Essay tests are widely used to assess ESL/EFL learners' writing abilities for instructional, administrative, and research purposes. Relevant literature was searched to identify 70 empirical studies on ESL/EFL essay tests. The majority of these studies examined task, essay, and rater effects on essay rating and scores. Less attention has been given…

Presents a summary outline of an approach to oral testing used in the past two years with groups of students completing Fernand Marty's "Active French." (Author/PP)

Describes underlying concepts and current issues in communicative testing and illustrates application of these ideas by examining theoretical constructs, issues, and work done so far in relation to second language testing. (Author/BK)

Advocates the study of poetry in FL classes and suggests methods by which students could be tested on poetry. (KM)

Describes development of testing program to evaluate listening comprehension in second language classes. Suggests it is necessary to incorporate the aural component into classroom activities to a greater degree. Time and effort must be spent in developing the ability to understand and process the spoken word. (Author/BK)

Paper delivered at an in-service training session for grade 6 French teachers at North York, Ontario, Canada. (DS)

The present study is a continuation of the work presented in the 2001 article by Greidanus and Nienhuis. In the current study, we also examine the quality of word knowledge among advanced learners of French as a second language (L2) by means of a word associates test. We studied the development of word knowledge among six groups of…

Examines the hypothesis that certain errors occurring in oral foreign language tests are due to the recurrence of phonological features both in the questions and in the answer. (AM)

Speech presented at the Sixth Annual Whitewater Language Conference, Whitewater, Wisconsin, March 1970. Many of the ideas presented have more relevance for the United States than Canada. (DS)

Suggests that second language learners could benefit from being made aware of the semantic components that unify verbs that display a certain syntactic behavior and the semantic components that exclude other verbs from participating in this behavior. Findings of a study in which production and judgment data on the behavior of "change of state" and…

Information in published articles on communicative testing is examined and discussed from the point of view of a classroom teacher. The administrability, reliability, and validity of communicative language testing are highlighted. (MSE)

Recent initiatives in second language testing theory, practice, and research are reviewed, including test specificity, relevance, accuracy, multidimensional assessment, and the test's link to instruction, and their relevance to language teaching is discussed. Special attention is given to Canadian contributions to the field. (63 references)…

Discusses the concept of communicative competence in second language learning and various models for testing this skill. (AM)