This reflective action research documents the mutual learning experiences of three education stakeholders as they construct their language assessment literacy (LAL). A?teacher educator, an inservice teacher, and a preservice teacher were the three stakeholders who took part in a project on language assessment development for ESOL students at a…

For elementary learners of Japanese, one of the main difficulties in reading is to distinguish words written in kana. This paper reports on a survey of elementary level learners with two different levels of proficiency to investigate the effectiveness of Japanese graded readers with parts of speech color-coded to distinguish nouns, verbs,…

A gloss refers to a short definition or explanation of the meaning of a word in a text that can assist learners in reading comprehension and vocabulary learning. This study aims to investigate how glosses in English academic texts affect the reading behaviour of ESL undergraduates while reading is taking place. In addition, it also examines the…

This two-phased study explored a corpus-driven, curriculum-based approach to assessing proficiency development of Mandarin Chinese in US universities. In Phase I, we developed an elicited imitation (EI) test based on the Chinese curriculum at a large US university. This test demonstrated higher psychometric qualities to (1) place L2 learners into…

Internationally educated nurses' (IENs) English language proficiency is critical to professional licensure as communication is a key competency for safe practice. The Canadian English Language Benchmark Assessment for Nurses (CELBAN) is Canada's only Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB) referenced examination used in the context of healthcare…

Computer-based, pop-up glossaries are perhaps the most promising accommodation aimed at mitigating the influence of linguistic structure and cultural bias on the performance of English Learner (EL) students on statewide assessments. To date, there is no established procedure for identifying the words that require a glossary for EL students that is…

This contribution reports on the developing and piloting of a computer-based version of the test of English as a foreign language produced by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), where it is currently used for the admission of international students and the subsequent evaluation of their language progress. Among other benefits,…

Scholars have long recognized the Washback effect of English language tests on English teaching inside the classroom. However, the lack of scholarly reports in this area is also nonnegligible. Therefore, the present study intends to review some empirical researches that focus on the washback of some English language tests on different aspects of…

There is growing interest in using comparative judgement to assess student work as an alternative to traditional marking. Comparative judgement requires no rubrics and is instead grounded in experts making pairwise judgements about the relative 'quality' of students' work according to a high level criterion. The resulting decision data are fitted…

Many universities in Korea have implemented teaching TOEIC based courses in their core curriculums as a result of the increased popularity of the TOEIC test. With the assumption that reading and listening scores are inter-related with each other, a focus of this study is to find the distribution patterns of the reading comprehension (RC) and the…

This study examines the washback effects of a national test in Swedish at upper secondary schools. The test consists of three parts--reading, writing and speaking--and this study specifically focuses on the washback effects in relation to Stephen Ball's theory of policy enactment. The study draws on qualitative data from a total of 21 interviews…

In view of the ubiquitous increase in the use of C-tests, which are almost unanimously believed to measure general language proficiency, this study investigates whether the aspects of language proficiency tapped into by the C-test format are the same when the test is taken by a learner population other than that of foreign language learners.…

A large body of evidence shows an animacy effect on memory in that animate entities are better remembered than inanimate ones. Yet, the reason for this mnemonic prioritization remains unclear. In the survival processing literature, the assumption that richness of encoding is responsible for adaptive memory benefits has received substantial…

The authors describe Monster, P.I., which is an app-based, gamified assessment that measures language skills (knowledge of morphology, vocabulary, and syntax) of students in grades 5-8 and provides teachers with interpretable score reports to drive instruction that improves vocabulary, reading, and writing ability. Specifically, the authors…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine narrative language samples of Spanish-speaking preschoolers to analyze changes in microstructural and macrostructural skills in their first language (L1) from fall to spring, relationships between narrative and vocabulary skills in L1, and the extent to which fall skills predict spring performance.…