This descriptive study investigated the levels of oral proficiency of candidates for initial PreK-12 teacher licensure in Spanish and French as reported by faculty and students in the teacher education programs at Ohio colleges and universities. The study was motivated by the adoption of the NCATE/ACTFL "Program standards for the preparation…

Multiple uses of the same assessment may present challenges for both the design and use of an assessment. Little advice, however, has been given to assessment developers as to how to understand the phenomena of multiple assessment use and meet the challenges these present. Particularly problematic is the case in which an assessment is used for…

The problem. The purpose of this study is to investigate positive and negative cross-linguistic transfer on EFL learners' phraseological competence in collocations and its relationship to learners' linguistic proficiency. Method. A quantitative study was conducted. Two instruments, multiple choice test and grammaticality judgment test, were…

Little L2 reading strategy research has explored the effect of linguistic and cross-cultural differences on strategic reading habits. This study attempted to fill this void by examining the reading strategies that Arabic- and Mandarin-speaking immigrants employed when reading and answering Canadian Language Benchmarks Assessment reading…

Purpose: Research has established that African American (AA) children are lagging behind other children in their reading skills. A number of factors have been proposed to account for the literacy gap; however no single factor has entirely explained this disparity. This investigation examined the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Test-Fourth…

This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for executive function tasks in children of varying levels of language dominance, and examines the contributions of general cognitive knowledge, linguistic abilities, language use and socio-economic level to performance. Welsh-English bilingual and English monolingual…

The relationship between linguistic experience and phonemic representations in spelling was investigated in two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (aged 5-6 years) who spoke mostly Mandarin-L1 (n = 23) or mostly English-L1 (n = 27) at home. A 60-item cloze task including high- and low-frequency words with word-initial and word-final…

This study compares integrated and isolated form-focused instruction for vocabulary development in an English as a second language (ESL) reading lesson. Two classes of ESL learners (N = 20) from a university preparation academic English course were involved in the study. Each class did two reading treatments in which they read an article and…

The increasing popularity of paired format in oral testing has engendered legitimate scrutiny of its reliability and validity as compared with the more traditional interviewer-interviewee arrangement. Although characteristics such as the gender, cultural/L1 background, and language proficiency of one's interlocutor likely affects the discourse…

The aim of this pilot study was to identify the most common speech sound confusions of 5 Norwegian cochlear implanted post-lingually deafened adults. We played recorded nonwords, aCa, iCi and bVb, to our informants, asked them to repeat what they heard, recorded their repetitions and transcribed these phonetically. We arranged the collected data…

It has been observed that persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) have poor language production. However, very few studies have addressed the question whether all aspects of language production are equally afflicted, or whether there are differences between for instance phonological and morphological abilities. The present study was aimed at…

The purpose of this paper is to propose an applied model for the assessment of bilingual children's language abilities with standardised tests. We discuss the purposes of such tests, especially in relation to vocabulary knowledge, and potential applications of test results for each of those purposes. The specific case to be examined here is that…

This study seeks to investigate the impact of symmetrical (S) and Asymmetrical (AS) scaffolding, which are two types of scaffolding, on students' reading comprehension achievement of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The study was done in two phases: In the first phase after administering a Pre-test, 52 homogeneous intermediate students were…

This study is to investigate whether self-assessment contains construct-irrelevant variances of gender and age, and whether self-assessment correlates with test scores. The data were collected from seventy-eight newly arrived international students at the English Language Center, Michigan State University, USA. Prior to class commencement, they…

This study examined the "communicativeness" of 22 English language tests designed and administered by 22 English instructors from 22 different colleges and universities in the Philippines. Its key objective was to answer the question "How communicative are the language tests used in assessing students' competence (knowledge of the…