The research was conducted to investigate the role of Pictures as the teaching media in improving the Second Graders' English vocabulary at SD Pangudi Luhur, Jakarta in Academic Year 2016/2017. To achieve the objective, the data were collected through the tests, questionnaires and observer's sheet. The respondents consisted of 25 students. The…

The investigation of test-taking strategies is a crucial aspect of test validation studies especially if the test is a high-stakes one. The purpose of this study was to uncover if gender, academic discipline and the total exam score influence on the test-taking strategies employed by the candidates of the General English Section of the National…

This study investigates the role of prosodic cues and explicit information (EI) in the acquisition of German accusative case markers. We compared 4 groups of 3rd-semester learners (low intermediate level) who completed 1 of 4 Processing Instruction (PI) treatments that manipulated the presence or absence of EI and focused prosody. The results…

The present study is a follow-up study of Çakir (2016b) which focused on the wh-adverbial & which NP constructions asymmetry within island structures in Turkish. The characteristics of wh-adverbial nasil "how" is compared with the which-NP constructions "hangisekilde" "in what way" and "hangihalde"…

In this study, we developed assistive tools and resources to support TOEIC® Listening test item generation. There has recently been an increased need for a large pool of items for these tests. This need has, in turn, inspired efforts to increase the efficiency of item generation while maintaining the quality of the created items. We aimed to…

This study investigated EFL teachers' orientations toward the assessment of pronunciation at the upper-secondary school level in Norway. Data were gathered from purposeful samples of 24 interview informants and 46 questionnaire respondents. The teachers were asked about their attitudes toward the assessment of nativeness and intelligibility,…

To investigate whether the type of keyboard used in exams introduces any construct-irrelevant variance to the TOEFL iBT Writing scores, we surveyed 17,040 TOEFL iBT examinees from 24 countries on their keyboard-related perceptions and preferences and analyzed the survey responses together with their test scores. Results suggest that controlling…

Sparse-rated data are common in operational performance-based language tests, as an inevitable result of assigning examinee responses to a fraction of available raters. The current study investigates the precision of two generalizability-theory methods (i.e., the rating method and the subdividing method) specifically designed to accommodate the…

Scores on the Test of English for International Communication Listening and Reading (TOEIC LR) have been used for rolling-based university admissions in South Korea. Because this test is not designed for that purpose by the testing organization, there may be a need to explore the validity of TOEIC LR score use for admission purposes. Accordingly,…

The present research paper is a plea for a reform policy of English Language Education in Algerian secondary-school education. It attempts to redraw the boundaries of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) from a teaching-testing perspective based on two fundamental questions: the 'what-to-teach' and the 'what-to-test', which represent the rationale…

While it is well established that non-native speakers differ from native speakers in their perception and/or production of Mandarin lexical tones, empirical studies focusing on non-native "learners" are still limited. The objective of this study is to add to the current understanding of lexical tone perception by comparing native…

Summative assessment of interpretation is widely conducted in interpreting courses/programs to inform high-stakes decision making, such as the selection, certification, and conferral of academic degrees. Yet there has been very limited empirical research to investigate the score dependability of summative interpretation assessment. The present…

The impacts of task characteristics on second language (L2) writing require further exploration. This study examined the effects of increasing task complexity on L2 argumentative writing. Upper-intermediate L2 learners performed two writing tasks with varying degrees of complexity in relation to the number of elements and the degree of reasoning.…

This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using…

This explorative-descriptive study set out to examine the equivalence among Test of English Proficiency (TOEP) forms, developed by the Indonesian Testing Service Centre (ITSC) and co-founded by The Association for The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia (TEFLIN) and The Association of Psychology in Indonesia. Using a…