This set of 82 summaries is based on papers written between 1963 and 1982 concerning the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). TOEFL is currently required by more than 2,500 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada to determine the English proficiency of applicants whose native language is not English. It is also required…

Four writing samples were obtained from 638 foreign college applicants who represented three major foreign language groups (Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish), and from 60 native English speakers. All four were scored holistically, two were also scored for sentence-level and discourse-level skills, and some were scored by the Writer's Workbench…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) was administered to 26 hearing impaired college students, in order to test the assumption that the English-language deficiencies of hearing impaired students are similar to those of foreign students. The students were attending Gallaudet College's School of Preparatory Studies and were identified…

This study used classical psychometric, latent trait, and nonparametric approaches to analyze 13- and 14-item scales of English language proficiency. Tests of English listening comprehension (dictation) and reading ("copytest") were constructed by modifying the standard dictation testing procedure to create items of text segments which…

This paper reports on Educational Testing Service research studies investigating the parameters critical to reliability and validity in both the direct and indirect writing ability assessment of higher education applicants. The studies involved: (1) formulating an operational definition of writing competence; (2) designing and pretesting writing…