The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), with its illustrative scales and salient features of spoken language at the reference levels, is widely used as the base for rating scales for performance testing. If practitioners want to measure and report even small gains in proficiency, they need to adapt the descriptors to their local context…

The TOEFL iBT test was introduced in 2005 to better reflect the language demands of real-life academic tasks than did previous versions of the test. The task-based design of the test was intended to support the interpretation of its scores as a trustworthy measure of international students' ability to use English in an academic environment. Until…

This paper will deal, firstly, with the South African context, that cries out for attention to responsible language assessment. The renewed interest in language testing in South Africa is well illustrated in assessments of language ability for educational purposes generally, and more specifically in the assessment of academic literacy. Secondly,…

The Duolingo English Test (DET) is a computer adaptive test of English proficiency that is increasingly used for English-medium university admissions purposes. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, test centers were shut down in many countries, and major tests including the TOEFL iBT and IELTS could not be administered. The DET is an "at…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

This study investigates the relationship between performances on the speaking component of the TOEFL iBTTM with performances on academic oral assessment tasks. For the academic tasks, we recorded and transcribed the performances of five local and five high-achieving international undergraduate students on oral assessment tasks in core first-year…

This study determines the fine-grained bottom-up linguistic features involved in successful second language (L2) English academic group oral tutorial discussion through the use of a spoken learner corpus composed of more than 20 hrs of L2 production. Student performances were graded by teacher-raters using a can-do rating scale, which assessed…