With the present study I investigated the sources of score variance and dependability in a local oral English proficiency test for potential international teaching assistants (ITAs) across four first language (L1) groups, and suggested alternative test designs. Using generalizability theory, I examined the relative importance of L1s (i.e., Indian,…

Measuring language dominance, broadly defined as the relative strength of each of a bilingual's two languages, remains a crucial methodological issue in bilingualism research. While various methods have been proposed, the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) has been one of the most widely used tools for measuring language dominance. While previous…

This study examines how foreign language anxiety (FLA) and proficiency relate to second language (L2) utterance fluency during a final oral exam. Thirty-eight learners of Spanish (L1 English) completed unplanned narratives that were coded for ratio and length of pauses between and within Analysis of Speech Units, mean length of run, phonation-time…

Based on evidence that listeners may favor certain foreign accents over others (Gass & Varonis, 1984; Major, Fitzmaurice, Bunta, & Balasubramanian, 2002; Tauroza & Luk, 1997) and that language-test raters may better comprehend and/or rate the speech of test takers whose native languages (L1s) are more familiar on some level (Carey,…