Placing students of a foreign language within a basic language program constitutes an ongoing problem, particularly for large university departments when they have many incoming freshmen and transfer students. This article outlines the author's experience designing and piloting a language placement test for a university level Spanish program. The…

Describes the process for generating, from a text, three types of multiple-choice vocabulary cloze tests: one based on n-th word deletion, one using user-specified frequency ranges, and one based on a particular word class. The article discusses the extent to which good test material can be produced realistically by computer-aided systems and the…