Providing information to test takers and test score users about the abilities of test takers at different score levels has been a persistent problem in educational and psychological measurement (Carroll, 1993). Since the 1990s Educational Testing Service has been investigating solutions to this problem through the development of proficiency…

In 2002, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education Programs (NCATE) established Advanced Low (AL) as the minimal level of oral proficiency for foreign language teacher candidates. However, AL is not a level commonly reached by graduates of foreign language programs. Additional language training focusing on the development of…

Reading in a second language (L2) is important for a variety of reasons. Reading authentic materials, in particular, allows L2 learners to engage with native speaker content, and ultimately the target culture. One body of authentic materials is that of literary texts, including those of more traditional prose fiction, poetry, and drama, but also…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated speech rhythm acquisition by bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children, comparing their performance with functionally monolingual peers in both languages and to monolingual and bilingual adults. Method: Participants included younger children (3;9 [years;months] to 4;5.15 [years;months.days]),…

A survey of research on French as a second language (FSL) education in Canada suggests that French immersion (FI) students enjoy significant linguistic, academic, and cognitive benefits. We organize our summary of the advantages of FI around these three themes, comparing students' proficiency in French and English across various FI programs, and…

"The Critical Word Factor," based on word recognition demands of texts, is a measure of text difficulty designed specifically for texts used by beginning readers. The measure is a function of the number of new, unique words per 100 running words of text that fall outside a designated curriculum. The authors investigated the validity of the…

Second language (L2) reading research suggests that there is a complex interplay between L2 proficiency, first language (L1) reading and L2 reading. However, not much is known about the effect of L1 proficiency on L1 reading, and of L1 reading on L2 reading, or vice versa, in bilingual settings when readers have few opportunities for extensive…

With the rapid increase in immigration from Latin America to the USA, many US high schools are struggling with the thorny question of how best to educate newcomer immigrant youth with low levels of English proficiency. This paper examines what some might consider an anachronistic educational model--a segregated bilingual high school for Latino…

This study shows how online courses encouraged non-native freshman students to write poems and short stories in English as a foreign language. The 38 creative writers were enrolled in writing, grammar, vocabulary and reading courses that the author taught over 6 semesters. They were also registered in an asynchronous online course that was used as…

Foreign language learners typically experience considerable anxiety about taking listening tests. This study investigated how four forms of listening support (pre-teaching of content and vocabulary, question preview, and repeated input) affect the anxiety levels of college students in Taiwan taking a multiple-choice achievement test, which counts…

Although it is commonly believed that language and culture are inexorably linked, the precise nature of this relationship remains elusive. This study investigated the hypothesis that a loss in language signals a loss in culture if language is considered a central value. This hypothesis was investigated by rating the Hindi and English proficiency…

Public school students in Japan must take English as a required subject for three years in junior high school and for three more years in senior high school. In spite of the amount of classroom time invested, and in spite of the available learning support services, the foreign Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) system included, the English…

Differences between early and late Irish-immersion secondary school students are examined, not only in terms of academic outcome and target language ability, but also in terms of attitudes to learning the target language. Participants included a gender-balanced group of 97 students in Irish-immersion in fourth year of secondary school (mean age…

This study explored the extent to which the reading-to-write construct is the sum of one's reading and writing abilities or an independent construct. The investigation included an analysis of (a) test tasks, (b) the relationship of test task scores and scores on reading and writing measures, and (c) the effects of proficiency level and educational…

Keiwa College, a small liberal arts college in Niigata, Japan, has developed a number of on-campus and community-based teacher training programmes to benefit our students in the teacher education course in the Department of English and Communication and in-service English teachers in the area. These programmes provide students with opportunities…