Drawing on a growing body of research on the interface between corpus linguistics and second/foreign language testing and assessment, we adopted "Peykare," a large-scale, annotated, Persian written language resource to evaluate the content (i.e., coverage and typicality) and construct validity of a Persian language proficiency test…

Recently, psychometricians and researchers have voiced their concern over the exploration of language test items in light of Messick's validation framework. Validity has been central to test development and use; however, it has not received due attention in language tests having grave consequences for test takers. The present study sought to…

This article offers a critical review of the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology English Proficiency Test (MSRT), a high-stakes exam required for postgraduate graduation, scholarships, and certain employment positions in Iran. Despite its widespread use, the design and implementation of the MSRT raise concerns about its validity and…

The test view is on the Duolingo English Test (DET), an alternative online English proficiency test with a machine-driven characteristic. The review covers essential information of the DET such as test purpose, usage, score-mapping with CEFR scale, price, and publisher. Meanwhile, the test usefulness is discussed with focuses on reliability,…

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…

One of the most important dynamics of the educational setting all over the world is examinations, and some of those are English tests. In Turkey, English tests for the students preparing for the high schools were included in the national exams with the Level Determination Exam (SBS) in 2008 for the first time, and Transition Examination from…

Seeking evidence to support content validity is essential to test validation. This is especially the case in contexts where test scores are interpreted in relation to external proficiency standards and where new test content is constantly being produced to meet test administration and security demands. In this paper, we describe a modified…

Combining Bachman's (1990) conceptualization of content validity with Messick's (1989) unifying model of construct validity, this study attempted to fill the gap in researching content validation in the context of a university reading achievement test by (a) examining traditional content validity evidence and (b) analyzing the test scores to…

This study aimed at examining the quality of an English summative test of grade VII in a public school located in Kupang. Particularly, this study examined content validity, reliability, and conducted item analysis including item validity, item difficulty, item discrimination, and distracter effectiveness. This study was descriptive evaluative…

In German Switzerland the learning and assessment of Swiss German Sign Language ("Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache," DSGS) takes place in different contexts, for example, in tertiary education or in continuous education courses. By way of the still ongoing implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference for DSGS,…

The main objective of this research was to study challenges of preparing authentic English language tests in Ethiopian six secondary schools. The focus was to assess current challenges in the preparation of authentic and communicative language tests. To this end, interviews and FGD with English language teachers were made and hence, 61 teachers…

Classroom practices, materials and teaching methods in language classes have changed a lot in the last decades and continue to evolve; however, the commonly used techniques to test students' foreign language skills have not changed much regardless of the recent awareness in Bloom's taxonomy. Testing units at schools rely mostly on multiple choice…

Grammar assessment has long been a pivotal and regular component of almost all high-stakes English tests in China. In writing grammar items, however, test developers tend to depend largely on their individual knowledge of grammar, or even intuition, without much reference to the typicality or de facto uses of the language. To address this problem…

The work at hand is part of a wider study the aim of which was to determine what kind of factors influence failures in pragmatic items of an online adaptive placement test taken by a group of 34 Spanish students in their first year at university. A preceding analysis (Carrió & Martín, 2016) showed the type of personal factors, such as lack of…

This paper explores, through the use of the observation checklist and Conversation Analysis (CA), the discourse functions elicited by the dialogic task of the Free University of Bolzano (IT) speaking test. It aims to contribute to content validation, which has been claimed to be especially relevant in paired speaking tests, where interaction is…