With the increase in online teaching sessions, instructors face the need to engage and challenge their students in new ways. Online quiz sites provide teachers with a cost-free means of gaining immediate feedback on their students' progress. However, students can become bored if multiple-choice quizzes do not vary and are used too often. This…

Despite the increasing number of U.S. born Latinos, placing heritage and native speakers in the Spanish curriculum is still a challenge (MacGregor-Mendoza & Moreno, 2020). The present article: (1) addresses the unique needs of heritage speakers in the Spanish curriculum; (2) problematizes traditional grammar-based placement exams; and (3)…

The Mango Suite is a set of three freely downloadable cross-platform authoring programs for flexible network-based CALL exercises. They are Adobe Air applications, so they can be used on Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computers, provided the freely-available Adobe Air has been installed on the computer. The exercises which the programs generate are…

The World Wide Web has frequently been incorporated into second/foreign language (L2 hereafter) course instruction during the past decade. However, many teaching methods essentially employed it as a reactive mode of L2 instruction. Many other methods have been designed to facilitate constructive L2 production. They are, however, limited in their…

Discusses student evaluation in foreign-language courses and argues that passing a multiple-choice test should not be a course objective. Suggests that achieving such an objective does not ensure that students understand the topic or that they will use their new knowledge in new situations, nor that they know how to analyze to the appropriate…

Describes the application of the Instruction Parsed Corpus as data in the Word Class Drills version 1.0 (WCD v1.0), a simple CALL program teaching word classes or grammatical parts of speech. The WCD v1.0 provides two modes of language learning activities, "viz.", the learning mode and the testing mode. (three references) (Author/CK)

The testing of grammar is one of the mainstays of language testing, since it can be argued that a basic knowledge of grammar underlies the ability to use language to express meaning. The most common way of testing grammatical knowledge is the multiple-choice test, and the most common multiple-choice item is one in which the student selects a word…

Describes the development of the Secondary Level English Proficiency (SLEP) Test specifications and the performance of each item type during administration of the test in other countries. Innovative formats such as multiple-choice cloze and multiple-choice dictation are discussed and described. In addition, the findings of a validity study…

A good knowledge of English vocabulary is important for anyone who wants to use the language, so knowledge of vocabulary is often tested. A test may test one or all of the types of vocabulary (active spoken, active written, passive listening, and passive reading), but the test maker should be aware of the differences among the types and which is…

Provides a detailed analysis of techniques used for second language vocabulary assessment and the implied assumptions about the underlying construct of vocabulary knowledge. The article notes that existing measures of vocabulary size are uninformative as to the depth of knowledge that learners have about particular words. (56 references)…