This issue of the National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education (NCLE) newsletter includes an article titled "Assessment and Accountability: What Do We Know and Where Are We Going?" and a profile of Inaam Mansoor, director of the Arlington Education and Employment Program (REEP) in Arlington, Virginia. Also included are resource updates, news…

Summarizes Robert Lado's ideas on language testing and the study of linguistics. (DS)

Provides examples of listening comprehension tests used in England which take into account communicative skill testing. (AM)

It is shown that drilling tends to become contaminated with elements of testing. The two activities are defined, and suggestions are given for designing drills free of testing. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Reviews assumptions underlying approaches to research into speaking task difficulty and questions the view that test scores always vary with task conditions or discourse variation. Offers a new approach to defining task difficulty in terms of the interaction between pragmatic task features and first language cultural background. Results of a study…

Based on the observation that scale-level methods are sometimes exclusively used to investigate measurement invariance for test translation, describes results of a simulation study investigating whether item-level differential item functioning (DIF) manifests itself in scale-level analyses such as single and multigroup factor analyses and per…

Discusses the Test for Creative Thinking--Drawing Production (TCT-DP), a creativity test suitable for most age and ability groups. Explores the possibility of implementing TCT-DP among kindergarten children in Korea. Results from a TCT-DP field study on 1366 Korean preschool children are comparable to those found in previously reported German…

Discusses steps taken to attain cultural relevance and appropriateness in the reading literacy construct, and in the stimulus materials and items that operationalize it. Explains the influence of multilingual considerations on the development of the reading literacy assessment instrument and notes psychometric procedures used to maximize the…

Discusses problems in task-based language assessment, including the definition and sampling of tasks, generalizations across tasks, interpretations about broad ability and language use domains, and the notion of task difficulty. (Author/VWL)

Describes a test aimed at investigating the rule knowledge stored in foreign-language learners heads and at determining the relationship between rule knowledge and second-language performance. (CK)

Discusses the purpose of a French-as-a-Second-Language (FSL) placement test designed for students enrolling in FSL at the postsecondary level. The test measures proficiency level in French and consists of three parts: comprehension of a short paragraph, selection of the appropriate statement in a situation, and a fill-in-the-gap part. (JL)

Reviews research that sheds light on the comparability of Oral Proficiency Interview and the Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview. Suggestions are provided for further research. (16 references) (VWL)