The paper presents the first comprehensive look at the language development of Romani-speaking children from resource-poor Roma communities in several European countries. 250 participants aged 3- to 10-years participated. The experimental tasks assess knowledge in eight key areas of grammar and morphology, including fast mapping of novel items.…

This study aimed to examine the practices of EFL teachers in test construction. It was conducted in six purposively selected secondary schools. The study addressed the following question: What are the practices of EFL teachers in test construction? The theoretical basis of the study was Bloom's taxonomy. The design of the study was a convergent…

This article details the challenges and best practices of evaluating second language learners for placement into postsecondary Spanish language courses. The literature on testing for placement purposes in second language acquisition and language testing provides a great deal of insight, but language programs must make many decisions as well that…

This study is a conceptual replication of Ellis' 'Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language: A psychometric study', published in "Studies in Second Language Acquisition" (2005), aiming to establish the importance of including belief statements (hypothesized to increase processing demands) in the design of Elicited…

According to the IELTS official website, IELTS candidates usually score lower in the IELTS Writing test than in the other language skills. This is disappointing for the many IELTS candidates who fail to get the overall band score they need. Surprisingly enough, few studies have addressed this issue. The present study, then, is aimed at shedding…

The Multiple-choice (MC) item format is commonly used in educational assessments due to its economy and effectiveness across a variety of content domains. However, numerous studies have examined the quality of MC items in high-stakes and higher-education assessments and found many flawed items, especially in terms of distractors. These faulty…

Focus on form (FonF) studies have predominantly addressed its effectiveness in improving learners' syntactic, lexical, orthographic, and phonological knowledge. Extending the scope of this line of research to formulaic FonF practices, this study investigates the relative effectiveness of incidental FonF targeting formulaic versus nonformulaic…

This article aims to give a comprehensive guide to planning and designing vocabulary tests which include Identifying the skills to be covered by the test; outlining the course content covered; preparing a table of specifications that shows the skill, content topics and number of questions allocated to each; and preparing the test instructions. The…

This article presents a review of research that has investigated ways of measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language (L2), focusing on grammar. It begins by defining implicit and explicit knowledge in terms of a distinguishing set of criteria. Two ways of investigating implicit knowledge are discussed -- through experimental…

One of the major issues in SLA is developing language tests that could produce good measures of implicit knowledge. This study examines the validity of an English Elicited Imitation (EI) test as a measure of L2 implicit grammatical knowledge. Forty freshman university students in Turkey took a set of language tests: an EI test, two storytelling…

Despite the increasing number of U.S. born Latinos, placing heritage and native speakers in the Spanish curriculum is still a challenge (MacGregor-Mendoza & Moreno, 2020). The present article: (1) addresses the unique needs of heritage speakers in the Spanish curriculum; (2) problematizes traditional grammar-based placement exams; and (3)…

In second language writing assessment, rating scales and scores from human-mediated assessment have been criticized for a number of shortcomings including problems with adequacy, relevance, and reliability (Hamp-Lyons, 1990; McNamara, 1996; Weigle, 2002). In its testing practice, Euroexam International also detected that the rating scales for…

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…

Deaf students often differ from their hearing peers in written language development. Providing developmentally appropriate instruction is ideal, yet current methods of writing assessment do not provide teachers with sufficient information regarding the written language (i.e., syntactic) development of deaf students. In this research, we use a…

Turkish and Foreign Languages Research and Application Center (TÖMER) is one of the important institutions for learning Turkish as a foreign language. In these institutions, proficiency tests are applied at the end of each level. However, test applications in TÖMERs vary between each center as there is no shared program in teaching Turkish as a…