Research on anxiety and motivation in second language (L2) learning is proliferating. However, these two individual differences are commonly measured by self-report questionnaires, the psychometric properties of which have been questioned. Building on previous works on study quality, this methodological synthesis systematically describes and…

Supports use of multiple paradigms for the measurement of individual differences in the search for explanations of natural language. Rather than a single paradigm discipline, they offer a wider scope of inquiry--phenomena of interest, types of questions, and forms of explanations, as well as opening the discipline to inspiration and analogy from…

A study to evaluate seven commonly employed reading comprehension testing techniques in terms of predictive validity, difficulty and discriminability is described. (Author/RM)

Describes a study which investigated the intersentential sensitivity of the rational deletion cloze procedure. Eighty-four college-level students of German were divided into two sub-groups; one group completed a sequential cloze task, the other completed a scrambled cloze task. There were not significant differences in performance on the two…

Agrees with Oller and Perkins (1978) that correlation and causation are not equivalent and that correlations between invalid measures yield no important conclusions. In addition, Oller and Perkins' arguments against the validity of self-report measurements are examined, as well as evidence for a causal relation between variance in affective…

Describes a study which examined the reliability, validity, and scalability of a new technique for constructing, administering, and scoring dictation tests to measure second language proficiency. Findings indicate that such tests can be constructed easily by dividing a coherent text into segments of increasing length. (SED)

Reports the results of a study which sought to investigate the validity of the oral interview in testing language proficiency, in particular that of adult students of English as a Second Language. (Author/AM)

Questions the validity of current measurement instruments or techniques which purport to assess affective variables, and relates this to the question of correlation between measures of affective variables and attained language proficiency. (AM)

Four issues concerning aspects of the validity of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery are examined: (1) whether the subtests assess the attributes claimed; (2) the relationship of the subtests to higher order constructs; (3) whether the strategy for measuring affective variables influences correlations with achievement measures; and (4)…

Examines: (1) correlations between attitudes of Japanese students toward various variables, and their proficiency in English; and (2) the validity of attitude measures. (Author/AM)

This study found that reliable, accurate, time-saving placement information for English as a Second Language students can be derived from a procedure whereby an open-ended cloze is truncated and remodeled into a multiple-choice format. (Author/POP)

Discusses three possible sources of nonrandom but extraneous variance in self-reported attitude data, and demonstrates that these data may be surreptitious measures of verbal intelligence and language proficiency. (Author/AM)

Analysis of the use of a cloze-procedure test to measure the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) proficiency of Japanese college students revealed that the cloze test correlated significantly with an essay test and improved prediction of ESL proficiency, suggesting that carefully constructed cloze tests could be useful in integrative language…