This article details the challenges and best practices of evaluating second language learners for placement into postsecondary Spanish language courses. The literature on testing for placement purposes in second language acquisition and language testing provides a great deal of insight, but language programs must make many decisions as well that…

Recent literature in the field of L2 vocabulary assessment has advocated for the development of written receptive vocabulary tests such as Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs) that use: (a) meaning-recall item formats, (b) a minimum of 40 item counts per 1,000-frequency band to improve level estimates, and (c) lemmas (not word-families) as the lexical…

Foreign language aptitude is defined as one's potential to learn a second language. A language learner with higher aptitude is predicted to learn more, faster, and reach a higher level of proficiency. If this is the case, one way to validate the construct of aptitude and its measure is to conduct a validation study in which measures of aptitude is…

For young Spanish-speaking children entering U. S. schools, it is imperative that educators foster growth in the home language and in the language of instruction to the fullest extent possible. Monitoring language development over time is crucial for promoting language development because it allows educators to individualize student instruction.…

Proficiency is a key variable in late second language (L2) learning, but one that is undermeasured in current research. This study investigates whether L2 oral proficiency can be quickly and reliably assessed via the Spanish "elicited imitation task" (EIT; Ortega, Iwashita, Rabie, & Norris, 1999). Thirty-seven L2 learners of Spanish…

The present study examined the reliability of the reading, listening, speaking, and writing section scores for the TOEFL iBT® test and their interrelationship in order to collect empirical evidence to support, respectively, the "generalization" inference and the "explanation" inference in the TOEFL iBT validity argument…

In response to the need for examples of test validation from which everyday language programs can benefit, this paper reports on a study that used Bachman's (2005) assessment use argument (AUA) framework to examine evidence to support claims made about the intended interpretations and uses of scores based on a new web-based Spanish language…

While studies have been done to rate the validity and reliability of the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and Oral Proficiency Interview-Computer (OPIc) independently, a limited amount of research has analyzed the interexam reliability of these tests, and studies have yet to be conducted comparing the results of Spanish language learners who take…

This study investigates whether raters' knowledge of test takers' first language (L1) affects how the raters orient themselves to the task of rating oral speech. The authors qualitatively investigated the effects of accent familiarity on raters' score assignment processes. Twenty-six trained raters with a second language of Mandarin Chinese,…

Implicit and explicit knowledge of the second language (L2) are two central constructs in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in obtaining valid and reliable measures of L2 learners' implicit and explicit knowledge (e.g., Bowles, 2011; R. Ellis, 2005). The purpose of the present study…

In this study, we describe two studies used to select appropriate assessments to measure phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, and fluency in the Spanish language for students receiving literacy instruction in Spanish. We first describe two studies in which we use linear regression and correlations to examine the appropriateness of different…

Immigrant populations are growing and permanently changing the demographic profile of the United States. Diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds are manifested in the families in each community, imposing demands and challenges to agencies that provide services to them. A large population of immigrant families, especially first and second…

This study investigates the value of reporting the reading, listening, speaking, and writing section scores for the "TOEFL iBT"® test, focusing on 4 related aspects of the psychometric quality of the TOEFL iBT section scores: reliability of the section scores, dimensionality of the test, presence of distinct score profiles, and the…

This study examined the second language (L2) development of adult learners of Spanish at three levels of proficiency during and after a semester of instruction. A fundamental goal was to identify cognitive and psychosocial individual differences (IDs) that can explain between-learner variation over time in order to expand our understanding of the…

A study determining that a single test incorporating several special features can adequately place and evaluate native speakers and nonnative learners of Spanish is described. The description of native speaker proficiency is also refined. (MSE)