As a high-stakes standardized test, IELTS is expected to have comparable forms of test papers so that test takers from different test administration on different dates receive comparable test scores. Therefore, this study examined the text difficulty and task characteristics of four parallel academic IELTS reading tests to reveal to what extent…

Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely…

Research shows that test method can exert a significant impact on test takers' performance and thereby contaminate test scores. We argue that common test method can exert the same effect as common stimuli and violate the conditional independence assumption of item response theory models because, in general, subsets of items which have a shared…

This article investigates a version of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) listening test for evidence of differential item functioning (DIF) based on gender, nationality, age, and degree of previous exposure to the test. Overall, the listening construct was found to be underrepresented, which is probably an important cause…