Purpose: Sentence repetition (SR) is believed to be a clinical marker for developmental language disorder (DLD) across many languages. This study explored the potential of a self-designed Mandarin SR task (MSRT) to reflect Mandarin-speaking preschoolers' language ability and to differentiate children with and without DLD in this population.…

Extensive oral tasks or monologues of different types (e.g., presentations, storytelling) are often used as second language acquisition tasks in the fields of language learning and language testing. Pre-task planning time is a common provision to test-takers who may use different strategies to prepare their response. High-stakes tests, such as the…

This study examined the effect of rater training on promoting inter-rater reliability in oral language assessment. It also investigated whether rater training and the consideration of the examinees' expectations by the examiners have any effect on test-takers' perceptions of being fairly evaluated. To this end, four raters scored 31 Iranian…

The present study was executed with the purpose of validating ELT Certificate Lesson Observation and Report Task (ELTC-LORT), which was developed by China Language Assessment to certify China's EFL teachers by performance-based testing. The ELT Certificate has high-stakes considering its impacts on candidates' recruitment, ELT in China and quality…

This study determines the fine-grained bottom-up linguistic features involved in successful second language (L2) English academic group oral tutorial discussion through the use of a spoken learner corpus composed of more than 20 hrs of L2 production. Student performances were graded by teacher-raters using a can-do rating scale, which assessed…

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and validate a screening questionnaire for the early identification of language difficulties in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking preschool children. Method: The article is divided into two studies. In the first study, we reported the theoretical principles that guided the development of the Screening for…

An English placement test (PT) is an essential component of any foundation program. It helps place students into their suitable language proficiency level so that they do not spend time learning materials below or above their levels. It also helps teachers to prepare teaching materials to students of similar levels (Brown, 2004; Illinois, 2012).…

Research links to positive student outcomes have highlighted the need to address disposition during teacher clinical practice using sound measures. Education preparation providers may use these indicators to create defensible measures of disposition by formatting the indicators into Likert scales or rubrics. Authors have extended the psychometric…

The purpose of this study was to report preliminary reliability and validity data from the Conversation Compass© Communication Screener (CCCS), a teacher-reported language screener intended to capture children's skills related to classroom conversations with peers and teachers. Three preschool teachers completed the CCCS and the Child Observation…

Prominent spoken language assessments such as the Oral Proficiency Interview and the Test of Spoken English have been primarily concerned with speaking ability as it relates to conversation. This paper looks at an additional aspect of spoken language ability, namely public speaking. This study used an adapted form of a public speaking rating scale…

Language test preparation has often been studied within the consequential validity framework in relation to ethics, equity, fairness, and washback of assessment. The use of independent and integrated speaking tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"® test represents a significant development and innovation in assessing speaking ability in academic…

Forty science students received training for 12 weeks on delivering effective presentations and using a tertiary-level English oral presentation scale comprising three subscales (Verbal Communication, Nonverbal Communication, and Content and Organization) measured by 18 items. For their final project, each student was given 10 to 12 min to present…

Teacher knowledge, as an important cognitive basis of teaching, has attracted tremendous attention in educational research in the last few decades. This study examines whether teachers' self-perceived knowledge about oral English teaching differs with regard to their professional profiles in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context in…

One of the major innovations of the "TOEFL iBT"® test is the incorporation of integrated tasks complementing the independent tasks to which examinees respond. In addition, examinees must produce discourse in both modes (speech and writing). The validity argument for the TOEFL iBT includes the claim that examinees vary their discourse in…

The present study contributes to developing a Public Speaking Class Anxiety Scale (PSCAS) to measure anxiety in the EFL public speaking class in the Thai context. Items were adopted from previous scales: Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) by Horwitz et al. (1986); Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) and Personal…