This study investigated the differences between the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview - Computer (OPIc) among Spanish learners at a U.S. university. Participants (N = 154) were randomly assigned to take both tests in a counterbalanced order to mitigate test order effects. Data were analyzed using an…

The growing number of English Learners (ELs) in American schools has led to increasing referrals of these students for special education, including speech-language services. These ELs are frequently overidentified as having a language impairment (LI) due to biased assessment practices that are not legal or grounded in research promoting best…

The present study aimed to examine the effect of activity engagement, age, language proficiency, and time elapse on children's response accuracy to adult's questions. A total of 70, 3- to 6-year-old children participated in the study, engaging in a story-telling activity, a proficiency test, and two interviews. Additionally, 57 of these children…

Two assumptions of speaking proficiency tests are that the speech produced is spontaneous and the the scores on those tests predict what examinees can do in real-world communicative situations. Therefore, when examinees memorize scripts for their oral responses, the validity of the score interpretation is threatened. While the American Council on…

We examined whether observers' beliefs about deception were affected by a speaker's language proficiency. Laypersons (N = 105) and police officers (N = 75) indicated which nonverbal and verbal behaviors were predictive of native versus non-native speakers' deception. In addition, they provided their beliefs about these speakers' interrogation…

Lexical sophistication has been an important indicator of productive lexical proficiency for almost 30 years. Although lexical sophistication has most often been operationalized as the proportion of low frequency words in a text, a growing body of research has indicated that a number of indices such as concreteness, hypernymy, and n-gram…

In this article, we address the issue of reliability of quantitative data on multilingualism of the past obtained as recall data. More specifically, we investigate whether the interviewees' assessments of the language repertoires of their late relatives (indirect data) provide results that are quantitatively similar to those obtained from the…

Recent empirical research in sociolinguistics and social psychology has established the existence of the socio-psychological phenomena known as linguistic stereotyping (LS) and reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS), which have an implicit or unconscious effect on listeners' perception of speech and speakers. Despite such findings, little research…

Jessica Wu is Research and Development Program Director at the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC) in Taipei, Taiwan. Jessica has been deeply involved in the development and validation of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) in addition to a number of other foreign language testing programs. Her research focuses on speaking…

The aim of the study was to check whether minorities such as LEP/ZEP (limited/zero English proficiency) speakers can expect the same access to justice as competent English speakers in a majority language (US English) justice system. The main hypothesis is that, due to linguistic and cultural factors, the instances of miscommunication in the…

Research examining test taker fluency in simulated and face-to-face oral proficiency interview performances has primarily focused on quantitative spoken utterance fluency data alone, with further qualitative investigation of test taker processing fluency's effect being neglected. This study compared four test takers' spoken utterance and…

In the assessment of speaking, a psycholinguistically based speaking construct has predominated. In this paper, we argue for the integration of the construct of interactional competence (IC) in speaking assessments to broaden the range of defensible inferences from speaking tests. IC emphasizes the co-constructed nature of interaction and enables…

This study profiled Intermediate-level learners in terms of their linguistic characteristics and performance on different proficiency tasks. A stratified random sample of 300 Korean learners of English with holistic ratings of Intermediate Low (IL), Intermediate Mid (IM), and Intermediate High (IH) on Oral Proficiency Interviews-computerized…

This paper aims to clarify the expected oral proficiency level for secondary school English teachers in Japan. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (hereafter MEXT) encourages public secondary school English teachers to reach a threshold level of the Pre-1st Grade of Eiken (an English proficiency test).…

The present study investigates the effects of two subsequent learning contexts, formal instruction (FI) at home and a 3-month stay abroad (SA), on vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing and speaking. Data were collected from 30 Catalan/Spanish learners of English before and after each learning period using a written…