Language tools are reflections of the academic traditions of assessment developers, as well as the perceptions of language quality as held by a society. The certification of Quebec's teachers offers an interesting case in point: the Québec Government's "ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport" (MELS) requires that…

In Quebec the high-stakes Secondary Five ESL exit writing exam developed by the Education Ministry (MELS) is administered and corrected by classroom teachers. In this distinctive situation, the MELS works toward aligning classroom-based assessment (CBA) and the writing exam by making ongoing teacher involvement part of its development and…

Research on issues concerning the assessment of school-age English language learners (ELLs) in curriculum-learning contexts has been relatively less productive than assessment of adult language learners. A growing demand for assessing school-age ELLs has led to the development of assessment frameworks that provide the opportunity to examine the…

Diagnostic assessment is increasingly being recognized as a potentially beneficial tool for teaching and learning (Jang, 2012). There have been calls in the research literature for students to receive diagnostic feedback and for researchers to investigate how such feedback is used by students. Therefore, this study examined how students…

This study investigates the relationships between test takers' metacognitive and cognitive strategy use through a questionnaire and their test performance on an English as a Foreign Language reading test. A total of 593 Chinese college test takers responded to a 38-item metacognitive and cognitive strategy questionnaire and a 50-item reading…

This study explores the construct of a summarization test task by means of single-group and multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM). It examines the interrelationships between strategy use and performance, drawing on data from 298 Taiwanese undergraduates' summary essays and their self-reported strategy use. Single-group SEM analyses…

Training of pre- and in-service teachers constitutes one of the most important aspects in the quality assurance of language testing and assessment (LTA). For instance, foreign language (FL) teachers have to deal with standardised tests as well as their own classroom-based assessment procedures. This means they need the necessary expertise that can…

Researchers debate whether listening tasks should be supported by visuals. Most empirical research in this area has been conducted on the effects of visual support on listening comprehension tasks employing multiple-choice questions. The present study seeks to expand this research by investigating the effects of video listening passages (vs.…

Language testing has seen unprecedented expansion during the first part of the 21st century. As a result there is an increasing need for the language testing profession to consider more precisely what it means by "assessment literacy" and to articulate its role in the creation of new pedagogic materials and programs in language testing and…

In this study, I investigated the reliability of the U.S. Naturalization Test's civics component by asking 414 individuals to take a mock U.S. citizenship test comprising civics test questions. Using an incomplete block design of six forms with 16 nonoverlapping items and four anchor items on each form (the anchors connected the six subsets of…

This article reports on an empirical study that tests a fourth-order factor model of strategic competence through the use of structural equation modeling (SEM). The study examines the hierarchical relationship of strategic competence to (a) strategic knowledge of cognitive and metacognitive strategy use in general (i.e., trait) and (b) strategic…