The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) has served as one of the most reliable proofs of people's English language proficiency. There have been rumors about the discrepancy in difficulty between the two modules of IELTS, namely Academic (AC) and General Training (GT); however, there is little empirical evidence to confirm such a…

This study evaluated the efficacy of two proposed methods in an operational standard-setting study conducted for a high-stakes language proficiency test of the U.S. government. The goal was to seek low-cost modifications to the existing Yes/No Angoff method to increase the validity and reliability of the recommended cut scores using a convergent…

This study presents a comparative analysis of classical reliability measures, including Cronbach's alpha, test-retest, and parallel forms reliability, alongside modern psychometric methods such as the Rasch model and Mokken scaling, to evaluate the reliability of C-tests in language proficiency assessment. Utilizing data from 150 participants…

Transparency in high-stakes English language assessment has become crucial for ensuring fairness and maintaining assessment validity in language testing. However, our understanding of how transparency is conceptualised and implemented remains fragmented, particularly in relation to stakeholder experiences and technological innovations. This study…

The linguistic characteristics of text productions depend on various factors, including individual language proficiency as well as the tasks used to elicit the production. To date, little attention has been paid to whether some writing tasks are more suitable than others to represent and differentiate students' proficiency levels. This issue is…

This study investigated the thematic and lexical characteristics of high-difficulty English reading items--commonly referred to as "killer questions"--in the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) between 2018 and 2025. Using text mining methods, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and CEFR-based lexical profiling, the…

Chulalongkorn University Language Institute (CULI) test was developed as a local standardised test of English for professional and international communication. To ensure that the CULI test fulfils its intended purposes, this study employed Kane's argument-based validation and Rasch measurement approaches to construct the validity argument for the…

A better understanding of how distractor features influence the plausibility of distractors is essential for an efficient multiple-choice (MC) item construction in educational assessment. The plausibility of distractors has a major influence on the psychometric characteristics of MC items. Our analysis utilizes the nominal categories model to…

Language complexity reveals the ability to use a wide and varied range of sophisticated structures and vocabulary. Although different languages compose complexity differently, complexity measures such as the T-unit have typically been based on clause subordination, which may underrepresent complexity and threaten the validity of studies. This…

This study explores the extent to which the difficulty levels of grammar items in an English test can be predicted by the complexity of grammatical structures. The researchers carried out two sets of analyses. In the first analysis, the item facility and item discrimination indices of 175 multiple-choice items were examined. In the second…

The Sentence Structure sub-test (SST) of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) aims to "measure the acquisition of grammatical (structural) rules at the sentence level". Although originally designed for clinical practice with monolingual children, components of the CELF, such as the SST, are often used to inform…

Although the TOEFL iBT Listening test is sometimes used for other purposes, it was designed primarily for use as a college entrance examination. Item difficulty in TOEFL iBT Listening tests is the product of interactions between two sets of complex relationships: 1) relationships among numerous item characteristics themselves, and 2) relationships…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

This study aims to investigate ChatGPT's ability to comprehend input from nonnative speakers, specifically those learning English as a second language, with Japanese speakers serving as the model population. The experiment examines how ChatGPT evaluates the difficulty levels of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), which is…

The current paper intends to exploit the Many Facet Rasch Model to investigate and compare the impact of situations (items) and raters on test takers' performance on the Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) and Discourse Self-Assessment Tests (DSAT). In this study, the participants were 110 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at…