The present trend in developing and using semi-direct speaking tests has been supported by test developers and researchers' claim of their increased practicality, higher reliability and concurrent validity with test scores in direct oral proficiency interviews. However, it is universally agreed within the language testing and assessment community…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

A program designed to provide students with a fairly good command of English, including some knowledge of scientific and technical English, upon completing the five year middle school is discussed. The five year period is divided into three stages. In the first stage, first and second year students receive training in listening comprehension,…