Although there is abundant evidence for the use of first-language (L1) knowledge by bilinguals when using a second language (L2), investigation into the impact of L1 knowledge in large-scale L2 language assessments and discussion of how such impact may be controlled has received little attention in the language assessment literature. This study…

This study examines the role of receptive vocabulary knowledge on outcomes of the TOEFL reading comprehension task. Participants included 18 native speakers of Spanish learning English as a foreign language and 17 native speakers of English ranging in age from 19-25 years. Lexical stimuli were presented auditorily and were divided into…

Listening has been widely characterised as a multifaceted process encompassing a range of linguistic and psycholinguistic components (see Rubin, 1994). However, for learners at different levels of L2 proficiency, there is uncertainty over the relative importance of the various sub-skills. To address this issue, a number of linguistic and…