The purpose of this paper is to (a) establish whether meaning recall and meaning recognition item formats test psychometrically distinct constructs of vocabulary knowledge which measure separate skills, and, if so, (b) determine whether each construct possesses unique properties predictive of L2 reading proficiency. Factor analyses and…

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…

Multilingualism in education is encouraged in South Africa, and children are expected to become bilingual and biliterate during the early primary grades. Much focus has been placed on measuring literacy in children's first language, often the medium of instruction (MOI), and English, the language typically used as MOI from fourth grade. However,…

There is a strong international demand for official certification of French competence. A range of tests are available to meet this goal. Among the recognized tests available for this purpose is the "DELF" ("Diplôme d'études en langue française"). The "DELF" has been awarded the Association of Language Testers in…

This study explores the constructs that underpin three different measures of vocabulary knowledge and investigates the degree to which these three measures correlate with, and are able to predict, measures of second language (L2) listening and reading. Word frequency structured vocabulary tests tapping "receptive/orthographic (RecOrth)…

The paper examines the results of the CEFR alignment project for the Slovenian national examinations in English. The authors aim to validate externally the standard-setting procedures by adopting a socio-cognitive model of validation (Khalifa & Weir, 2009; Weir, 2005) to analyse the scoring, context and cognitive validity of three reading…

This study describes the development and validation of the Extract the Base test (ETB), which assesses derivational morphological awareness. Scores on this test were validated for 580 monolingual students and 373 Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in third through fifth grade. As part of the validation of the internal structure,…

Providers of tests of languages for academic purposes generally claim to provide evidence on the extent to which students are likely to be able to cope with the future demands of reading in specified real-life contexts. Such claims need to be supported by evidence that the texts employed in the test reflect salient features of the texts the test…

With recent statistical advances in cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA), the CDA approach has been increasingly applied to non-diagnostic tests partly to meet accountability demands for student achievement. The study aimed to evaluate critically the validity of the CDA application to an existing non-diagnostic L2 reading comprehension test and…

An exploratory analysis comparing two test batteries for English-as-a-Foreign-Language reading comprehension used a single framework of communicative language ability and test method facets to investigate construct validity. The framework's use in the content analysis of communicative language tests, and for the comparison of content across tests,…

An English-as-a-second-language reading comprehension test is analyzed, first using classical measurement procedures and then using the Rasch Model latent trait procedures. Results indicate that the Rasch Model analysis procedure produced numerous advantages for the test developer. Summarizes and describes 13 of these advantages. (SED)

Describes a study of multiple-choice and open-ended questions, each presented in the native language and in the second language, on the same second language text. Different methods resulted in different scores. Some methods were found to be more difficult than others and to have a greater effect on students of low-level proficiency. (SED)

Analysis of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores for 32,467 graduate school applicants, all nonnative speakers of English, revealed that students in the two key major-field groups, humanities/social sciences and biological/physical sciences, performed better on reading passages related to their own groups than on other passages.…