The construction of tests of oral competence in a foreign language requires consideration of several factors. The face validity of the test, or the degree to which students feel they are performing a real communicative act, is illustrated with a number of model testing situations. Content validity, or the ability of a test to measure what has been…

English-speaking children and adults who were learning Dutch at school and at work, without signigicant amounts of foreign language instruction, were tested at five-month intervals during their first year in Holland. The test battery included tests for active and passive control of phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. Significant…

Factors responsible for the inadequate preparation for college Russian courses of many high school trained students of Russian are identified, and remedies are suggested. Attention is given to common deficiencies in high school training, minimum requirements for advanced placement, placement tests, the need to establish a standard program, and…

There is a lack of adequate measurement techniques for testing language proficiency. Researchers compose specific tests for a certain task, but these have only limited general applicability. Often multiple-choice, true-false or fill-in-the-blank tests are used, but these rely heavily on written language and are inadequate for those with poor…

The report gives the results of the 1974 joint student selection entrance test for English, administered simultaneously at the universities of Joensuu, Jyvaskyla and Turku. The test battery comprised 309 multiple-choice items and was completed by 843 candidates. Hirvonen's paper examines problems of student selection and theoretical aspects of…

The study reports the results of the analysis of Comprehension-Production Test in the kindergarten of two bilingual schools (L-1 English/L-2 French, L-1 Spanish/L-2 English) in the San Francisco Bay area. The tests used covered 14 formal contrasts of English. Parallel tests for Spanish and French were developed by translating the English test.…

Some validity criteria were applied to the language proficiency measures used by the British Council, particularly the "Davies Test." Five types of test validity are identified: construct validity; content validity; concurrent validity compared with another test; prediction validity; and face, or apparent, validity. Foreign students…

Listening comprehension and reading comprehension editions of an experimental test were devised to provide equivalent measures from which raw scores would be directly comparable. The test was designed for a four-place multiple-choice category format. Forms A and B were administered on a rotation basis for the study. The testing population…

The Commander Naval Amphibious School is responsible for the Vietnamese language training of certain naval officer and enlisted personnel who are enroute to assignments in Vietnam. Courses of two and six weeks are offered; they were designed to meet the language needs of river boat crewmen and advisors. The Navy Training Research Laboratory was…

The author feels that one of the most significant contributions to English teaching in Mexico today is being rendered by the 14 American-Mexican and three Anglo-Mexican cultural relations institutes or "binational centers." These autonomous institutions receive the cooperation of agencies of the American and British governments and exert…

The purposes of this first phase of a proposed two-phase study were (1) to collect necessary baseline data for the completion of the total two-part study, and (2) to note the effects on school achievement of one year's instruction in English given to kindergarten Navaho-speaking monolinguals. The following groups from the Window Rock-Ft. Defiance…

The future of Greek in the English school system is seen to be directly dependent on two major issues discussed in this paper. The author argues in the first instance for the teaching of Greek literature in translation, particularly to the non-specialist. The second issue of importance is treated in a review of program articulation and examination…

The oral language differences between Negro and Puerto Rican youngsters were compared in the hope that the study would be relevant to curriculum modifications for specific populations. Subjects (Ss) were five Negro and six Puerto Rican third grade girls in inner city classrooms. The facility of Ss in language use independent of vocabulary and…

Six lectures presented by TESOL experts for the 1973 Annual Defense Language Institute are summarized and discussed here. The first paper, by John B. Carroll, "Some Suggestions from a Psycholinguist," concerns the relationship between learning and memory. Albert H. Marckwardt, in "The Dictionary as an English Teaching Resource," recommends the…

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) whether there is a developmental sequence in children's acquisition of metalinguistic abilities and (2) whether the acquisition of these abilities is related to Piagetian operations. Word awareness served as the measure of metalinguistic ability. An attempt was also made to determine whether the…