The redesigned "TOEIC Bridge"® tests are designed to measure the reading, listening, speaking, and writing proficiency of beginning to low-intermediate English learners in the context of everyday adult life. This report describes the comprehensive and multifaceted process used to enhance the meaningfulness of TOEIC Bridge test score…

The "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test is a new English language proficiency test in the "TOEFL"® family of assessments. It measures foundational language skills and communication abilities in academic and general (daily life) contexts. The test covers the four language skills of reading, listening, writing, and speaking and is intended…

The research note focuses on the alignment aspect of English language proficiency (ELP) assessments, one of the required types of validity evidence for the federal peer review process of states' assessment systems. A basic tenant of current U.S. education policy is the alignment between what a test assesses and what content has been determined as…

The purpose of this study is to examine the appropriateness of using the "TOEFL Primary®" tests to evaluate the language abilities of students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) through an online-delivered curriculum, the VIPKid Major Course (MC). Data include student test scores on the TOEFL Primary Listening and Reading tests…

To ensure fairness, it is important to better understand the relationship of language proficiency with the standard procedures of psychometric analysis. This paper examines how equating results are affected by an increase in the proportion of examinees who report that English is not their first language, using the analysis samples for a…

To facilitate the interpretation of test scores from the new TOEIC[R] (Test of English for International Communications[TM]) speaking and writing tests as measures of English-language proficiency, we administered a self-assessment inventory to TOEIC examinees in Japan and Korea, to gather their perceptions of their ability to perform a variety of…

To ensure fairness, it is important to better understand the relationship of language proficiency to standard psychometric analysis procedures. This paper examines how results of differential item functioning (DIF) analysis are affected by an increase in the proportion of examinees who report that English is not their first language in the…

The TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) test is an English-language proficiency test for people whose native language is not English. It measures the everyday English skills of people working in an international environment. The scores indicate how well people can communicate in English with others in business, commerce, and…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM], better known as TOEFL[R], is designed to measure the English-language proficiency of people whose native language is not English. TOEFL scores are accepted by more than 6,000 colleges, universities, and licensing agencies in 130 countries. The test is also used by governments, and scholarship and…

The issue of identifying reading difficulties and disabilities in English language learners (ELLs) is a complex one. It is an area that draws on the diverse disciplines of first- and second-language acquisition, literacy, English language learning, and reading, including differences and disabilities research. This literature review aims to…

This research applied a cognitive model to identify item features that lead to irrelevant variance on the Test of Spoken English[TM] (TSE[R]). The TSE is an assessment of English oral proficiency and includes an item that elicits a description of a statistical graph. This item type sometimes appears to tap graph-reading skills--an irrelevant…

This monograph provides a comprehensive description and analysis of the literacy proficiencies of the adult immigrant population (16-65 years old) in the U.S. in recent years and assesses their implications for the labor force behavior, employment, earnings, incomes, and civic behavior of the immigrant population. The first section will present…