The "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test is a new English language proficiency test in the "TOEFL"® family of assessments. It measures foundational language skills and communication abilities in academic and general (daily life) contexts. The test covers the four language skills of reading, listening, writing, and speaking and is intended…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

Despite the importance of assessment accommodations, little is known about its use in the context of classroom assessments. To provide guidance for teachers on how to best support their emergent bilinguals during classroom assessments, there may be ideas from large-scale assessments that can be used in the classrooms. This article, a targeted…

This study is a critical analysis of a low-stakes in-house English as a Second Language (ESL) and English literacy test from a local program in a large city in the southwestern United States. From a critical multimodal social semiotic perspective (Kress G. Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge, 2010;…

Writing multiple-choice test items to measure student learning in higher education is a challenge. Based on extensive scholarly research and experience, the author describes various item formats, offers guidelines for creating these items, and provides many examples of both good and bad test items. He also suggests some shortcuts for developing…

Our paper aims at analysing the linguistic "features" produced by Arabic learners of Italian as a foreign language. There are published studies of common errors for Arab students of Italian (Della Puppa, 2006; Giacalone Ramat et al., 2001). However, this study introduces the standardized language assessment, namely the CILS test of…

The purpose of test directions is to familiarize examinees with a test so that they respond to items in the manner intended. However, changes in educational measurement as well as the U.S. student population present new challenges to test directions and increase the impact that differential familiarity could have on the validity of test score…

This article reports a mixed-method study that examined the washback effect from a locally-produced, theme-based, high-stakes English language proficiency test in tertiary education in a Turkish EAP context. The aim was to explore the extent to which washback on teaching was induced by an integrated theme-based English proficiency test designed to…

The Applied Language Centre at University College Dublin offers foreign language modules to students in ten languages at CEFR [Common European Framework of Reference for Languages] levels ranging from A1 to B2. Efforts have been underway in the Centre to standardise the assessment components across languages to ensure parity between module credits…

For many purposes, it is useful to collect a corpus of texts all produced to the same stimulus, whether to measure performance (as on a test) or to test hypotheses about population differences. This paper examines several methods for measuring similarities in phrasing and content and demonstrates that these methods can be used to identify…

Argues that formal English is a prestige dialect containing select constructions so unnatural as to be outside the domain of normal language acquisition. Among these are nominative pronouns used as conjoined subjects. Prestige usage is unavailable for consistent use. While formal education may have some effect on normal usage, that effect is…

Testing language skills is difficult, but testing writing, and the writing of students of English as a Second Language, poses two major problems. The first is making decisions about the matter of control, objectivity of the evaluation, and naturalness in the writing test. The second major problem is that, if the test is done in a way that cannot…