A PENCIL-AND-PAPER TEST WAS CONSTRUCTED TO STUDY DEAF CHILDREN'S LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE (ABILITY TO PRODUCE AND COMPREHEND THE GRAMMATICAL SENTENCES COMPRISING A LANGUAGE). THE TEST WAS TO REFLECT LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF A CHILD'S BEHAVIOR, BUT NOT EXTRALINGUISTIC ASPECTS SUCH AS READING AND WRITING. IT CONSISTED OF FIVE SUBTESTS--(1) REPETITION OF…

Intended for teachers of elementary age hearing impaired students, the article describes the Test of Receptive Language Ability and the Test of Expressive Language Ability. (SBH)

This study inquired into the effect of testing on foreign language learning. The main question was: Do tests of communicative proficiency, when administered in lieu of currently prevailing discrete-point item tests, further the student's spontaneous communicative ability? Discussion of results indicates uses for both types of tests. (CHK)

To assess a child's communicative ability, it is important to develop not only measures of his understanding of vocabulary, but of his understanding of the syntax of language: patterns of words, regularities, and relationships of words in a sentence. Controlled test situations should be established in which the child receives minimal cues from the…

Assistance in this study was provided by the Testing and Certification Division of the English Language Institute. (VM)

Develops and validates a new language aptitude battery to be used for the selection of military personnel for training at the Defense Language Institute which offers over 50 foreign language courses. (RC)

The Boehm Test of Basic Concepts was translated into Navajo to investigate whether an English test can be translated into Navajo in a form suitable for assessing the language development of K-2 level Navajos. Differences were in: syntactic difficulty, organization of experience into concepts, accidental similarity of words, ranges of meaning. (SCC)

The development, design, and purposes of these advanced proficiency tests are discussed, along with brief descriptions of their seven component parts--listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, applied linguistics, civilization and culture, and professional preparation. Some of the research inspired by the tests is identified. (AF)

This study represents several years' work on devising tests to measure children's relative proficiency in two languages or speech varieties. A preliminary oral proficiency test in English and Spanish was administered to 45 bilingual students, of whom 41 took both versions. On the basis of difficulty and significant tendencies, 32 items were…

This is a preliminary report concerning the development of tests which measure the linguistic ability in Spanish of English students at the beginning of their post A-level courses. The Palspan (Post A-level Spanish project) pilot test battery is comprised of five sub-tests of between 45 and 90 minutes in length which test for speaking, listening,…

Early language aptitude tests were generally tests of ability in English or work-sample tests in the target language or an artificial language. Recent work has involved various correlational studies and factor analyses to determine what factors correlate most with success in foreign language learning. Approaches include: (1) correlations of…