This laboratory-based study of second- and third-year American university students learning French examines the effectiveness of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on noun-adjective agreement errors. The treatment consisted of one hour of interactive tasks. Implicit feedback was operationalized as a single recast with interrogative…

Essay tests are widely used to assess ESL/EFL learners' writing abilities for instructional, administrative, and research purposes. Relevant literature was searched to identify 70 empirical studies on ESL/EFL essay tests. The majority of these studies examined task, essay, and rater effects on essay rating and scores. Less attention has been given…

Describes underlying concepts and current issues in communicative testing and illustrates application of these ideas by examining theoretical constructs, issues, and work done so far in relation to second language testing. (Author/BK)

The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) is a cross-curricular literacy test issued to all secondary school students in the province of Ontario. The test consists of a reading and a writing component, both of which must be successfully completed for secondary school graduation in Ontario. This study elicited 16 first language and second…

Advocates the study of poetry in FL classes and suggests methods by which students could be tested on poetry. (KM)

Describes development of testing program to evaluate listening comprehension in second language classes. Suggests it is necessary to incorporate the aural component into classroom activities to a greater degree. Time and effort must be spent in developing the ability to understand and process the spoken word. (Author/BK)

The present study is a continuation of the work presented in the 2001 article by Greidanus and Nienhuis. In the current study, we also examine the quality of word knowledge among advanced learners of French as a second language (L2) by means of a word associates test. We studied the development of word knowledge among six groups of…

Examines the hypothesis that certain errors occurring in oral foreign language tests are due to the recurrence of phonological features both in the questions and in the answer. (AM)

Suggests that second language learners could benefit from being made aware of the semantic components that unify verbs that display a certain syntactic behavior and the semantic components that exclude other verbs from participating in this behavior. Findings of a study in which production and judgment data on the behavior of "change of state" and…

Argues that English-speaking learners of French as a second language start with a major asset in that these two languages share a sizeable vocabulary. The article describes a seven-lesson program designed to exploit the lexical similarities between the two languages with beginning university-level learners of French. (21 references) (Author/CK)

Starting from the premise that the assessment of second language learners' competence is a must at several points during the learning process, discusses the usefulness of laboratory testing. Argues that it allows for standardized testing, facility of test administration, easy scoring, objective measures, reliability and validity of results. (MES)

Describes a reading experiment with two groups of English speaking children attending French immersion programs. The two groups, from grades 3 and 6 respectively, were tested in both English and French for their ability to recognize spelling patterns and to make positive transfers from one language to the other. (MES)

Discusses the concept of communicative competence in second language learning and various models for testing this skill. (AM)

Examines the effect of teaching mathematics in French on mathematics achievement evaluated in English. Analyzes the effect of increased intensity of bilingual education on mathematics achievement and the effects of language of testing in the context of French immersion at the intermediate level. (Author/VWL)

Reports a study which investigated the use of rational cloze procedure in conjunction with retrospection or introspection assessment techniques to examine how individuals understand text in both first and second languages, especially the use of contextual constraints. (MSE)