Using a new method, 48 children in an elementary school in Rome, Italy, were taught a foreign language (26 English, 22 German) and tested after three years. The authors attempt to explain the variation in test results in terms of the students' attention, memory, and phonetic discrimination. (CFM)

Discusses the issue of oral communication tests through an account of an oral test administered to nearly 1,000 students at Yarmouk University Language Center. The ways in which the institution attempted to overcome problems in the oral test's feasibility, validity, and reliability are presented. (Author/CB)

Speech samples of Chinese scientists studying in an intensive English-for-science-and-technology program were evaluated by native English-speaking professional peers. Such evaluation techniques could be used by other languages for specific purposes programs. (Author/LMO)

Limited-English-speaking students (N=198), taking college admissions tests, were studied in terms of reading, writing, and listening test scores and their university performance (grade point average, dropped classes, etc.). Results indicate that the English language test scores are not always related to the students' academic achievement. (CB)

Reviews a secondary school version of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) that focuses on two of the primary language skills: listening and reading. Subtest includes a variety of tasks measuring semantic, syntactic, and higher-level reading comprehension abilities. (NKA)

To estimate reading difficulty of items on a sentence repetition task, a study had 50 adult English as a second language (ESL) students repeat each of 26 sentences immediately after two presentations. High-difficulty items were derivationally more complex than low-difficulty items, and the most difficult items involved the processing of…

The development of an oral language proficiency rating scale for use in evaluating New Brunswick's junior and senior high school students' core French program achievement is described and discussed. (MSE)

An oral language test administered at the end of a four-year program combining business administration and French is described. The test consists of the formal presentation of a report including numbers, graphics, and text, a discussion of a theoretical issue, and interview. (MSE)

Reviews earlier studies of the effect of student background knowledge on reading comprehension and then reports on a third investigation into the same effect. Concludes that the test results obtained in the study can be accounted for in terms of an interaction between background knowledge and linguistic proficiency. (Author/SED)

Discusses the development of a communicative language testing unit for grade nine French immersion students. The interlocking of teaching and testing is suggested, by preparing a potential testing unit for every communicative, theme-oriented curriculum teaching unit, thus aiming toward goals compatible with both teacher and student. (SL)

Discusses Michael Canale's paper, "Considerations in the Testing of Reading and Listening Proficiency," focusing on the third section, "Suggestions for improvements in receptive language testing." Considers such areas as: (1) level descriptions for academic use, (2) item and item types, and (3) validation. (SED)

Describes a rating scale designed to provide a valid and practical evaluation instrument for testing communicative competence in French. Evidence from the application of this scale to actual test data and an analysis of its validation by means of native speaker judgments show that this method of evaluating student performance is effective. (SL)

An examination of measures currently used to assess degree of bilingualism in individuals looks at the problems inherent in them, ideal measures, and how to use available measures. It is suggested that definition of bilinguality is a central cause for measurement problems, since a bilingual is assumed to be the sum of two monolinguals, without…

This highly technical, data-rich paper examines how the Many-Facet Rasch Measurement Model can be applied to communicative language test data analyses and how beneficial the model is to language teachers. The results for a 20-item conversational response test and a 15-item sociolinguistic test of oral communication ability in English for 30…

The differences between the testing practices at the University General Requirements Unit (UGRU) of United Arab Emirates University and the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) were studied, focusing on the differences in styles of grading written English examinations. The UGRU always uses norm- referenced testing in their 1-year foundations…