This study discusses the characteristics of test specifications (specs) and item writer guidelines (IWGs), their role in item development of English as a Second Language (ESL) reading tests, and the use of the CEFR for specs development. This mixed-method study analyzed specs, IWGs, tests, and the Pearson Test of English General test statistics.…

Teacher support, as an essential type of social support and an important antecedent of many key outcomes in L2 learning, can significantly contribute to foreign language achievement. Although teacher support has received considerable attention in education and educational psychology, it has drawn scanty attention in foreign language and applied…

Teacher agency is a pivotal element of professionalism and second/foreign language (L2) education. However, its role in L2 assessment has remained under-researched. Part of this negligence is due to the absence of a validated questionnaire to measure the construct and its underlying components. To address this gap, drawing on the ecological…

The credibility of conclusions arrived at in quantitative research depends, to a large extent, on the quality of data collection instruments used to quantify language and non-language constructs. Despite this, research into data collection instruments used in Applied Linguistics and particularly in the thesis genre remains limited. This study…

As testing involves various aspects of education as well as the ones who are involved like instructors, students, managers, teacher trainers, testers, and decision-makers, it comes to be highly crucial to develop ethical tests. In addition, as some methods of testing are more favored and practiced compared to others without considering the ethical…

The idea of sources other than the test-takers' knowledge leading to different results on high-stakes tests was the motif based on which the present investigation was initiated on the probable sources of unreliability of a test. For this purpose, the researchers went through a thorough literature review with the aim to identify the issues to be…

Background: Inadequacy of authority-based defensive teaching and summative and product-based evaluation such as certification and observation measures in providing information about the actual teaching teachers do was an inspiration in this study to design an inventory for formative and process-based evaluation of teacher competences. This study…