Purpose: The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) is a technological tool designed for comprehensive recordings and automated analysis of young children's daily language and auditory environments. LENA recordings play a crucial role in both clinical interventions and research, offering insights into the amount of spoken language children are…

With recent technological advances, researchers have begun to explore the potential use of spoken dialog systems (SDSs) for L2 oral communication assessment. While several studies support the feasibility of building these systems for various types of oral tasks, research on the construct validity of SDS-delivered tasks is still limited. Thus, this…

Background: Assessing spoken discourse during aphasia clinical examination is crucial for diagnostic and rehabilitation purposes. Recent approaches have been developed to quantify content word fluency (CWF) and informativeness of spoken discourse without the need to perform time-consuming transcription and coding. However, the accuracy of these…

We examined the concurrent validity of the Preschool Early Literacy Indicators (PELI®) with 105 New Zealand (NZ) five-year-old children entering primary school. PELI® incorporates oral language and emergent literacy tasks into a picture-book that is administered as a shared adult-child read-aloud activity. In this study, PELI® administration and…

Various factors such as regulatory body mandates, graduate employability challenges, decreasing student engagement and increasing academic misconduct in higher education have motivated universities to explore alternative approaches to teach and assess. Accordingly, the oral assessment has taken precedence in many contexts as a popular form of…

The present systematic review examines Glenn Fulcher's contributions, works, philosophy, and research in language testing and assessment. The data includes his published articles, book chapters, books and interviews (except the one in this special issue) relevant to language testing and assessment from 1987 to March 2022. This study is conducted…

Although lexical diversity is often used as a measure of productive proficiency (e.g., as an aspect of lexical complexity) in SLA studies involving oral tasks, relatively little research has been conducted to support the reliability and/or validity of these indices in spoken contexts. Furthermore, SLA researchers commonly use indices of lexical…

Purpose: Sentence repetition (SR) is believed to be a clinical marker for developmental language disorder (DLD) across many languages. This study explored the potential of a self-designed Mandarin SR task (MSRT) to reflect Mandarin-speaking preschoolers' language ability and to differentiate children with and without DLD in this population.…

Background: Current UK measures of early spoken language comprehension require manipulation of toys and/or verbal responses and are not accessible to children with severe motor impairments. The Computer-Based Instrument for Low motor Language Testing (C-BiLLT) (originally validated in Dutch) is a computerized test of spoken language comprehension…

A subtest of the LLAMA test battery (LLAMA_D) has been proposed as a potential test of implicit learning aptitude. To improve its construct validity, in the present study, the original LLAMA_D (a) instructions for incidental learning were modified, and (b) confidence ratings of test responses and (c) reaction time (RT) measurements were added.…

Constructing formal geometry proofs in is an important topic in the mathematics curriculum. But students' difficulties with proof are well documented. This article focuses on proofs that use triangle congruence postulates in US high school geometry. Examining students' proof reasoning in one-on-one task-based interviews, we analyzed students' oral…

Early-childhood researchers and practitioners have become increasingly aware that schools must integrate social and emotional learning outcomes into curricula and instruction to maximize children's learning and well-being. Behavioral regulation, which falls under the broader self-management social and emotional learning competency, has been linked…

The performance decision tree (PDT; Fulcher et al., 2011) is a rubric style that is applicable to performance assessment, with origins in Upshur and Turner's (1995) empirically derived binary-choice, boundary-definition (EBB) scale. It is easier for raters to assess performance by evaluating multiple binary-choice descriptors. Additionally,…

Advocates of the science of reading have invoked the simple view of reading (SVR) to justify an approach that foregrounds decoding in early reading instruction. The SVR, which describes comprehension as the product of decoding and listening comprehension, also served as the primary theoretical model underlying the Reading for Understanding (RfU)…

The Oral Motor Assessment Scale (OMAS) is a diagnostic tool used to assess the oral motor skills in individuals with neurological and neuromuscular disorders. This assessment was developed by Brazilian researchers and for the first time, its validity and reliability was examined in Brazil. The purpose of the present study was to examine the…