This paper investigates the attitudes of 246 English teachers from Outer and Expanding Circles (EC and OC) towards the global spread of English and the challenges underpinning international proficiency tests. Using a questionnaire, supplemented with interviews with a smaller group of teachers, this study explores how EC and OC teachers perceive…

Placing non-native speakers of English into appropriate classes involves mapping placement test scores onto proficiency levels based on predetermined cut scores. However, studies on how to set boundaries for different levels of proficiency have been lacking in the language testing literature. A top-down approach to standard setting in which a…

Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative…

The study evaluated a recently postponed national test policy on the use of external agencies' English tests measuring four skills for Japanese university admission purposes. Using Kunnan's principles of fairness and justice, we generated and evaluated three claims regarding the test policy: vocabulary coverage of the tests, the justifiability of…

Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely…

Those who work in second- and foreign-language testing often find Koretz's concern for validity inferences under high-stakes (VIHS) conditions both welcome and familiar. While the focus of the article is more narrowly on the potential for two instructional responses to test-based accountability, "reallocation" and "coaching,"…

The current focus across the U.S. on student college and career readiness standards makes clear that both instruction and assessment of academic English will continue to be important for school-age English learner (EL) students. This article presents an overview and summary of key literature on academic language (usually academic English);…

We report a small-scale study investigating the perceptions of postgraduate students who are non-native speakers of English and those of academic staff with regard to those students. Previous research has focused only on the former and identified a number of linguistic and cultural challenges these students face in adapting to Anglophone…

Draws attention to the validity of the Oakland School Board's resolution on Ebonics and to the value of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL)-based approaches to teaching standard American English to speakers of other dialects. Demonstrates validity of comparisons made between monodialectal speakers of African-American language/Ebonics and ESL…