The extant literature on oral and written language has shown several interesting differences in terms of production and style. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the content of word definitions provided by children in both the oral and written modes. A total of 30 typically developing children (mean age: 9 years; 2 months) defined…

Research and development of a new type of scoring rubric for the integrated speaking tasks of "TOEFL iBT"® are described. These "analytic rating guides" could be helpful if tasks modeled after those in TOEFL iBT were used for formative assessment, a purpose which is different from TOEFL iBT's primary use for admission…

Purpose: In this study, the authors explored the impact of test language and cultural status on vocabulary and working memory performance in multilingual language-minority children. Method: Twenty 7-year-old Portuguese-speaking immigrant children living in Luxembourg completed several assessments of first (L1)- and second-language (L2) vocabulary…

Previous studies have highlighted early differences in bilinguals' rate of language acquisition in comparison with monolinguals. However, these differences seem to disappear with increasing age and exposure to the language, and do so quicker in dominant community languages than in minority status languages. This study aimed to replicate these…

Current assessment practices in the United States are not able to accurately capture the total linguistic, cognitive, and achievement abilities of bilingual learners. There are psychometric complexities involved when assessing and interpreting test results of bilingual students, which impact the validity of this practice. Further, the compromise…

While much of the work in language testing is concerned with constructing quality tests in order to measure language knowledge in reliable and valid ways, there has been a significant movement in language testing research that examines tests in the context of their use in education and society. This line of research exits from the notion that…

In a developing nation like Turkey, the English language plays a significant role in educational and socioeconomic mobility. English is acquired and taught as a foreign language (EFL) primarily in the classrooms. However, the ways in which English language is represented in classroom instruction have been hardly examined and understood. With that,…

Many educational Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) collect baseline versions of outcome measures (pretests) to be used in the estimation of impacts at posttest. Although pretest measures are not necessary for unbiased impact estimates in well executed experimental studies, using them increases the precision of impact estimates and reduces sample…

This paper reports findings from the study that assessed the first year Indian ESL students' awareness of reading strategy use. It also investigated the relationship that exists between reading strategy use and the reading comprehension achievements of the Indian ESL students. The study utilized two instruments such as SORS and RCT which is the…

This study examined the influence of language knowledge, metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategy use on speaking and listening proficiency. Ninety six freshman and sophomore Iranian university students (male = 6, female = 90) were participated in the study. Two kinds of questionnaire and one language knowledge test were administered.…

Speaking performance tests typically employ raters to produce scores; accordingly, variability in raters' scoring decisions has important consequences for test reliability and validity. One such source of variability is the rater's level of expertise in scoring. Therefore, it is important to understand how raters' performance is influenced by…

The authors aimed to incorporate learning into the cognitive assessment framework that exists for static assessment data. In order to accomplish this, they derive a common likelihood function for dynamic models and introduce Parameter Driven Process for Change + Cognitive Diagnosis Model (PDPC + CDM), a dynamic model which tracks learning…

In this study, the researcher examined the strength and direction of relationships between NJ School Report Card Variables (NJ SRC) and 2008-2009 NJ ASK 5 Math and Language Arts Literacy (LAL) student test scores. Variables found to have an influence on standardized test scores in the extant literature were evaluated and reported. Analyses were…

An increasingly important curricular aim of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) is to develop learners' intercultural competence for communication with people from different cultures through English. English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' perceptions and practices in relation to integrating culture with English learning have been…

Full-time MBA students amount to about one-third of the 26,000 students enrolled on MBA programmes at UK universities. The programmes have become increasingly international in student composition and concerns have been expressed about performance, quality and comparability between programmes. Research into predictors of MBA success has been…