This paper outlines the Educational Testing Service (ETS) plan for developing instruments and procedures for evaluating Peace Corps Trainees' and Peace Corps Volunteers' competence in host country languages at various stages of training or in-country service. The goals of such an evaluation program are first stated. and then a critique of the…

The grades which foreign students receive are not always based on the same criteria as the grades assigned to native American students. The use of standardized test scores provides a common data base from which to evaluate the relative proficiency level of foreign students. This study examines the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and…

Sixty-four existing motion picture tests are listed and briefly described. Included are tests of perception, memory, abstract reasoning, attention span, and language. (RC)

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) was administered to 26 deaf students (approximately 18 years of age) to determine (1) whether deaf children of deaf parents (DP), as users of American Sign Language and as possessors of a shared code, would outperform deaf children of hearing parents (HP); (2) whether the performance of DP…

Three studies were conducted concerning the skills of deaf postsecondary students in recognizing and manipulating linguistic structures in written language. The first study was a pilot study dealing with the deaf student's ability to identify structural units in written language. The second two studies, concerning the cloze procedure, examined the…

THE HYPOTHESIS THAT TYPEWRITING INSTRUCTION COULD BE USED AS AN AID TO THE LEARNING OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE WAS TESTED. STUDENTS WERE ASSIGNED TO EXPERIMENTAL AND CONTROL GROUPS, MATCHED ON THE BASIS OF PRECOURSE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEST SCORES AND SUCH OTHER FACTORS AS NATIVE LANGUAGE. BOTH GROUPS COMPLETED THE REGULAR 12-WEEK, ENGLISH…

AN ANALYSIS OF THE PERFORMANCE OF FIRST-SEMESTER COLLEGE STUDENTS ON A MULTIPLE-CHOICE TEST OF PROFICIENCY IN GERMAN GRAMMAR REVEALED A CURIOUS PATTERN. LOW SCORING STUDENTS TRIED TO ESTABLISH A CORRELATION BETWEEN THE DETERMINER AND THE WORD PRECEDING IT, APPARENTLY BY MATCHING SIMILAR OR PARALLEL FINAL VOWELS OR CONSONANTS WITH INFLECTED ENDINGS…

Discussed are the construction and scoring of elicited imitation tasks, a sentence repetition procedure which can be used to obtain information about a child's syntactic abilities. (LS)

A test was administered to 200 children (ages 6-15) who were learning ESL to study the relationship between age and the rate of learning. The results indicated that while the rate of learning English as a second language changes with age, the order of acquisition remains constant. (MS)

Reports on a study to determine whether students of Chinese read faster when the text is written in characters than when written in Romanization. Results show reading efficiency as determined by speed and errors in translation to be greater with Romanization, while there is more overall accuracy with characters. (CLK)

Examines the hypothesis that certain errors occurring in oral foreign language tests are due to the recurrence of phonological features both in the questions and in the answer. (AM)

A study was conducted at Nanyang University in Singapore with Chinese-educated students who supposedly received 12 years of instruction in English but who were still deficient in the language. Comprehension of four different English accents were tested, and two tests of measuring aural comprehension were compared. (SW)

This summary of two dissertations involves a comparison of two procedures for measuring speaking and writing proficiency in French and German. Both studies used the MLA Cooperative Foreign Language Proficiency Tests. Findings indicated a strong relationship between native-rater speaking scores and scores on the MLA speaking test. (CHK)

Describes the rationale and design of the Zepeda/Saldate Spanish Language Proficiency Exam developed at the University of Arizona for use in evaluating the language proficiency of applicants for bilingual/bicultural teacher education programs. (JG)

The author responds to W. Arndt's and M. Byrne's criticisms of the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test (NSST), a test for assessing receptive and expressive grammar in young children. (SBH)