The Common Educational Proficiency Assessment (CEPA) is a large-scale, high-stakes, English language proficiency/placement test administered in the United Arab Emirates to Emirati nationals in their final year of secondary education or Grade 12. The purpose of the CEPA is to place students into English classes at the appropriate government…

English has been an official language of Hong Kong since it was first introduced to the region in the 1840s. Since then, its influence has invariably been strong and remains so even after 1997, when the sovereignty of the region was returned to China. This special background of English in Hong Kong heavily influences the policy and practices of…

This study describes the reading and test-taking strategies that test takers used on the "Reading" section of the "LanguEdge Courseware" (2002) materials developed to familiarize prospective respondents with the new TOEFL. The investigation focused on strategies used to respond to more traditional "single selection" multiple-choice formats (i.e.,…

This study investigates whether the practice of answer changing on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) is beneficial to Gulf Arab students' overall test performance. The proficiency exam used in this study is the Michigan English Language Institute College English Test - Grammar, Cloze, Vocabulary, Reading (MELICET-GCVR), which was developed using…

Student assessment plays a central and important role in teaching and learning. Teachers devote a large part of their preparation time to creating instruments and observation procedures, marking, recording, and synthesizing results in informal and formal reports in their daily teaching. A number of studies of the assessment practices used by…

FACETS many-facet Rasch analysis software was utilized to look at two consecutive administrations of a large-scale second language oral assessment in the form of a peer group discussion task with Japanese English-major university students. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Summarizes findings from investigations into the development and use of a prototype English language task-based performance test. Data included performances by 90 examinees in 13 complex and skill-integrative tasks. Findings indicated that the task-based test could inform intended inferences about examinees' abilities to accomplish specific tasks…

Explores the role of task and task-based assessment in a collegiate foreign language department that shifted its entire undergraduate curriculum from a form-based normative approach to a language-use and language-meaning orientation for instruction. Examines how demands for specificity that characterize task-based assessment contributed…

Investigates agreement among teacher-, self-, and peer-assessments of students in the presence of peer feedback. This is done in the context of oral presentation skills of first year undergraduate students of ethnic Chinese background. Findings how that when assessment criteria are firmly set, peer feedback enables students to judge the…

Explores theoretical and practical issues surrounding authenticity in course-based assessment, drawing on data from a university-level Japanese language course in Australia. Examines a teaching and assessment activity based around interviewing native speakers outside the classroom, which was designed to optimize authenticity. (Author/VWL)

Examines the concept of authenticity and the way this notion has evolved in language testing and general education. Presents a study looking at the importance of authenticity for test takers, and shows that test takers are willing and able to identify the attributes of a test likely to affect their performance. More research is needed if the…

Investigates how schemata activated by culturally familiar words might have influenced students' cloze test-taking processes. Subjects were Japanese English-as-a-foreign-language students. Results demonstrate that students who read culturally familiar cloze texts tried to solve more items and generally understood the text better, which resulted in…

Investigates potential presence of a topic effect for the Canadian Academic English Language (CAEL) Assessment using the mechanism of choice. Sought to determine whether test-takers given a choice of topic perform significantly differently from test-takers not given a choice. English-as-a-Second-Language university applicants were assigned one of…

Developed an analytic rating scale for Japanese university students' first-language (L1) expository writing. Devised a questionnaire to investigate Japanese L1 teachers' criteria for evaluating expository writing, and, based on questionnaire results, eliminated or reorganized the descriptions under six analytic criteria. (Author/VWL)

This study investigated topic features and the effect of topic variation on performance in a test designed to assess the language skills of international teaching assistants in chemistry. Results suggest a relationship between topic of input (as defined by the topic features of concepts, math, and calculations) and test scores. (Author/MSE)