In language assessment, AI technology has been incorporated in task design, assessment delivery, automated scoring of performance-based tasks, score reporting, and provision of feedback. AI technology is also used for collecting and analyzing performance data in language assessment validation. Research has been conducted to investigate the…

Over the past decade, testing and assessing spoken-language interpreting has garnered an increasing amount of attention from stakeholders in interpreter education, professional certification, and interpreting research. This is because in these fields assessment results provide a critical evidential basis for high-stakes decisions, such as the…

Despite the substantial expansion in vocabulary research since the 1980s, we still know very little about how vocabulary develops over time and what factors influence this development. This methodological overview discusses key issues and considerations in vocabulary breadth growth assessment to help advance research in this area. The report…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

Verbal interaction has been the subject of a growing interest among language professionals in Europe since the CEFR was published in 2001; in linguistics, verbal interaction has long been studied. In the Bakhtinian approach, it is even considered "the fundamental reality of language". All types of interaction share the fact that they are…

In Japanese secondary schools, speaking assessment in English classrooms is designed, conducted, and scored by teachers. Although the assessment is intended to be used for summative and formative purposes, it is not regularly or adequately practiced. This paper reports the problems (i.e., lack of continuous speaking assessment, limited speaking…

Vocabulary learning is an incremental process. Vocabulary knowledge, especially for second-language learners, may develop across a lifetime. Teachers with experience in providing feedback on their students' vocabulary use in writing or speech might have noticed that it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint one aspect of word knowledge. The reason is…

College and university admissions officers are the gatekeepers who decide which individuals may join the "country club" of higher education. As such, the decisions they make have a significant impact on the lives of individuals, especially those who are willing to travel across the globe and risk living in an unfamiliar country in order…

Preparing lifelong, world-ready German learners means German language instructors must intentionally incorporate globalized themes and tasks into the high school German curriculum. In 2010, the College Board redesigned the AP German Language and Culture Exam to meet these needs. The new exam encompasses six course themes and requires students to…

Oral language exams at university often consist of an individual or group conversation with the examiner about topics dealt with during the semester. A question-and-answer format is applied and vocabulary and structures tested. As a consequence, the oral exam does not reflect action-oriented approaches that often form part of classroom activities…

This article examines how the use of automated scoring procedures for short-answer reading tasks can affect the constructs being assessed. In particular, it highlights ways in which the development of scoring algorithms intended to apply the criteria used by human raters can lead test developers to reexamine and even refine the constructs they…

This paper introduces and discusses issues related to the challenge of obtaining more valid and reliable assessment and positive backwash of direct spoken English language performance of students in real-life situations. For this purpose, the paper is divided into four sections. The first section is the introduction to the article. The second part…

The College English Test (CET) is an English language test designed for educational purposes, administered on a very large scale, and used for making high-stakes decisions. This paper discusses the key issues facing the CET during the course of its development in the past two decades. It argues that the most fundamental and critical concerns of…

The assessment of so-called depth of word knowledge has been the focus of research for some years now. In this article the construct of deep word knowledge is further specified as the decontextualized knowledge of word meanings and word associations. Most studies so far have involved adolescent and adult second language learners. In this article,…

This article describes and analyses the development of a new test of aviation English by the Finnish Civil Aviation Authority (FCAA), as well as the overall situation in Finland as regards the testing of aviation English. The article describes the FCAA development project and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the new test and the whole…