The factors that influence rater scoring have been a subject of great interest to researchers in second language assessment. However, the research on the impact of test-takers' speech profiles (e.g., a jagged or a flat profile reflecting analytic subscores) on raters' scoring behaviors remains to be seen. To investigate the role of speech profiles…

Language learners are underserved if there are unlearned meanings of a word that they think they have already learned. For example, "circle" as a noun is well known, whereas its use as a verb is not. For artificial-intelligence-based support systems for learning vocabulary, assessing each learner's knowledge of such atypical but common…

The study aimed to determine the English proficiency and literary competence of English major students of CBSUA-Sipocot. The third and fourth-year college students were the respondents of the study. The evaluative-correlational method was employed in the research. Frequency count and percentage technique were used to describe levels of proficiency…

Purpose: In this letter, the authors respond to Pavelko and Owens' (2017) newly advanced set of procedures for language sample analysis: Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR). Method: The authors contrast some of the new guidelines for transcription, morpheme segmentation, and language sample elicitation in SUGAR with…

The use of assessments that require rater judgment (i.e., rater-mediated assessments) has become increasingly popular in high-stakes language assessments worldwide. Using a systematic literature review, the purpose of this study is to identify and explore the dominant methods for evaluating rating quality within the context of research on…

The history of vocabulary research has specified a rich and complex construct, resulting in calls for vocabulary research, assessment, and instruction to take into account the complex problem space of vocabulary. At the intersection of vocabulary theory and assessment modeling, this paper suggests a suite of modeling techniques that model the…

Educational assessment data are often collected from a set of test centers across various geographic regions, and therefore the data samples contain clusters. Such cluster-based data may result in clustering effects in variance estimation. However, in many grouped jackknife variance estimation applications, jackknife groups are often formed by a…

This study is a literature review on the findings of different studies on the dimensionality of language proficiency. It aims to particularly analyze the assumptions and the statistical findings of relevant research since it has always been an endless debate among linguists and language teachers about whether language proficiency is organized as a…

The history of vocabulary research has specified a rich and complex construct, resulting in calls for vocabulary research, assessment, and instruction to take into account the complex problem space of vocabulary. At the intersection of vocabulary theory and assessment modeling, this paper suggests a suite of modeling techniques that model the…

Vocabulary learning is an incremental process. Vocabulary knowledge, especially for second-language learners, may develop across a lifetime. Teachers with experience in providing feedback on their students' vocabulary use in writing or speech might have noticed that it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint one aspect of word knowledge. The reason is…

This article analyzes the results of the Saber Pro, the state exam for students completing higher education, during 2007-2017 concerning the English language section. This analysis uses the reports and databases from the Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación (ICFES) repository and explains the policy in its historical context.…

The TOEFL iBT test was introduced in 2005 to better reflect the language demands of real-life academic tasks than did previous versions of the test. The task-based design of the test was intended to support the interpretation of its scores as a trustworthy measure of international students' ability to use English in an academic environment. Until…

This is a case study of supplementary support sessions for Spanish proficiency offered in a bilingual teacher preparation program in Texas throughout an academic year. The support sessions were created to assist pre-service bilingual teachers in further developing their command of Spanish through extra practice, feedback, and test preparation in…

Computer-based testing (CBT), which refers to delivering assessments with computers, has been widely used in large English proficiency tests worldwide. Despite an increasing CBT in China, limited research is available concerning whether CBT can be used for the Test for English Majors-Band 4 (TEM 4). The current study investigated whether testing…

The present article gives an overview of several studies on the predictive validity of the C-test. In the first part of the article, we discuss the construct validity of this test format. Only if the underlying construct of this test is understood, can a justification for high predictive validity be made. In the second part, we discuss several…