Language assessment is increasingly computermediated. This development presents opportunities with new task formats and equally a need for renewed scrutiny of established conventions. Recent recommendations to increase integrated skills assessment in lecture comprehension tests is premised on empirical research that demonstrates enhanced construct…

We employed qualitative research methods to examine student learning in context during a teacher's unit on 1920s-Great Depression in an 11th grade United States & Virginia History class in a standards-based setting with a high-stakes end-of-course test. We focused on four focal students (all of whom were classified as English learners at some…

This article explores the issue of identifying guessers -- with a specific focus on multiple-choice tests. Guessing has long been considered a problem due to the fact that it compromises validity. A test taker scoring higher than they should through guessing does not provide a picture of their actual ability. After an initial description of issues…

The increasing popularity of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) in non-native English-speaking countries has generated a demand for concrete examples in the creation of CEFR-based tests that assess the four main English skills. In response, this research endeavors to provide insight into the development and validation of a…

The "TOEFL Junior"® Standard test is a tool for measuring the English language skills of students ages 11+ who learn English as an additional language. It is a paper-based multiple-choice test and measures proficiency in three sections: listening, form and meaning, and reading. To date, empirical evidence provides some support for the…

The teaching of English as a foreign language in Indonesia has a long history, and it is always important to ask whether the assessment of the students' language skills has been valid and reliable. A screening of many articles in several prominent databases reveal that a number of evaluation studies have been done by Indonesian scholars in the…

Due to the complex and integrative nature of translation competence construct, its free of subjectivity assessment is considered quite a challenging task for modern translation pedagogy. The conducted literature review revealed diverse directions and opportunities to raise translation competence assessment objectivity. In this key, there is a need…

Although an accurate measure of vocabulary size is integral to understanding the proficiency of language learners, the validity of multiple-choice (M/C) vocabulary tests to determine this has been questioned due to users guessing correct answers which inflates scores. In this paper the nature of guessing and partial knowledge used when taking the…

The main purpose of this study is to investigate guessing in the Yes/No (YN) format vocabulary test. One-hundred-and-five university students took a YN test, a translation task and a multiple-choice vocabulary size test (MC VST). With matched lexical properties between the real words and the pseudowords, pseudowords could index guessing in the YN…

The current study sought to examine the validity of a General English Achievement Test (GEAT), administered to university students in the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic year, by hybridizing differential information (DIF) and differential distractor function (DDF) analytical models. Using a purposive sampling method, from the target population…

The calibration of test materials generally involves the interaction between empirical analysis and expert judgement. This paper explores the extent to which scale familiarity might affect expert judgement as a component of test validation in the calibration process. It forms part of a larger study that investigates the alignment of the…

In this study the validity of partial dictation as a measure of overall language proficiency was examined. Two partial dictation tests along with a C-Test, a cloze test, and a reading comprehension test, as criterion measures, were administered to a group of Iranian EFL learners. The coefficients of correlation between partial dictation and…

This exploratory study examines the role of foreign and second language contexts in the acquisition of conventional expressions. A group of 21 ESL learners was compared to 25 EFL learners randomly selected from a larger pool. Both groups completed an aural multiple-choice discourse completion task (MC-DCT), which was developed from a previously…

The central purpose of this paper is to examine validity problems arising from the multiple-choice items and technical passages in the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test (TOEFL iBT) reading section, primarily concentrating on construct-irrelevant variance (Messick, 1989). My personal TOEFL iBT experience, along with my…

Background: This study aims to empirically answer the question of whether the role of sub-reading skills changes depending on the test format (e.g., multiple-choice vs. open-ended reading questions). The test format effect also addresses the issue of test validity--whether the reading test properly elicits construct-relevant reading skills or…