In this study, I investigate the construct validity and fairness pertaining to the use of a variety of Englishes in listening test input. I obtained data from a post-entry English language placement test administered at a public university in the United States. In addition to expectedly familiar American English, the test features Hawai'i,…

Measuring language dominance, broadly defined as the relative strength of each of a bilingual's two languages, remains a crucial methodological issue in bilingualism research. While various methods have been proposed, the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) has been one of the most widely used tools for measuring language dominance. While previous…

Sign languages present particular challenges to language assessors in relation to variation in signs, weakly defined citation forms, and a general lack of standard-setting work even in long-established measures of productive sign proficiency. The present article addresses and explores these issues via a mixed-methods study of a human-rated…

This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and…

In the realm of language proficiency assessments, the domain description inference and the extrapolation inference are key components of a validity argument. Biber et al.'s description of the lexicogrammatical features of the spoken and written registers in the T2K-SWAL corpus has served as support for the TOEFL iBT test's domain description and…

In this study we investigated the potential for a shared-first-language (shared-L1) effect on second language (L2) listening test scores using differential item functioning (DIF) analyses. We did this in order to understand how accented speech may influence performance at the item level, while controlling for key variables including listening…

Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…