Anthony Bruton comments on Brown and Hudson's article "The Alternatives in Language Assessment," (v32 n4 Win 1998). Raises questions about some of their definitions and categories and suggests additional items that need to be considered by test takers. Brown and Hudson reply with clarifications of terms and definition of the scope of their paper.…

Addresses the question of whether there are different characteristics and language performance conditions (involving assumed different levels of cognitive demand) associated with different levels of fluency, complexity, or accuracy in test candidate responses. Participants were pre-university students taking English courses. (Author/VWL)

This paper reports early findings from a wider study that sought to test the hypothesis that differences in language use exist between children who have a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and their non-ADHD peers. Twenty-two, 8 to 12 year-old children (11 with a diagnosis of ADHD and 11 matched peers) comprised the…

Background: We investigated the aetiology of language impairment in 579 four-year-old twins with low language performance and their co-twins, members of 160 MZ twin pairs, 131 same-sex DZ pairs and 102 opposite-sex DZ pairs. Methods: Language impairment in 4-year-olds was defined by scores below the 15th percentile on a general factor derived from…

In 1993, the language section of the Swedish Migration Board initiated the production of documents they called "language analyses" to aid in the processing of asylum seekers. Today, 11 years later, 2 privately owned companies in Stockholm produce these documents. These companies have produced language analyses not only for the Swedish…

We assessed six multilingual subjects by functional MRI using a Noun Verb Generation task in four different languages. We hypothesised that the degree of proficiency in each language would be related to the extent of functional activity measured in a region of interest analysis. Proficiency in each language was quantified using two…

Recent articles in this journal (Foot 1999; Saville and Hargreaves 1999) have focused on the advantages and disadvantages of the paired format of the Cambridge Speaking Tests. This article aims to contribute to the debate by considering how the pairing of candidates may impact upon the language sample produced and could affect the assessment…

The ACTFL oral proficiency interview (OPI) and the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale provide both a testing method and a set of rating factors for evaluating proficiency. Both are closely related to actual language tasks identified as critical for government employees. Over time, the scale has been expanded to include four skills, a…

This study examined whether language deficits persist even in children with optimal outcomes. We examined a group of children with prior diagnoses on the autism spectrum who had IQs in the normal range, were in age-appropriate mainstream classes, and had improved to such an extent that they were considered to be functioning at the level of their…

This empirical study of the effects of grammar instruction was conducted at a college-prep, private school on 70 participants in grades seven through twelve. The dependent variable was the number of correct items over the forms from a pre-test, post-test, and delayed-post-test. Chi-square was used to find if there was a significant difference…

This analysis evaluates the receptive tests of targeted lexical knowledge in the written medium, which are typically used in empirical research into lexical acquisition from reading foreign/second language texts. Apart from the types of second language cues or prompts, and the language of the responses, the main issues revolve around: (a) the…

Reynolds and Nicolson ("Dyslexia," 2007; 13: 78-96) claim to show that the "dyslexia dyspraxia attention-deficit treatment" (DDAT) benefits children with reading difficulties. However, Rack, Snowling, Hulme, and Gibbs ("Dyslexia," 2007; 13: 97-104) argue that because this study did not include an untrained control group then "all that needs to be…

This article examines the effects of synonymy (i.e., learning words with and without high-frequency synonyms that were known to the learners) on word knowledge in a study of 84 Japanese students learning English. It employed 10 tests measuring 5 aspects of word knowledge (orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic association, meaning and…

Two kinds of scoring templates were empirically derived from summaries written by experts and students to evaluate the quality of summaries written by the students. This paper reports students' attitudes towards the use of the two templates and its differential statistical effects on the judgment of students' summarization performance. It was…

The possibility of teaching communication strategies and the feasibility of incorporating them into school syllabi have been a controversial issue. In the current study, 60 Iranian students were divided into two thirty-member classes; then two different textbooks, one with specific CS and the other without them, were chosen to be taught in the…