Language assessment literacy has gained recent attention in the field of language testing, particularly on teachers' profile. However, the literature on LAL is limited regarding teachers' perceptions of language assessment courses. In this paper, we used a case study method to characterize the perceptions of eighteen English language teachers into…

Researchers commonly estimate the prevalence of nativelikeness among second-language learners by assessing how many of them perform similarly to a sample of native speakers on one or several linguistic tasks. Even when the native (L1) samples and second-language (L2) samples are comparable in terms of age, socio-economic status, educational…

Dynamic assessment is a dialectic procedure requiring teachers to assess learners' progress by paying attention to students' errors while providing graduated prompts to help them fix them. Although previous studies have focused on the teachers' competence in carrying out the dynamic assessment, this case study explores the dynamic assessment…

This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…

This study used think-aloud protocols to compare essay-rating processes across holistic and analytic rating scales in the context of China's College English Test Band 6 (CET-6). A group of 9 experienced CET-6 raters scored the same batch of 10 CET-6 essays produced in an operational CET-6 administration twice, using both the CET-6 holistic…

Dynamic assessment research, with its roots in Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, is still in its infancy (Lantolf and Poehner, 2004; Poehner, 2008). It came to the attention of scholars to break away from a static, incomplete and unfair form of assessment to the dynamic form of assessment in order to more comprehensively uncover learners'…

This paper aims to investigate the efficacy of two commonly used techniques of feedback in teaching writing: teachers' feedback and peers' feedback in the Saudi educational context. The study was comprised of 132 Saudi EFL students enrolled at the Department of English in the University of Hai'l. The data collection was carried out through a…

Questions the effectiveness of contrastive linguistics in measuring the difference between two languages and therefore in predicting the ease or difficulty of acquisition from one to the other. The simplicity of a language is not objectively quantifiable since it is measured as relative to other languages. (Text is in French.) (TL)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of error analysis in specifying and planning remedial treatment in second language learning. Part 1 discusses situations that demand remedial action. This is a quantitative assessment that requires measurement of the varying degrees of disparity between the learner's knowledge and the demands of the…

A discussion of dictionaries and their use for second language (L2) learning suggests that lack of computerized modern language corpora can adversely affect bilingual dictionaries, commonly used by L2 learners, and shows how use of such corpora has benefitted two contemporary monolingual L2 learner dictionaries (1995 editions of the Longman…

This paper reports on the development of an error-coding instrument and a computerized continuous feedback system for the diagnostic evaluation and remedial treatment of unstructured second-language performances and the use of such a system in an instructional setting. The system does the following: it allows quick, objective, accurate, and…