Educational assessments, from kindergarden to 12th grade (K-12) to licensure, have a long, well-documented history of oppression and marginalization. In this paper, we (the authors) ask the field of educational assessment/measurement to actively disrupt the White supremacist and racist logics that fuel this marginalization and re-orient itself…

As applied linguists and language testers, we are in the business of "doing language". For many of us, language learning is a lifelong passion, and we invest similar enthusiasm in our language assessment research and testing practices. Language is also the vehicle through which we communicate that enthusiasm to others, sharing our…

Over the past decade, testing and assessing spoken-language interpreting has garnered an increasing amount of attention from stakeholders in interpreter education, professional certification, and interpreting research. This is because in these fields assessment results provide a critical evidential basis for high-stakes decisions, such as the…

This article provides a detailed review of the Computer-based English Listening Speaking Test (CELST) used in Guangdong, China, as part of the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) to assess students' English proficiency. The CELST measures listening and speaking skills as outlined in the "English Curriculum for Senior Middle…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

Although there are many methods available for assessing text comprehension, the cloze test is not widely acknowledged as one of them. Critiques on cloze testing center on its supposedly limited ability to measure comprehension beyond the sentence. However, these critiques do not hold for all types of cloze tests; the particular configuration of a…

The argument-based approach to validation involves two steps; specification of the proposed interpretations and uses of the test scores as an interpretive argument, and the evaluation of the plausibility of the proposed interpretive argument. More ambitious interpretations and uses tend to involve an extended network of inferences and assumptions…

The "Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers of English" (LPATE) is a test of standards of English language ability for Hong Kong primary and secondary school teachers of English. The impetus for the creation of the LPATE arose, in 1996, because of concerns in business and education communities over falling English language…

The assessment of so-called depth of word knowledge has been the focus of research for some years now. In this article the construct of deep word knowledge is further specified as the decontextualized knowledge of word meanings and word associations. Most studies so far have involved adolescent and adult second language learners. In this article,…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) posits six levels of proficiency and defines these largely in relation to empirically derived difficulty estimates based on stakeholder perceptions of what language functions expressed by 'Can-do' statements can be successfully performed at each level. Though also containing much valuable…

Investigated the reliability, validity, and practicality of a controlled production measure of vocabulary, consisting of items from five frequency levels and using a completion-item format. Two equivalent test forms were compared. The test was found to be useful in distinguishing between different proficiency groups. (Author/MSE)

Reports on an international project's progress in revising the English Language Testing Service test, jointly produced and administered by the British Council and the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate. The rationale for the project's using new approaches to content validation of the revised test is explored. (Author/CB)

Links the theory of washback with the broader concept of impact in educational measurement and to the recent debate on construct validity associated with Messick. Notes that for many years it was asserted that language tests negatively impacted teaching and learning, an impact known as washback. (25 references) (Author/CK)

Describes several elicitation techniques used for speech act data collection and analysis and discusses their suitability in testing a learner's acquisition of the rules of language use. Argues that the development of testing instruments for communicative competence cannot be divorced from the field of cross-cultural pragmatics. (SED)

Argues that language tests employing methods not fair to all test takers are unethical. Ways of reducing sources of unfairness in language testing is discussed. (15 references) (Author/CK)