In the US K-12 public school settings, each state's annual English language proficiency (ELP) assessment, as part of an educational accountability system, has tremendous impact on English learner (EL) students' academic paths and success. It is thus critical to establish a robust validation framework and empirical evidence to ensure that states'…

Background and Context: Despite the increasing implementation of coding in early curricula, there are few valid and reliable assessments of coding abilities for young children. This impedes studying learning outcomes and the development and evaluation of curricula. Objective: Developing and validating a new instrument for assessing young…

Purpose: The current study applies an innovative approach to the assessment of second language listening comprehension skills. This is an important focus in need of innovation because scores generated through language assessment tasks should reflect variation in the target skill and the literature broadly suggests that conventional methods of…

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the construct validity of language aptitude by synthesizing the existing research that has been accumulated over the past five decades. The study aimed to provide a thorough understanding of the construct by aggregating the data reported in the primary research on its correlations with other individual…

This case study of Al-Aqsa School attempts to show that Cambridge Young Learners English Tests (YLE) may hurt learners' motivation and teaching process. The paper aims to highlight the adoption of Cambridge YLE proficiency tests and explore learners and teachers' perception of those tests. Also, providing alternative yardstick measures learners'…

The present study discusses the relevance of measures of lexical diversity (LD) to the assessment of learner corpora. It also argues that existing measures of LD, many of which have become specialized for use with language corpora, are fundamentally measures of lexical repetition, are based on an etic perspective of language, and lack construct…

The main objective of this article is to demonstrate with the help of learner corpus data the practical relevance of the phraseological dimension of language for writing assessment in higher education. Phraseological competence is now widely recognized as an important part of fluent and idiomatic language use, but its development has not received…

Learning a language means not only studying four skills of proficiency, but also understanding the system of rules underlying. In this respect, learners' attitudes towards grammar are also of vital importance. The main objective of this descriptive study is to determine English language learners' attitudes towards grammar and to analyze these…

Multiple traits of language proficiency as well as test method effects were concurrently analyzed to investigate interrelations of construct validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity using multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrices. A total of 585 test takers' scores were derived from the field test of the "Pearson Test of English…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…

The primary purpose of this study was to provide preliminary validity evidence for a 140-item form of the Vocabulary Size Test, which is designed to measure written receptive knowledge of the first 14,000 words of English. Nineteen native speakers of English and 178 native speakers of Japanese participated in the study. Analyses based on the Rasch…

This dissertation reports development and validation studies of a Web-based standardized test of Japanese as a foreign language (JFL), designed to measure learners' off-line grammatical and pragmatic knowledge in multiple-choice format. Targeting Japanese majors in the U.S. universities and colleges, the test is designed to explore possible…

Administration of the Test of Spoken English (TSE) yields tapes of oral performance on items within six sections of the test. Trained scorers subsequently rate responses using four proficiency scales: pronunciation, grammar, fluency, and overall comprehensibility. This project examined the consistency of statistical relations among TSE scores with…