The purpose of the study is to have a relook at the ESL reading comprehension assessment system for Malaysian Year Five students. Traditionally, the ESL teachers have been assessing and reporting on their primary year's students by merely giving a composite grade with some vague remarks. This process has been used and is still being employed in…

This study assessed the invariance in the factor structure of the "Test of English as a Foreign Language"™ Internet-based test (TOEFL® iBT) across subgroups of test takers who differed in native language and exposure to the English language. The subgroups were defined by (a) Indo-European and Non-Indo-European language family, (b)…

A project is described that was undertaken to investigate: (1) how long a cloze test has to be to achieve optimum reliability without wasting anyone's time; and (2) how cloze tests should be scored in order to obtain maximum reliability. The literature recommended 50 deletions in order to provide for an adequate sample of examinee's abilities; it…

A study was undertaken to develop a partial credit scheme for scoring cloze-type questions on an English collocation test, obtain construct validity evidence for the test and the scoring scheme using the Rasch Partial Credit Model, and compare partial credit scoring with the more commonly used dichotomous scoring with the same test instrument.…

The optimal test length, using predictive validity as a criterion, depends on two major conditions: the appropriate item-difficulty rather than the total number of items, and the method used in scoring the test. These conclusions were reached when responses to a 100-item multi-level test of reading comprehension from 136 non-native speakers of…

During spring 1992, the Combined English Language Skills Assessment (CELSA) test was piloted with a sample of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes at Golden West College (GWC) in Huntington Beach, California. The CELSA, which utilizes a cloze format including parts of conversations and short dialogues, combines items from beginning,…