The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) oral proficiency interview -- computer (OPIc) testing system represents an ambitious effort in language assessment: Assessing oral proficiency in over a dozen languages, on the same scale, from virtually anywhere at any time. Especially for users in contexts where multiple foreign…

The purpose of this paper is (1) to report on the design of the early writing observational writing rubric designed to observe and describe change over time in the writing of children emerging into conventional literacy (ages 6-7) within an instructional setting and (2) to investigate the initial reliability and validity of the rubric. We used an…

The purpose of this study was to report preliminary reliability and validity data from the Conversation Compass© Communication Screener (CCCS), a teacher-reported language screener intended to capture children's skills related to classroom conversations with peers and teachers. Three preschool teachers completed the CCCS and the Child Observation…

Prominent spoken language assessments such as the Oral Proficiency Interview and the Test of Spoken English have been primarily concerned with speaking ability as it relates to conversation. This paper looks at an additional aspect of spoken language ability, namely public speaking. This study used an adapted form of a public speaking rating scale…

This article presents and analyses a classroom-based assessment method to test students' speaking skills in a variety of professional settings in tourism. The assessment system has been implemented in the Communication in English for Tourism course, as part of the Tourism Management degree programme, at Florida Universitaria (affiliated to the…

The primary purpose of the current research was to determine whether low-income, high-risk young children's emergent literacy skills, including measures of oral language and letter knowledge, were related to their social competence. Other goals included determining the reliability of a social competence rating scale, the Social Competence…

The College English Test-Spoken English Test is a nationwide spoken English test designed to assess the oral communicative ability of Chinese university and college students who have undertaken compulsory English study at a Chinese university. This article describes the test and evaluates it in terms of reliability, validity, authenticity,…

The development and validation of a Portuguese oral language test are described. The test consisted of five item types: personal conversation, giving directions, description of picture sequences, topical discourse, and oral task completion based on printed instructions. Three preliminary forms of the test were administered to a group of language…

The Bilingual Reading Study employs several measures of oral language proficiency: (1) a standardized oral language proficiency test, the Language Assessment Scales (LAS); (2) teacher ratings on the Student Operational Language Assessment Scale (SOLA); (3) teacher ratings on the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) Oral Language…

Oral proficiency tests were constructed for French, German, and English by the Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement to determine how well students could cope linguistically with daily living situations, after 3 years of foreign language instruction. Originally the rating scale featured six categories. Because of difficulties in…

This paper investigates the role of cohesion in oral proficiency testing. This study analyzed the cohesion of oral reports given by 16 Cypriot high school students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) using a modification of M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan's rating scale. It then compared the objective cohesion ratings with impressionistic…

A discussion of teaching and testing oral skills in a second language looks at issues in the testing of speaking ability in general, the effect that testing can have on teaching, and the kinds of communicative activities that can be built into a foreign language program with oral proficiency as a goal. The issues addressed include the differential…