This article reviews a selected sample of 70 empirical studies in journal articles and doctoral dissertations on language assessment in China between 2011 and 2018. Following a brief introduction to the history and current state of language assessment in China, the article presents a critical review of language assessment research on six themes…

The number of public school students who are English learners (ELs) has been increasing steadily in the United States. According to a report by Snyder, de Brey, and Dillow (2016), in the 2014-2015 school year, nearly 4.6 million students enrolled in Kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) in U.S. schools were English learners, representing…

This paper assesses the performance of a vocabulary test designed to measure second language productive vocabulary knowledge.The test, Lex30, uses a word association task to elicit vocabulary, and uses word frequency data to measure the vocabulary produced. Here we report firstly on the reliability of the test as measured by a test-retest study, a…

Maki, Wasada, and Hashimoto developed the Minimal English Test (MET), which is a five-minute English as a Second Language (ESL) test. The Maki Group has, since the development of the MET, investigated correlations between the scores on the MET and the scores on other ESL tests, the reliability of the MET, and what kind of ESL proficiency the MET…

Interface design and ergonomics, while already studied in much of educational theory, have not until recently been considered in language testing (Fulcher, 2003). In this paper, we revise the design principles of PLEVALEX, a fully operational prototype Internet based language testing platform. Our focus here is to show PLEVALEX's interfaces and…

The College English Test-Spoken English Test is a nationwide spoken English test designed to assess the oral communicative ability of Chinese university and college students who have undertaken compulsory English study at a Chinese university. This article describes the test and evaluates it in terms of reliability, validity, authenticity,…

This study was conducted in the FL English class of a typical Spanish secondary school. The students translated a short L1 Spanish text into FL English orally as a class, with accompanying dictionary glosses, before writing it down individually. This collaborative translation was supported by the teacher, and any lexical items that were not known…

A project is reported that developed a test for students in foreign language in the elementary school (FLES) programs. Relevant tests in Spanish and English as a Second Language (ESL) were reviewed in order to develop a listening and reading test that could determine achievement in a typical FLES curriculum. Pilot testing was conducted with 121…

A study examined inter-rater reliability on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages/Educational Testing Service (ACTFL/ETS) oral language proficiency rating scale. Seven raters, all elementary or intermediate college Spanish teachers given only brief formal training in the use of the scale, evaluated recorded interviews with…

The one-parameter psychometric model known as the Rasch model is described and examined. The basic principles underlying the model and the concepts of unidimensionality, local stochastic independence, and additivity are explained in non-mathematical terms. The requirements of measurement procedures, the measurement of latent traits, the control on…

In comparison with the C-test, the cloze procedure is recommended for inclusion in a student placement test battery, and as an item of greater flexibility and with application to a wider range of placement test situations. The features considered were validity, reliability, scorability, economy, administrability, practicality, and discrimination.…

The paper reviews the ways in which the cloze testing procedure measures the reading comprehension skills of students in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. The construction and scoring of the test and the interpretation of the scores are discussed and the reliability and validity of the cloze procedure for testing reading skills…

Based on the responses of 50 ESL instructors to a composition-scoring exercise, a detailed method of scoring compositions was developed that divides the writing into basic components (structure, content, vocabulary, organization, and mechanics) and provides a scoring mechanism for each component for each of three competency levels. (MSE)

The faculty of an intensive program of English as a second language for college-bound students, questioning the objectivity of faculty evaluations of non-native college applicants' written essays, assessed the existing evaluation process, reformed it, tested it, and planned for ongoing development. In the first stage, readers read and graded…

Linguistic and statistical analyses of cloze tests as a measure of second language competence revealed qualitative and quantitative differences between the performances of Anglophone immersion and French control groups. The diagnostic limitations of the procedure and the usefulness of the linguistic information derived from it are discussed. (MSE)