In choosing language testing alternatives appropriate for their language education contexts, language teachers need to keep in mind the purposeful nature of language assessment. Purposeful language assessment involves focusing what is to be accomplished by language assessment, specifying intended uses of language tests, selecting appropriate…

Working definitions of proficiency and performance in language testing are established, and their role in multidimensional testing is examined. The discussion also covers the relationship between proficiency and performance, a comparison of both types of tests, and performance test scoring dilemmas. (Contains 17 references.) (Author/LB)

Four dimensions of bilingual measurement are defined, and three major topics in the assessment of language proficiency and language dominance are discussed: selection of the language components to be assessed; appropriateness of certain elicitation tasks used; and general checkpoints that can be used to evaluate language proficiency dominance…

This paper reviews basic social validity assessment techniques, discusses the constructs underlying direct magnitude estimation (DME), illustrates the use of DME for performing social validity evaluations of spontaneous language samples (with 3 brain-injured children, ages 10-15, and 3 controls), and discusses the relationship between subjective…

Although there are many regions of the country that have historically been ethnically and linguistically diverse, school system data as well as information from the 2000 census and other sources has indicated that many hitherto homogeneous regions of the country and their educational institutions have experienced significant growth in populations…

Focusing on the realities and constraints operating in public school settings, this book suggests ways that school personnel with responsibilities for hearing-impaired and other language-delayed children can produce effective language assessments and interventions. Following an overview of language development, the book is organized into sections…

Describes efforts to design a method of assessing community college students' entry-level writing skills, which compared the predictive validity of three methods of evaluating writing skills: writing samples, objective tests, and self-assessments. Results of these scores were correlated with students' success in writing courses. (CAM)

This article considers the models and beliefs of language clinicians, as reflected by their choice of specific assessment instruments or measurement methods. Differences in construct and philosophy are demonstrated in a review of personality and vocational preference inventories and several subtests of sentence production. (DB)

This handbook, which focuses on foreign language teaching in the classroom, aims to describe the "state of the art" in testing. The first section considers the area of aptitude testing, particularly the diagnostic function of aptitude tests. A taxonomy of foreign language teaching objectives points out the need to classify the aims of foreign…

The Language Assessment Battery was administered to third to fifth grade limited English speaking students in New York City. Special techniques addressed two common problems in testing these populations: (1) language tests suitable for limited English speakers change their psychometric characteristics over time as the students' language ability…