Findings of the test reported here were: (1) group-administered tests are practicable and may be scored reliably; (2) performance correlated highly with performance on standardized listening and grammar tests of English as a foreign language; (3) the difficulty of the test sentences seemed to be determined by their length and syntactical…

Three measures often used with handicapped children (the Berry-Talbott Comprehension of Grammar, the Grammatic Closure subtest of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, and the Grammatic Completion subtest of the Test of Language Development) are discussed in terms of test reliability, scoring procedures, format, and types of scores.…

Lists five objectives in creating an item bank for language proficiency test items and describes the design of an item bank card. Briefly discusses item analysis and population distribution in this system and points out the numerous advantages of the system and conditions for its success. (PMJ)

The interplay between the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the oral language performance is discussed. Performance features and their cutoff criteria are suggested for a clinical use of the reformulation task in an initial pass/fail screening of the oral language ability of students at the upper elementary school level. (Author)

States the requirements for graduation from the augmented 10-year Hauptschule (a "terminal" school) in Lower Saxony. Current examination practice is described and suggestions for improvement given. (IFS/WGA)

Provides examples of listening comprehension tests used in England which take into account communicative skill testing. (AM)

The article responds to Rosaura Sanchez' specific criticisms of the Bilingual Syntax Measure regarding its rationale, administration, and uses, as well as defining and clarifying some of the more important theoretical and practical questions in the language testing field raised by the Sanchez review. (NQ)

Focusing on the distinction between inferential measures of language proficiency and tests which assess language skills more directly, the article discusses briefly various dimensions relevant to language proficiency testing and some of the special problems involved in the testing of equivalent proficiencies. (NQ)

It is shown that drilling tends to become contaminated with elements of testing. The two activities are defined, and suggestions are given for designing drills free of testing. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Reviews assumptions underlying approaches to research into speaking task difficulty and questions the view that test scores always vary with task conditions or discourse variation. Offers a new approach to defining task difficulty in terms of the interaction between pragmatic task features and first language cultural background. Results of a study…

Based on the observation that scale-level methods are sometimes exclusively used to investigate measurement invariance for test translation, describes results of a simulation study investigating whether item-level differential item functioning (DIF) manifests itself in scale-level analyses such as single and multigroup factor analyses and per…

Discusses the Test for Creative Thinking--Drawing Production (TCT-DP), a creativity test suitable for most age and ability groups. Explores the possibility of implementing TCT-DP among kindergarten children in Korea. Results from a TCT-DP field study on 1366 Korean preschool children are comparable to those found in previously reported German…

Discusses steps taken to attain cultural relevance and appropriateness in the reading literacy construct, and in the stimulus materials and items that operationalize it. Explains the influence of multilingual considerations on the development of the reading literacy assessment instrument and notes psychometric procedures used to maximize the…

Discusses problems in task-based language assessment, including the definition and sampling of tasks, generalizations across tasks, interpretations about broad ability and language use domains, and the notion of task difficulty. (Author/VWL)