Investigating the comparability of students' performance on TOEFL writing tasks and actual academic writing tasks is essential to provide backing for the extrapolation inference in the TOEFL validity argument (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). This study compared 103 international non-native-English-speaking undergraduate students'…

In the present study, aspects of the measurement of writing are disentangled in order to investigate the validity of inferences made on the basis of writing performance and to describe implications for the assessment of writing. To include genre as a facet in the measurement, we obtained writing scores of 12 texts in four different genres for each…

Although a key concept in various writing textbooks, learning standards, and writing rubrics, voice remains a construct that is only loosely defined in the literature and impressionistically assessed in practice. Few attempts have been made to formally investigate whether and how the strength of an author's voice in written texts can be reliably…

Development and administration of institutional ESL placement tests require a great deal of financial and human resources. Due to a steady increase in the number of international students studying in the United States, some US universities have started to consider using standardized test scores for ESL placement. The English Placement Test (EPT)…

The English Placement Test (EPT) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is designed to provide an accurate placement (or exemption) of international students into the ESL writing and pronunciation classes. Over the last five years, UIUC has experienced an increase in the number of international students taking the EPT. Because of…

This study investigated the validity of four theoretically motivated traits of writing ability across English and Korean, based on elementary school students' responses to letter- and story-writing tasks. Their responses were scored analytically and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. The findings include the following. A model of writing…

The goal of the current study was to examine the validity and topic generality of a writing performance test designed to place international students into appropriate ESL courses at a large mid-western university. Because for each test administration the test randomly rotates three academic topics integrated with listening and reading sources, it…