The purpose of the current study was to determine interrater reliability (IRR) of Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) Curriculum-based Measures (R-CBM) when used with Spanish-speaking English Learner (EL) students. The ORF R-CBM probes obtained from AIMSweb are measures of a student's reading accuracy skills and reading fluency skills. Certified school…

Rater variation in performance assessment can impact test-takers' scores and compromise assessments' fairness and validity (Crooks, Kane, & Cohen, 1996). Rater variation can also undermine a test's validity and fairness; therefore, it is important to investigate raters' scoring patterns in order to inform rater training. Substantial work has…

Knowledge of local norms and conventions of interaction and ability to use them appropriately as well as the ability to negotiate meaning with interlocutors are important for ESL graduate students and prospective teaching assistants in an English-speaking university context. The interactive communication (IC) assessment using a paired student…

Understanding the sources of variance in speaking assessment is important in Japan where society's high demand for English speaking skills is growing. Three challenges threaten fair assessment of speaking. First, in Japanese university speaking courses, teachers are typically the only raters, but teachers' knowledge of their students may unfairly…

The design and validation of a classroom observation instrument to provide formative feedback for teachers of EFL in Spain is the overarching purpose of this study. This study proposes that a valid and reliable classroom observation instrument, based on effective practice in teaching EFL, can be developed and used in Spain to enable teachers to…

A renewed focus on foreign language (FL) learning and speech for communication has resulted in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) software developed with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). ASR features for FL pronunciation (Lafford, 2004) are functional components of CALL designs used for FL teaching and learning. The ASR features…

Performance assessments have become the norm for evaluating language learners' writing abilities in international examinations of English proficiency. Two aspects of these assessments are usually systematically varied: test takers respond to different prompts, and their responses are read by different raters. This raises the possibility of undue…