A fundamental challenge to understanding effects of foreign language anxiety on the foreign language learning lies in implementing reliable and valid measures. Considering importance of measurement bias and widespread usage of the foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS) in education, the aim of the current study was to detect differential…

Parametric analyses such as t tests and ANOVAs are the norm--if not the default--statistical tests found in quantitative applied linguistics research (Gass 2009). Applied statisticians and one applied linguist (Larson-Hall 2010, 2012; Larson-Hall and Herrington 2010), however, have argued that this approach may not be appropriate for small samples…

This article reviews all (quasi)experimental studies appearing in the first 19 volumes (1997-2015) of "Language Teaching Research" (LTR). Specifically, it provides an overview of how statistical analyses were conducted in these studies and of how the analyses were reported. The overall conclusion is that there has been a tight adherence…

This paper describes how a Many Faceted Rasch Measurement (MFRM) approach can be applied to performance assessment focusing on rater analysis. The article provides an introduction to MFRM, a description of MFRM analysis procedures, and an example to illustrate how to examine the effects of various sources of variability on test takers' performance…

I discuss three common practices that obfuscate or invalidate the statistical analysis of randomized controlled interventions in applied linguistics. These are (a) checking whether randomization produced groups that are balanced on a number of possibly relevant covariates, (b) using repeated measures ANOVA to analyze pretest-posttest designs, and…

This study sought to examine the development of paragraph writing skills of 116 English as a second language university students over the course of 12 weeks and the relationship between the linguistic features of students' written texts as measured by Coh-Metrix--a computational system for estimating textual features such as cohesion and…

Language learners' productive role in teaching and learning processes has recently been the focus of attention. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the effect of oral vs. written output-based instruction on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' vocabulary learning with a focus on reflective vs. impulsive learning styles. To this…

Self-assessment has been used to assess second language proficiency; however, as sources of measurement errors vary, they may threaten the validity and reliability of the tools. The present paper investigated the role of experiences in using Japanese as a second language in the naturalistic acquisition context on the accuracy of the…

An important gap in the field of second language vocabulary assessment concerns the lack of validated tests measuring aural vocabulary knowledge. The primary purpose of this study is to introduce and provide preliminary validity evidence for the Listening Vocabulary Levels Test (LVLT), which has been designed as a diagnostic tool to measure…

The study scrutinized the probable interaction between using cognitive test-taking strategies, reading proficiency, and reading comprehension test performance of Iranian postgraduate students, who studied English as a foreign language. The study also probed the extent to which the participants' test performance was related to the use of certain…

This study assessed the factor structure of the LanguEdge™ test and the invariance of its factors across language groups. Confirmatory factor analyses of individual tasks and subsets of items in the four sections of the test, Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing, was carried out for Arabic-, Chinese-, and Spanish-speaking test takers. Two…