The ACTFL Assessment of Performance Toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL, https://www.actfl.n.d.org/assessments/k-12-assessments/aappl) assesses proficiency in 11 languages for students in grades 3 to 12 and is often used to award the Seal of Biliteracy. While arguments for the valid interpretation and uses of the AAPPL have previously been…

Jessica Wu is Research and Development Program Director at the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC) in Taipei, Taiwan. Jessica has been deeply involved in the development and validation of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) in addition to a number of other foreign language testing programs. Her research focuses on speaking…

This paper examined to what extent causal explanation speaking tasks (CESTs) are cognitively appropriate for assessing young language learners' (YLLs) L2 speaking. Ninety-six YLLs (48 from Grade 4 and 6 each) in China performed two CESTs in both L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English). They also completed receptive and productive L2 vocabulary size tests.…

Recently, research in second language acquisition has seen an increased attention on low-educated low-literate (LESLLA) learners. However, few of the existing instruments to measure L2 proficiency have been validated for use with this population. In this paper, we examine how adult L2 learners with diverging educational backgrounds perform on and…

Indices of lexical diversity have been used to estimate the size of a writer's vocabulary and/or a writer's lexical proficiency for some time. One issue with many commonly used indices of lexical diversity (e.g., TTR and index) is that they vary as a function of text length. Accordingly, much research has been devoted to the development of indices…

The increasing representation of young language-minority students in school settings around the world and recent insights into multilingualism as a potential resource for language learning and development call for acritical study of theoretical and practical implications for the field of language teaching and assessment. Relatively little…

Recent research conducted as part of the English Profile identified grammatical criterial features that are characteristic of each Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) proficiency level. The extent to which these criterial features attest in English learners of various first language backgrounds call for an empirical examination. In this…

In the present study, I examined the effects of rater characteristics, in particular, raters' familiarity with a foreign accent, on the assessment of second language (L2) pronunciation. Forty-three native English-speaking teachers were divided into three groups according to their reported types of familiarity with Korean accents: heritage,…

As a branch of artificial intelligence, automated speech recognition (ASR) technology is increasingly used to detect speech, process it to text, and derive the meaning of natural language for various learning and assessment purposes. ASR inaccuracy may pose serious threats to valid score interpretations and fair score use for all when it is…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

Global efforts for standards-based linguistic assessment increasingly hold that examinees should be tested in the language with which they are most familiar. Yet, language use still occurs differently from its characterization in exams, even as exams are increasingly developed in historically minoritized languages. Drawing from two years of…

One of the greatest assessment challenges is providing fair and valid tests for multilingual pupils. Since language proficiency impacts their results on content tests, accommodations are suggested to help in solving the validity issues. In this mixed methods study on multilingual assessment, pupils were divided according to three testing…

Examining spoken features across proficiency levels allows researchers to explore the nature of speaking proficiency as it develops. This line of research has thus far primarily focused on adult second language (L2) learners. Using cross-sectional data based on a large-scale language assessment intended for young L2 learners, in this study, we…

The article investigated how the inclusion of loanwords in vocabulary size tests affected the test scores of two L1 groups of EFL learners: Hebrew and Japanese. New BNC- and COCA-based vocabulary size tests were constructed in three modalities: word form recall, word form recognition, and word meaning recall. Depending on the test modality, the…

In this article, we report on our development of a translanguaged French/English listening task as part of the revision of a test for professors in a bilingual Canadian university. The primary objective in revising the test was to more authentically represent the target language use domain, which regularly includes translanguaging. We describe the…