The growing diversity among test takers in second or foreign language (L2) assessments makes the importance of fairness front and center. This systematic review aimed to examine how fairness in L2 assessments was evaluated through differential item functioning (DIF) analysis. A total of 83 articles from 27 journals were included in a systematic…

Clinical Question: For young AAE speakers (P), how useful is the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) compared with Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in the presence of African American English (AAE)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: PsycInfo®, Education Source, Education Resources…

Many Chinese universities are implementing an educational reform to transform their general English courses into academic English courses. Accordingly, how to assess students' English ability should also be reformed. In this test review, we introduce a school-based general academic English summative test developed by English instructors. An…

Thousands of education institutions worldwide rely on IELTS scores as criteria for accepting international students whose first language is not English. Individual studies have found varying degrees of strength of correlations and conflicting results between IELTS entry scores and subsequent academic success. These conflicting results were…

Argument-based validation requires test developers and researchers to specify what is entailed in test interpretation and use. Doing so has been shown to yield advantages (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2010), but it also requires an analysis of how the concerns of language testers can be conceptualized in the terms used to construct a…

This article presents a review of the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language--Second Edition (CASL-2), in which reliability, utility, and validity are analyzed and discussed. Some limited recommendations for practice are made based on a review of the information provided by the publisher for clinicians.

Purpose and background: The purpose of this paper is to critically review the traditional and contemporary validation frameworks--the content, criterion, and construct validations; the evidence-gathering; the socio-cognitive model; the test usefulness; and an argument-based approach--as well as empirical studies using an argument-based approach to…

The present study is part of a larger mixed methods project that investigated the speaking section of the Advanced Placement (AP) Japanese Language and Culture Exam. It investigated assumptions for the evaluation inference through a content analysis of test taker responses. Results of the content analysis were integrated with those of a many-facet…

For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

Research on English Medium Instruction (EMI) is rapidly increasing and well-documented worldwide; however, recent studies in EMI have given less emphasis on assessments in EMI classrooms. Indeed, assessment plays a significant role in informing teaching and learning competencies, but what to assess and how to assess are questions which have been…

Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) is a computer-based international English language test. Pearson developed PTE Academic in response to demand from higher education, governments, and other customers for a test that could more accurately measure the English communication skills of international students in an academic environment.…

Language testing has witnessed three major trends in the 1990s: theoretical, methodological, and analytical. Theoretically, emphasis has been placed on the further understanding of the construct of language proficiency. Methodologically, there has been an outburst of interest in language performance testing and the promotion of the professional…

Panahi and Mohebbi review James Dean Brown's 50-years of research in language testing, curriculum development and research statistics with reference to an impressionistic framework for analysis containing two components with their subcomponents: Annotations (i.e., briefing and implications) and main concepts and themes (i.e., testing and teaching…

Clinical Question: Among school-age children who speak AAE (P), does the use of dialect scoring modifications (I), when compared to traditional scoring methods (C), yield more reliable identification of true language disorders (O)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: Google Scholar and ASHAWire. Search Terms: (1) "dialect" OR…

The increasing attention on Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) pronunciation instruction gives us an opportunity to look into the current directions of teaching CFL and the specific instructional pronunciation strategies employed by CFL teachers. This paper offers a review of empirical evidence on the use and impact of instructional pronunciation…