J.D. Brown (JD) served as the author of an instructional column titled "Statistics Corner" in the "Shiken": JALT "Testing & Evaluation SIG Newsletter" for an extensive period spanning over two decades, from 1997 to 2019. This publication was under the auspices of the Testing and Evaluation Special Interest Group,…

It has been argued in the literature on (language) testing that any act of testing/assessment can impact: (1) educators' curriculum design; (2) teachers' teaching practices; and (3) students' learning behaviors. This quality of any given testing situation or act of assessment has been called washback, or backwash if you will. Washback falls into…

Administration of high-stakes language proficiency tests has been disrupted in many parts of the world as a result of the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic. Institutions that rely on test scores have been forced to adapt, and in many cases this means using scores from a different test, or a new online version of an existing test, that can be taken…

One of the main challenges higher educational institutions encounter amid the recent COVID-19 crisis is transferring assessment approaches from the traditional face-to-face form to the online Emergency Remote Teaching approach. A set of language assessment principles, practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, and washback, which can be…

Twenty years ago, a state-of-the-art review in "SSLA" marked the coming of age of the study of temporality in second language acquisition. This was followed by three monographs on tense and aspect the next year. This article presents a state-of-the-scholarship review of the last 20 years of research addressing the aspect hypothesis (AH)…

Celpe-Bras, is the exam for the certification of proficiency in Portuguese as a foreign language. It, is the only Portuguese proficiency test recognized by the Brazilian government (Ministério da Educação, 2013). Given the recent growth of interest and also its unique design as a large-scale proficiency test, this article provides a general…

In this contribution, I argue for a radical reappraisal of accepted ideas about how English is taught and tested. I am not alone in questioning the validity of the current orthodoxy. Others have expressed views that correspond or are consistent with the points I make here. What I have sought to do is to synthesize them in the formulation of a…

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) oral proficiency interview -- computer (OPIc) testing system represents an ambitious effort in language assessment: Assessing oral proficiency in over a dozen languages, on the same scale, from virtually anywhere at any time. Especially for users in contexts where multiple foreign…

As access to smartphones and emerging technologies has become ubiquitous in our daily lives and in language learning, technology-mediated social interaction has become common in teaching and assessing L2 speaking. The changing ecology of L2 spoken interaction provides language educators and testers with opportunities for renewed test design and…

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 Duolingo English Test (DET) is a computer adaptive test of English proficiency that is increasingly used for English-medium university admissions purposes. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, test centers were shut down in many countries, and major tests including the TOEFL iBT and IELTS could not be administered. The DET is an "at…

The Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program (CELPIP) Test was designed for immigration and citizenship in Canada. CELPIP is a computer-based English-language proficiency test which covers all four skills. This test review provides a description of the test and its construct, tasks, and delivery. Then, it appraises CELPIP for…

This paper reports on the proposed transfer of a paper-based English proficiency exam to an online platform. We discuss both the potential predetermined advantages, which were the impetus for the project, and also some emergent benefits, which prompted an in-depth analysis and reconceptualisation of the exam's role, which in turn we hope will…

The United States is formally represented around the world by approximately 14,000 Foreign Service officers and other personnel in the U.S. Department of State. Roughly one-third of them are required to be proficient in the local languages of the countries to which they are posted. To achieve this language proficiency for its staff, the State…

Embedded questions (EQs) are islands for filler--gap dependency formation in English, but not in Norwegian. Kush and Dahl (2022) found that first language (L1) Norwegian participants often accepted filler-gap dependencies into EQs in second language (L2) English, and proposed that this reflected persistent transfer from Norwegian of the functional…