Analyzes briefly the results of a questionnaire distributed to secondary English teachers in Ghana, Nigeria, and Ethiopia, concerning the use of objective tests, their effects on teaching, and teacher attitudes toward them. School leaving certificate examinations in these countries are closely linked to employment opportunities. (MSE)

Two kinds of objective tests are discribed which are fairly easy to construct and which stress overall language ability and language predictability. Cloze tests involve filling in passages from which every nth word is missing; noise tests the interpretation of recordings on which noise is superimposed. (RM)

A definition of objective test items is given. The disadvantages and advantages of objective tests are discussed, and some examples of objective items are given. Hints on writing objective items are offered, and some non-objective items are discussed. (RM)

The development and validation of the English-Spanish Verbatim Translation Exam (ESVTE) is described. The test is for use by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the selection of applicants for the positions of Language Specialist or Contract Linguist. The report is divided into eight sections. Section 1 describes the need for the test,…

The primary purpose of the interview-type of language proficiency evaluation is to get a rough idea of the language learner's ability at oral communicative exchange. However, interview examinations are often structured in such a way that true exchange is unlikely. Questions elicit obvious answers in a way unlike everyday conversation. Potential…

It is suggested that for checking purposes, "Questions and Answers" should accompany, in the form of a class work blank, the study of a given text. Justification is given, possible objections refuted. An example shows how such work can be quickly corrected and evaluated. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Two psycholinguistic processes are examined in a phoneme monitoring experiment and a sentence completion experiment. Tests were conducted with matched materials on subjects drawn from one population. With ambiguous lexical items all meanings are retrieved, but following a decision stage only one is transferred to memory. (SC)

In any field of study, teaching and learning go hand in hand with testing. In foreign language teaching, the testing of skills development has become a specialized area requiring the combined efforts of linguists, psychologists, statisticians, and educators. Teachers must constantly ask: What kind of progress are my students making in this second…

Various manners of presenting two vocabularies were compared in terms of rate of learning and amount of immediate and delayed retention. Four concurrent and two consecutive conditions were used, each comprising two sets of symbols (nonsense syllables distinguished by a color cue) associated with a common set of referents (nonsense forms). Twenty…

Fifty-four native American children, 62 Spanish-speaking children, and 36 Black children (all from kindergarten through fourth grade) were given the Utah Test of Language Development (UTLD). (SBH)

To ensure reliable language data for research there is a need for experiments eliciting acceptability judgments. Experimental data are discussed to show that evaluation of a sentence may be affected by the sentence with which it is paired. Sentences with similar deviances should be presented as a set for evaluation. (CHK)