The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the university admissions and proficiency testing landscape. One change has been the meteoric rise in use of the fully automated Duolingo English Test (DET) for university entrance purposes, offering test-takers a cheaper, shorter, accessible alternative. This rapid response study is the first to investigate the…

The increasing use of computer-based mode in language testing raises concern over its similarities with and differences from paper-based format. The present study aimed to delineate discrepancies between TOEFL PBT and CBT. For that objective, a quantitative method was employed to probe into scores equivalence, the performance of male-female…

This study investigated U.S. undergraduates' perceptions of non-native speakers' (NNS) speech which had received 100% proficiency scores on the TOEFL iBT test. Fifty-five U.S. undergraduates rated 20 speech samples for comprehensibility, accentedness, and acceptability. The speech samples were also analyzed for acoustic fluency. Descriptively,…

With the wide introduction of English-medium instruction (EMI) to higher education institutions throughout East Asian countries, many East Asian universities are using English proficiency tests that were not originally designed for this context to make admissions and placement decisions. To support the use of these tests in this new EMI context,…

The present study investigated the speaking module of TOEFL iBT with an emphasis on the dichotomy of independent and integrated tasks. The potential differences between the two speaking conditions were intended to be explored based on the oral performance elicited from a group of Iranian test takers. To collect the required data, a simulated…

Despite growing interest in the studies on Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), its operation in the forms of individualized and group-wide has been controversial. To cast some empirical light on the issue, this study was designed to study the applicability of the two scenarios of ZPD-based instructions to the writing accuracy of two levels of…

The divisibility of the reading has led many researchers to examine whether reading construct is a unitary skill that cannot be divided into separate sub-skills, or it is composed of underlying components. In these studies, however, participants have generally been located in a product-oriented testing environment where their actual reading…

Investigating the comparability of students' performance on TOEFL writing tasks and actual academic writing tasks is essential to provide backing for the extrapolation inference in the TOEFL validity argument (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). This study compared 103 international non-native-English-speaking undergraduate students'…

This study examines the predictive validity of the TOEFL iBT with respect to academic achievement as measured by the first-year grade point average (GPA) of Chinese students at Purdue University, a large, public, Research I institution in Indiana, USA. Correlations between GPA, TOEFL iBT total and subsection scores were examined on 1990 mainland…

The project aimed to examine the effect of raters' familiarity with accents on their judgments of non-native speech. Participants included three groups of raters who were either from Spanish Heritage, Spanish Non-Heritage, or Chinese Heritage backgrounds (n = 16 in each group) using Winke & Gass's (2013) definition of a heritage learner as…

Interest in Web-based and computer-assisted language testing is growing in the field of English for academic purposes (EAP). In this study, four groups of undergraduate EAP students (n = 120), each group consisted of 30 students, were randomly selected from four different disciplines, i.e. biology, political sciences, psychology, and law. The four…

A major concern with computer-based (CB) tests of second-language (L2) writing is that performance on such tests may be influenced by test-taker keyboarding skills. Poor keyboarding skills may force test-takers to focus their attention and cognitive resources on motor activities (i.e., keyboarding) and, consequently, other processes and aspects of…

This study aimed to describe the writing activities that test takers engage in when responding to the writing tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"[superscript R] test and to examine the effects of task type and test-taker English language proficiency (ELP) and keyboarding skills on the frequency and distribution of these activities. Each of 22 test…

This study examined the relationship between scores on the TOEFL Internet-Based Test (TOEFL iBT[R]) and academic performance in higher education, defined here in terms of grade point average (GPA). The academic records for 2594 undergraduate and graduate students were collected from 10 universities in the United States. The data consisted of…

Scores assigned by trained raters and by an automated scoring system (SpeechRater[TM]) on the speaking section of the TOEFL iBT[TM] were validated against a communicative competence criterion. Specifically, a sample of 555 undergraduate students listened to speech samples from 184 examinees who took the Test of English as a Foreign Language…