This paper will deal, firstly, with the South African context, that cries out for attention to responsible language assessment. The renewed interest in language testing in South Africa is well illustrated in assessments of language ability for educational purposes generally, and more specifically in the assessment of academic literacy. Secondly,…

Testing can potentiate new learning, which is often called the "forward testing effect." One potential explanation for this benefit is that testing might enable participants to use more effective learning strategies subsequently. We investigated this possibility by asking participants to report their encoding strategies in a multi-list…

This study examines how foreign language anxiety (FLA) and proficiency relate to second language (L2) utterance fluency during a final oral exam. Thirty-eight learners of Spanish (L1 English) completed unplanned narratives that were coded for ratio and length of pauses between and within Analysis of Speech Units, mean length of run, phonation-time…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with Questar Assessment Inc. (Questar) for the development of the 2019 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP). The 2019…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with Questar Assessment Inc. (Questar) for the development of the 2019 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP). The 2019…

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has a partnership with Questar Assessment Inc. (Questar) for the development of the 2020 Grades 3-8 English Language Arts Tests. Teachers from across the State work with NYSED in a variety of activities to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP). The 2020…

This study investigates how figurative language is processed by learners of a second language (L2). With an experiment testing L2 comprehension of figurative expressions in three categories, each combining shared and unshared first language (L1) and L2 lexical representations and conceptual representations in a different way, the study…

In Winter 2021-2022, the Nebraska Student-Centered Assessment System (NSCAS) assessments are administered in ELA and mathematics in Grades 3-8. In Spring 2021-2022, the NSCAS assessments are administered in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics in Grades 3-8 and in science in Grades 5 and 8. The purposes of the NSCAS assessments are to…

"Translanguaging" refers to the flexible use of the bilingual repertoire. In this report, we provide a theoretical framework to support the use of translanguaging to assess the academic content knowledge of newly arrived emergent bilingual students. In this report, we argue that translanguaging offers newly arrived emergent bilingual…

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

This study utilised regression methods to explain Grade 4 reading literacy achievement taking into account discrepancies between the language of the test and home language for learners who participated in the South African preProgress in International Reading Literacy Study (prePIRLS) 2011. Grade 4 learners were tested across all 11 official…

In Fall and Winter 2022-2023, the NSCAS assessments were administered in ELA and mathematics for grades 3-8. In Spring 2022-2023, the NSCAS assessments were administered in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics for grades 3-8 and in science for grades 5 and 8. The purposes of the NSCAS assessments are to measure and report Nebraska students'…

This study examines the methodology of global foreign accent ratings in studies on L2 speech production. In three experiments, we test how variation in raters, range within speech samples, as well as instructions and procedures affects ratings of accent in predominantly monolingual speakers of German, non-native speakers of German, as well as…