This article focuses on rater severity and consistency and their relation to major changes in the rating system in a high-stakes testing context. The study is based on longitudinal data collected from 2009 to 2019 from the second language (L2) Finnish speaking subtest in the National Certificates of Language Proficiency in Finland. We investigated…

The present investigation explores Cognitive Test Anxiety (CTA) in a high-stake oral examination, taking into consideration how face-to-face and computer-based examination formats affect test-takers' anxiety and consequently language performance. Two speaking tests -- face-to-face and computer-based -- were developed for a Spanish university's…

The purpose of this study is to find out if there is a correlation between the anxiety of a foreign language in nursing students and their performance in an oral examination, and if it exists, how strong is that correlation. It also aims to examine the effect that different levels of anxiety have on students' oral test scores and how students feel…

Despite the increasing importance of language testing, technology design matters related to testing have hardly been addressed in academic research, yet not enough has been written on test-taking anxiety related to computerized speaking tests. Although students nowadays are digital natives, in our experience they seem to experience a significant…

Testing is an issue of increasing importance. While for many teachers language learning should be communicative; in fact, they expect their students to provide evidence of their knowledge. Thus, there is a clear mismatch on the approach to language teaching and language testing. As a consequence, there is an evident need change the testing…

Communicative approaches to language teaching that emphasize the importance of speaking (e.g., task-based language teaching) require innovative and evidence-based means of assessing oral language. Nonetheless, research has yet to produce an adequate assessment model for oral language (Chun 2006; Downey et al. 2008). Limited by automatic speech…

The debate over the extensive use of paired and group oral assessments has yielded an enriched body of theoretical inquiries and empirical investigations, marking a shift from viewing second language (L2) speaking ability as residing in the individual to emphasizing joint construction distributed among interlocutors within local contexts. This…

Continuous exponential families are applied to linking test forms via an internal anchor. This application combines work on continuous exponential families for single-group designs and work on continuous exponential families for equivalent-group designs. Results are compared to those for kernel and equipercentile equating in the case of chained…

This paper traces 9 non-English major EFL students and collects their oral productions in 4 successive oral exams in 2 years. The canonical correlation analysis approach of SPSS is adopted to study the disfluencies developmental traits under the influence of language acquisition development. We find that as language acquisition develops, the total…

Article contains a new intelligence test developed for use by teachers and administrators who are or will be working with Spanish-speaking pupils in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. (Editor/GB)

Presents a summary outline of an approach to oral testing used in the past two years with groups of students completing Fernand Marty's "Active French." (Author/PP)

States the requirements for graduation from the augmented 10-year Hauptschule (a "terminal" school) in Lower Saxony. Current examination practice is described and suggestions for improvement given. (IFS/WGA)

Suggests a monolingual, strictly oral "multiple choice" testing system, with suggestions regarding method, correcting and grading. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

The present study, conducted at the Department of Audiology and Sciences, Michigan State University, consisted of determining the intelligibility of 648 Spanish stimulus-words arranged in a multiple-choice test of the two forms, A and B, each including 12 lists of approximately the same degree of difficulty. (Appendix.) This multiple-choice test…

The simulated oral proficiency interview (SOPI) is a semi-direct speaking test that models the format of the oral proficiency interview (OPI). The OPI is a method of assessing general speaking proficiency in a second language. The SOPI is a tape-recorded test consisting of six parts: simple personal background questions posed in a simulated…