The practice of second language (L2) speech perception has traditionally relied on equal-interval perceptual scales and novice listeners' (NLs) impressionistic judgments of constructs such as accentedness and comprehensibility (Munro & Derwing, 2011). However, issues have surfaced with respect to how well NLs can use these scales, whether they…

Prominent spoken language assessments such as the Oral Proficiency Interview and the Test of Spoken English have been primarily concerned with speaking ability as it relates to conversation. This paper looks at an additional aspect of spoken language ability, namely public speaking. This study used an adapted form of a public speaking rating scale…

The elicited imitation task (EIT), in which language learners listen to a series of spoken sentences and repeat each one verbatim, is a commonly used measure of language proficiency in second language acquisition research. The "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test includes an EIT as a holistic measure of speaking proficiency, referred to as the…

Threats to construct validity should be reduced to a minimum. If true, sources of bias, namely raters, items, tests as well as gender, age, race, language background, culture, and socio-economic status need to be spotted and removed. This study investigates raters' experience, language background, and the choice of essay prompt as potential…

Speaking performance tests typically employ raters to produce scores; accordingly, variability in raters' scoring decisions has important consequences for test reliability and validity. One such source of variability is the rater's level of expertise in scoring. Therefore, it is important to understand how raters' performance is influenced by…

Research and development of a new type of scoring rubric for the integrated speaking tasks of "TOEFL iBT"® are described. These "analytic rating guides" could be helpful if tasks modeled after those in TOEFL iBT were used for formative assessment, a purpose which is different from TOEFL iBT's primary use for admission…