This study investigates the psychological effect of a wrong question with wrong items on answering to the next question in a test of structure. Forty students selected through stratified random sampling are given 15 questions of a standardized test namely a TOEFL structure test in which questions number 7 and number 11 are wrong and their answers…

This study investigates test-takers' processing while completing banked gap-fill tasks, designed to test reading proficiency, in order to test theoretically based expectations about the variation in cognitive processes of test-takers across levels of performance. Twenty-eight test-takers' eye traces on 24 banked gap-fill items (on six tasks) were…

Researchers are frequently confronted with unanswered questions or items on their questionnaires and tests, due to factors such as item difficulty, lack of testing time, or participant distraction. This paper first presents results from a poll confirming previous claims (Rietveld & van Hout, 2006; Schafer & Graham, 2002) that data…

The research reported in this article investigates differential item functioning (DIF) in a listening comprehension test. The study explores the relationship between test-taker age and the items' language domains across multiple test forms. The data comprise test-taker responses (N = 2,861) to a total of 133 unique items, 46 items of which were…

The present study focused on the analysis of listening sections of two international English proficiency tests, i.e. IELTS and TOEFL tests, and one local English proficiency test, i.e. TOLIMO from pragmatic perspective. An attempt was made to explore the areas of pragmatic knowledge presented, and to assess test takers' pragmatic knowledge. For…

Cloze tests have been the subject of numerous studies regarding their function and use in both first language and second language contexts (e.g., Jonz & Oller, 1994; Watanabe & Koyama, 2008). From a validity standpoint, one area of investigation has been the extent to which cloze tests measure reading ability beyond the sentence level.…

Several attempts have been made to illustrate the organization of the monolingual mental lexicon and each model proposed so far has highlighted different aspects of lexical processing. What they have in common is the fact that their depictions rely on single lexical items and paradigmatic relations come to the fore in their explanations. Hoey's…

This paper reports a post-hoc analysis of the influence of lexical difficulty of cue sentences on performance in an elicited imitation (EI) task to assess oral production skills for 645 child L2 English learners in instructional settings. This formed part of a large-scale investigation into effectiveness of foreign language teaching in Polish…

The aim of this research is to determine the attitudes of secondary level students regarding the skills in English as a Foreign Language and to compare the level of relationship between the academic success at English and the attitudes measured. Attitudes and success levels of the students of secondary education regarding their language skills…

The study aimed at analyzing English questions of the Jordanian Secondary Certificate Examinations via Blooms' cognitive levels. An analysis sheet was prepared by the researcher for the purpose of the study, which was ensured to be valid and reliable. The whole questions of the general secondary examinations for English course in both levels…

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is…

Our study aimed at finding out the effectiveness of corpus-based vocabulary teaching activities as well as students' attitudes towards concordance-based materials when corpus-based tasks in English vocabulary learning are used. The study was conducted in a preparatory school in a private university. The participants were 28 intermediate level…

An important gap in the field of second language vocabulary assessment concerns the lack of validated tests measuring aural vocabulary knowledge. The primary purpose of this study is to introduce and provide preliminary validity evidence for the Listening Vocabulary Levels Test (LVLT), which has been designed as a diagnostic tool to measure…

Reviewing the test specifications to improve the quality of language tests may be a routine process in professional testing systems. However, there is a paucity of research about the effect of specifications review on improving the quality of small-scale tests. The purpose of the present study was twofold: how specifications review could help…

There has been a growing interest in the use of integrated tasks in the field of second language testing to enhance the authenticity of language tests. However, the role of text integration in test takers' performance has not been widely investigated. The purpose of the current study is to examine the effects of text-based relational (i.e.,…