Focusing on the realities and constraints operating in public school settings, this book suggests ways that school personnel with responsibilities for hearing-impaired and other language-delayed children can produce effective language assessments and interventions. Following an overview of language development, the book is organized into sections…

A study of the effects of recent changes in the United Kingdom's school-exit tests in French language skills, primarily in the new emphasis on communicative competence, compared the perceptions of students in four classes preparing for the traditional test and four classes preparing for the new test. These groups were administered questionnaires…

Scholastic and personal characteristics of students undertaking exit competency examinations are investigated. Research questions concerned: what the tests measure, whether the tests provide unique information or are duplicating other easily obtained measures, whether it is possible to increase the probability of student success by controlling…

Six basic questions that are important to consider in foreign language testing are often taken for granted: (1) What is it that a student "knows" when he or she has acquired a foreign language, and is it measured in qualitative or quantitative terms or both? (2) What are the roles of skills and attitudes in learning a foreign language?…

The modified American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Educational Testing Service (ACTFL/ETS) oral proficiency scale was developed in response to a request from the New Brunswick (Canada) Department of Education for assistance in comparing the results of its French immersion and core programs. Because the existing ACTFL/ETS academic…

A study investigated the use of reading proficiency scales developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), Educational Testing Service (ETS), and Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) for meaningful rank-ordering and assigning levels of second language competence to reading passages. In a proficiency test writing…

Written examinations are considered to be more searching than oral ones; they are less subject to chance because they give more time to the student for reflection, and they do not favor one type of learner over another. This view is taken even though language is speech before it is writing. While there may be a need for a complementary oral…

The status and priorities of the teaching of East Asian languages were discussed in eight papers presented at a 1981 conference. The topics addressed include: (1) the need to give language teaching a higher priority as a national concern; (2) the role of the federal government in East Asian language study; (3) the teaching of Japanese, Korean, and…

The Test of Language Development--Intermediate (TOLD-I) was administered to 26 learning disabled (LD) and 26 nonLD elementary aged black children. The subjects were matched for age, IQ, and class placement. Statistically significant differences were found between the two groups on four of the five subtests of the TOLD-I. The data also were…

These placement tests are designed to help teachers determine a students' Chinese reading and writing level and to place them in the appropriate grade level book in the Golden Mountain Reading Series. The tests are divided into two parts: (1) word recognition and (2) reading and writing test. (Author/CFM)

This paper describes an instrument used to assess the receptive language of children. The bilingual child is tested first in the non-dominant language. When the ceiling is reached in the non-dominant language, the tester switches to the dominant language. (The ideal situation would be to give the test in one language one day, then repeat the test…

Three major stages in the development of language testing have been identified and correlated with corresponding stages in teaching. These are: (1) the pre-scientific stage associated with the grammar-translation method; (2) the psychometric-structuralist stage concomitant with the audio-lingual method; and (3) the integrative-sociometric stage…

Most U.S. institutions require international students to meet a minimum English proficiency test requirement for admission to the institution. The language requirements for admission appear to be the same for technical and for academic students. Standardized English proficiency tests purport to be non-specific; yet an analysis of the items on a…

This paper presents research on the contribution of the amount of schooling to performance in French as a second language, assessed by newly developed measures of communicative competence. Test items addressed three components of communicative competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic. Aware of the relationship of context to…

Principles of language assessment and instruction for Spanish speaking preschoolers at St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, are presented. Basic definitions and program model (which looks at the child's communication skills based purely on semantic content contained in spontaneous language samples) are explained. The program's theoretical bases…