The development of alternate assessments for students with disabilities plays a pivotal role in state and national accountability systems. An important assumption in the use of alternate assessments in these accountability systems is that scores are comparable on different test forms across diverse groups of students over time. The use of test…

According to Kane (2006), the argument-based framework is quite simple and involves two steps. First, specify the proposed interpretations and uses of the scores in some detail. Second, evaluate the overall plausibility of the proposed interpretations and uses. Based on experience gained in developing that validity argument, Chapelle, Enright, and…

This edited book documents practices of learning-oriented language assessment through practitioner research and research syntheses. Learning-oriented language assessment refers to language assessment strategies that capitalise on learner differences and their relationships with the learning environments. In other words, learners are placed at the…

Reliability and differential item functioning (DIF) analyses were conducted on testlets displaying local item dependence in this study. The data set employed in the research was obtained from the answers given by 1,500 students to the 20 items included in six testlets given in English Proficiency Exam by the School of Foreign Languages of a state…

Research has found that, during speaking activities, instances of students' collaborative repair are most often lexicon-focused. Collaborative writing tasks have been credited with the potential to force students to confront broad issues, such as content and register, along with more narrow lexical and morphological choices. The present study…

The study reported here investigates the validity of judgments made when aligning tests to the "Common European Framework of Reference" (CEFR). Listening tests operationalizing pre-defined difficulty-determining characteristics were to be aligned to CEFR levels. We employed a modified version of the item-descriptor-matching-method. Ten…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of consistent hearing aid (HA) use on outcomes in children with mild hearing loss (HL). Method: Five- or 7-year-old children with mild HL were separated into 3 groups on the basis of patterns of daily HA use. Using analyses of variance, we compared outcomes between groups on speech and language tests and a…

Although many theoretical issues revolving around implicit and explicit knowledge in second language (L2) acquisition hinge on the ability to measure these two types of knowledge, few empirical studies have attempted to do so. However, R. Ellis (2005) did develop a battery of tests intended to provide relatively separate measures. This study aims…

This study evaluated the effects of the linguistic context on the recognition of words in noise in older listeners using the Spanish Sentence Lists. These sentences were developed based on the approach of the SPIN test for the English language, which contains high and low predictability (HP and LP) sentences. In addition, the relative contribution…

The present study explored listening strategy use among a group of Egyptian EFL college sophomores (N = 84). More specifically, it aimed to identify 1) the strategies used more often by participants, 2) the relationship between listening strategy use, and listening comprehension and self-efficacy, and 3) differences in listening comprehension and…

This article reports a meta-analysis of 42 experiments in 33 published studies involving processing instruction (PI) and production-based instruction (PB) used in the PI studies. The comparative effectiveness of PI and PB showed that although PI was more effective than PB for developing receptive knowledge, PB was just as effective as PI for…

Malaysia is fast becoming a major attraction for candidates from all over the world to pursue their higher education. Currently students (local and international) who pursue postgraduate (hereafter, PG) education in Malaysia use the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or International English Language Testing System (IELTS) scores as…

In an effort to make the learning of the target culture a meaningful and motivating experience for foreign language (FL) learners, the researchers designed and implemented a semester-long project in which intermediate Spanish students used Pinterest to pin and comment on cultural artifacts and websites in the target language (TL) that were of…

This study investigated the elicited imitation task (EIT) as a tool for measuring linguistic proficiency in a second/foreign (L2) language, focusing on French. Nonnative French speakers (n = 94) and native French speakers (n = 6) completed an EIT that included 50 sentences varying in length and complexity. Three raters evaluated productions on…

This study evaluates the effects of Age of Exposure to English (AoEE) and Current Input/Output on language performance in a cross-sectional sample of Spanish-English bilingual children. First- (N = 586) and third-graders (N = 298) who spanned a wide range of bilingual language experience participated. Parents and teachers provided information…