There is a strong international demand for official certification of French competence. A range of tests are available to meet this goal. Among the recognized tests available for this purpose is the "DELF" ("Diplôme d'études en langue française"). The "DELF" has been awarded the Association of Language Testers in…

The Assessment of Language Competence (ALC) certificates is an annual, international testing program developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research to test the listening and reading comprehension skills of lower to middle year levels of secondary school. The tests are developed for three levels in French, German, Italian and…

The "cloze" test is one possible investigative instrument for predicting text comprehensibility. Conceptual coding of student replacement of deleted words has been considered to be more valid than exact coding, partly because conceptual coding seemed fairer to poorer readers. This paper reports a quantitative study of 447 Australian…

The purpose of the College English Test (CET) is to examine the English proficiency of undergraduate students in China and ensure that Chinese undergraduates reach the required English levels specified in the National College English Teaching Syllabus (NCETS). In accordance with the courses on the syllabus, the CET consists of three tests: Band 4…

This paper concerns the divisibility of comprehension subskills measured in L2 listening and reading tests. Motivated by the administration of the new Web-based English as a Second Language Placement Exam (WB-ESLPE) at UCLA, this study addresses the following research questions: first, to what extent do the WB-ESLPE listening and reading items…

The study reported here examined the evaluation criteria used to assess the proficiency and effectiveness of the language produced in an oral performance test of English conducted in an American university context. Empirical methods were used to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively transcriptions of the Oral English Tests (OET) of 44…

A meta-analysis was conducted on the effects of multiple-choice and open-ended formats on L1 reading, L2 reading, and L2 listening test performance. Fifty-six data sources located in an extensive search of the literature were the basis for the estimates of the mean effect sizes of test format effects. The results using the mixed effects model of…

Providers of tests of languages for academic purposes generally claim to provide evidence on the extent to which students are likely to be able to cope with the future demands of reading in specified real-life contexts. Such claims need to be supported by evidence that the texts employed in the test reflect salient features of the texts the test…

In this article, the author reviews the TOEFL iBT which is the latest version of the TOEFL, whose history stretches back to 1961. The TOEFL iBT was introduced in the USA, Canada, France, Germany and Italy in late 2005. Currently the TOEFL test is offered in two testing formats: (1) Internet-based testing (iBT); and (2) paper-based testing (PBT).…

Title III of Public Law 107-110 (No Child Left Behind; NCLB) provided for creation of assessments of English language learners (ELLs) and established, through the Enhanced Assessment Grant program, a platform from which four consortia of states developed ELL tests aligned to rigorous statewide content standards. Those four tests (ACCESS for ELLs,…

To address the concern that most traditional reading comprehension tests only measure basic comprehension, this study designed measures to assess more complex reading tasks: Reading to Learn and Reading to Integrate. The new measures were taken by 251 participants: 105 undergraduate native speakers of English, 106 undergraduate nonnative speakers,…

In the componential approach to modelling reading ability, a number of contributory factors have been empirically validated. However, research on their relative contribution to explaining performance on second language reading tests is limited. Furthermore, the contribution of knowledge of syntax has been largely ignored in comparison with the…

It is said that one important aspect of education is the production of coherent discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). This is the speaker's or the writer's ability to organize relevant meanings in relation to each other, and this in turn requires the establishment of "chain interaction"--relations between components of a message--in a text. The…

The immediate written recall task, a widely used measure of both first language (L1) and second language (L2) reading comprehension, has been advocated over traditional test methods such as multiple choice, cloze tests and open-ended questions because it is a direct and integrative assessment task. It has been, however, criticized as requiring…

This study describes the reading and test-taking strategies that test takers used on the "Reading" section of the "LanguEdge Courseware" (2002) materials developed to familiarize prospective respondents with the new TOEFL. The investigation focused on strategies used to respond to more traditional "single selection"…