The manual is designed to help Peace Corps language teachers design simple evaluation procedures that will: (1) help them select appropriate classroom activities; (2) encourage students to self-monitor their progress and take responsibility for learning; and (3) give insight into student aptitudes. An introductory chapter examines the relationship…

An assessment battery, measuring multiple aspects of language, was administered to 29 children between 4 and 5 years of age who had been born prematurely. The children, who weighed less than 2,500 grams at birth after less than 37 weeks of gestation, were recruited from a cohort of children originally admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit…

To help postgraduate students find resources for their studies or research, a World Wide Web page was created to provide information about language testing. Although the Web page is intended for people who do not have much knowledge and information about language testing, it is useful for anyone who is doing research in the area of language…

The proceedings of a working group conference on proficiency testing of Japanese as a second language contain a brief background paper distributed to conference invitees, a list of items included in the pre-conference portfolio, an advance organizer of potential discussion topics, a 77-item annotated list of bibliographies on second language…

The need in adult education English-for-Speakers-of-Other-Languages (ESOL) classes for a simple, effective placement measure that is inexpensive in terms of both cost and time is noted, and results of a study of the predictive validity of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) on the achievement scores of adult ESOL students are reported. The WRAT…

This report describes the development, construction, and validation of the Preliminary Chinese Proficiency Test (Pre-CPT), a standardized, nationally-normed test of listening and reading comprehension for beginning-level native English-speaking learners of Chinese as a second language. The Pre-CPT was designed as a lower-level version of the…

A specialized bibliography on foreign language testing compiled by the British Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) is presented covering the period 1981 to 1987. This supplement consists of 200 abstracts from the journals "Language Teaching and Linguistics: Abstracts" and "Language Teaching." It also contains an…

The 12 tests cited in this bibliography are used to assess students' knowledge of German as a second language. Many of the tests described are included because one or more of their subtests measure some aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension. The tests are primarily for secondary or higher education students; a few are used to…

The 81 tests described in this bibliography are designed to assess children's proficiency in those skill areas necessary for success in learning to read. Among the skills tested are visual perception, auditory discrimination, letter identification, vocabulary, and word recognition. Many of the tests measure a child's eligibility for kindergarten…

In July 1990, "Standards, Policies and Procedures for the Evaluation of Assessment Instruments Used in the California Community Colleges" was published, requiring colleges to determine whether current testing practices discriminate against members of underrepresented groups. The standard for demonstrating disproportionate impact comes…

A study of item response theory in language testing research investigated the influence of sample size on (1) the statistical test of data-model fit and (2) the invariance of parameter estimates. Data were drawn from a 1993 administration of the examination of Dutch as a second language to about a thousand candidates, using results from only the…

The eight papers in this volume, prepared by staff and students of the Institute for Applied Language Studies of Edinburgh University, address a variety of issues in applied linguistics. The papers include: (1) "A Coding System for Analyzing a Spoken Database" (Joan Cutting); (2) "L2 Perceptual Acquisition: The Effect of…

This paper reports on a two-part evaluation of the Test of English at Matriculation (TEAM) in use at the University of Edinburgh. TEAM has been used since 1987 to identify entering non-native speakers of English who are likely to be at risk linguistically and who should receive English language support. Separate samples of candidates' scores were…

A sample of 1,500 students in grades K-3 were selected from 80 Jordanian schools in a study of aural vocabulary scores. This study followed a pilot study in 1980 of an Arabic translation of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test with Arabic-speaking children with limited English proficiency in the Dearborn, Michigan, public schools. The 1982…

In a test administered to Spanish-speaking students of English as a second language at the elementary and intermediate levels, the results indicated the subjects' reliance on the strategies of overgeneralization and transfer was qualitatively different. Implications of the results are discussed. (Author/RM)