Compares Japanese women's (N=159) reading comprehension of two original passages in English written for second-language consumers. Results supported the hypothesis that minor changes for unfamiliar cultural elements would result in a significantly better performance on cloze tests. (Author/CB)

The study investigated the alternate forms reliability of four type-token ratios (TTRs) of oral language samples obtained from 52 elementary school children. Findings indicated that TTRs were not comparable when calculated for different sample sizes and that they were not reliable measures of the language performance of this population. (Author/DB)

Describes an experiment with eight Micro-Artificial Languages (MALs) that tested the ability of 409 secondary children learning foreign languages to extrapolate from word order in a verb phrase to word orders in prepositional and noun phrases. Results showed most learners (N=340) to be consistent in ascribing word order and most (N=321) succeeded…

Reviews a volume of descriptive and evaluative information on 47 commercially available English language proficiency tests used in North America, Great Britain, and Australia. The book includes discussions of uses and misuses of tests, and overviews of English as second language testing in North America and Great Britain. (SV)

The Token Test for Children was given in both synthesized-speech and natural-speech versions to 11 language impaired children (aged 8-10 years) and to 11 control subjects. Scores of the impaired children on the synthesized version were significantly lower than the synthesized-speech scores of the control group or of their own scores on the…

Responds to criticism against the use of the oral proficiency interview for foreign language testing through examination of the concept of logic and language testing, components of speaking ability, and the limits of linguistic theory. (20 references) (CB)

Reports on an international project's progress in revising the English Language Testing Service test, jointly produced and administered by the British Council and the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate. The rationale for the project's using new approaches to content validation of the revised test is explored. (Author/CB)

A study with 10 developmentally delayed children between the ages of 52 and 80 months found that test-retest samples resulted in greater variability for lexical and morphological measurements than split-half transcripts. It was also found that 50-utterance sample segments contained 70-80 percent of the lexical information found in 100-utterance…

The results of a behavioral anchoring analysis of student performance on three English as a second language reading comprehension tests indicated that, for each of three proficiency levels, the higher ability students could comprehend questions with implicit information sources. All students showed competence with linguistic structures that…

Describes and evaluates the Primary and Intermediate versions of the Test of Language Development-2 (TOLD-2). Concludes that TOLD-2 tests should be used only as screening instruments, and suggests that poor performance on the TOLD-2 be followed with naturalistic language sampling and analysis. (MM)

First-graders' responses to a battery assessing phonemic awareness, syntactic awareness, receptive vocabulary, word decoding ability, and reading comprehension ability revealed strong zero-order correlations among all the variables, although analysis revealed that metalinguistic ability did not contribute to the prediction of early reading…

This study investigated the validity of having English-as-a-Second-Language test-takers select from a checklist the strategies they believe they use when answering multiple choice reading comprehension questions. Results suggest that the self-report checklist discussed above exercised to an unknown extent an instrument effect on the readers who…

This article presents the goals, design, and pilot-testing results of a new oral interview procedure for eliciting a representative sample of spontaneous Japanese language abilities from children aged 5 through 10. Pilot results show that the procedure elicits a language sample that is superior in quality and quantity to other existing Japanese…

Addresses the effectiveness of the oral proficiency interview in assessing foreign language skills, responding to arguments regarding the logic of the interview method, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines and levels of proficiency, and the relationship between linguistic knowledge and the bases of…

The results of this study indicate that a well-designed, on-campus interview conducted by experienced English-as-a-Second-Language teachers who are given structured training in evaluating oral proficiency can be used as an alternative instrument if a standardized test like the Test of Spoken English (TSE) is not readily available. (24 references)…