This pilot study on international relocation examined the adjustment experiences of 68 children, age 9 to 11 years, who relocated to Vienna, Austria either from their native country or from another overseas setting. The study proposed an additive model of adjustment which took into account potential sources of adjustment within the relocation…

This Master's research project involved implementation of a program to increase learning readiness skills of children entering kindergarten. The target population was pre-kindergarten students in a changing urban community in northern Illinois. The problem of lack of readiness skills for learning was documented through teacher tests and…

This guidebook provides Spanish-speaking refugees being resettled in the United States with general information about what they will encounter and the services they can receive in their first months in the country. This is the Spanish version, and is available in several other languages. The book is distributed to overseas processing agencies,…

Some of the issues involved in validating two English second-language listening comprehension tests are examined. The tests were two different levels of a listening summary-cloze measure developed for use in a battery of language proficiency tests in the second and fourth years of university-level study in China. In them, students listen to a talk…

A preliminary study is reported of the use of new multifaceted Rasch measurement mechanisms for investigating rater characteristics in language testing. Ratings from four judges of scripts from 50 candidates taking the International English Language Testing System test, a test of English for Academic Purposes, are analyzed. The analysis…

A computerized adaptive test for placement of students in postsecondary French second language courses is evaluated for unidimensionality of its three component tests: reading comprehension of a short paragraph; selection of the appropriate statement in a given situation; and a "fill-in-the-blank" section. A variety of statistical…

The purpose of this research was to compare two different forms of a placement test in French as a second language at the post-secondary level, a conventional test and a computerized test. First, expectations regarding a placement test as a measure of general proficiency are discussed and principles of adaptive testing that have been used to…

A discussion of language proficiency focuses on the conceptual framework for assessing proficiency and its implications for educational policy formation at the state and local levels. First, the concept of language is defined in terms of the interaction of these elements: language subsystems, communication skills, language domains, language…

A study investigated the changes in English and Spanish oral expression and comprehension skills of 18 male and 25 female Spanish-speaking Latino children attending a preschool that emphasized English language learning but supported maintenance of Spanish skills. For comparison purposes, the English skills of African American children (n=16 boys,…

A study of the translation process compared the decisions that native speakers (experts) and non-native speakers (non-experts) made that influenced resulting translations. Subjects were 40 students, graduate students, and faculty in a university foreign language department. English language proficiency was measured for native speakers by using the…

This digest provides a description of block scheduling and discusses specific advantages, concerns, and considerations of block scheduling and foreign language instruction and learning. Block scheduling is a reorganization of school time that comes in many complex variations, including 4x4 (four blocks of 90 minutes each) and A/B (eight blocks…

The proceedings of a working group conference on proficiency testing of Japanese as a second language contain a brief background paper distributed to conference invitees, a list of items included in the pre-conference portfolio, an advance organizer of potential discussion topics, a 77-item annotated list of bibliographies on second language…

The relationship between the reading comprehension and writing production of non-English speakers was examined in an exploratory study to determine whether knowledge gained through reading academic texts can facilitate the writing of compositions. The 10 subjects were enrolled in a developmental English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) university-level…

The need in adult education English-for-Speakers-of-Other-Languages (ESOL) classes for a simple, effective placement measure that is inexpensive in terms of both cost and time is noted, and results of a study of the predictive validity of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) on the achievement scores of adult ESOL students are reported. The WRAT…

This report describes the development, construction, and validation of the Preliminary Chinese Proficiency Test (Pre-CPT), a standardized, nationally-normed test of listening and reading comprehension for beginning-level native English-speaking learners of Chinese as a second language. The Pre-CPT was designed as a lower-level version of the…