The increasing influence of sociocultural theories of learning on assessment practices in second language education necessitates an expansion of the knowledge base that teacher-assessors need to develop (what teachers need to know) and related changes in the processes of language teacher education (how they learn and develop it). Teacher assessors…

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for researching classroom-based assessment (CBA) processes, and is based on a detailed empirical study of two Australian school classrooms where students aged 11 to 13 were studying Indonesian as a foreign language. The framework can be considered innovative in several respects. It goes beyond the…

Title III of Public Law 107-110 (No Child Left Behind; NCLB) provided for creation of assessments of English language learners (ELLs) and established, through the Enhanced Assessment Grant program, a platform from which four consortia of states developed ELL tests aligned to rigorous statewide content standards. Those four tests (ACCESS for ELLs,…

With the United States' adoption of a standards-based approach to education, most attention has focused on the large-scale, high-stakes assessments intended to measure students' mastery of standards for accountability purposes. Less attention has been paid to the role of standards-based assessments in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to…

Pictures are widely used to elicit expressive language skills, and pictures must be established as parallel before changes in ability can be demonstrated by assessment using pictures prompts. Why parallel prompts are required and what it is necessary to do to ensure that prompts are in fact parallel is not widely known. To date, evidence of…

This paper reports the findings of an empirical study on ESL/EFL teachers' evaluation and interpretation of oral English proficiency as elicited by the national College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) of China. Informed by debates on the issue of native speaker (NS) norms which have become the focus of attention in recent years, this…

This article reports the results of a research study to determine the washback effect of an oral assessment system on some areas of the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The research combined quantitative and qualitative research methods within a comparative study between an experimental group and a comparison group.…

Gist identification or coherent situation model construction performance is an important criterion not only in L1 and L2 reading comprehension assessment but also in every aspect of discourse processing. Whereas most previous L2 research has investigated schematic knowledge of readers about relations within a text, more recent studies have used…

Multifaceted Rasch measurement was used in the present study with 91 student and 4 teacher raters to investigate how self- and peer-assessments work in comparison with teacher assessments in actual university writing classes. The results indicated that many self-raters assessed their own writing lower than predicted. This was particularly true for…

This study used a mixed methods research approach to examine how native English-speaking (NS) and non-native English-speaking (NNS) teachers assess students' oral English performance. The evaluation behaviors of two groups of teachers (12 Canadian NS teachers and 12 Korean NNS teachers) were compared with regard to internal consistency, severity,…

The competencies required for conducting assessment in the educational context have recently been reformulated in view of social constructivist perspectives and the acknowledgement of the role of classroom assessment in promoting learning. These changes have impacted the knowledge base language assessors need to obtain, and hence the contents of…

This study examined the effects of training on peer assessment and comments provided regarding oral presentations in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms. In Study 1, both the treatment and control groups received instruction on skill aspects, but only the treatment group was given an additional 40-minute training on how to rate…

Two kinds of scoring templates were empirically derived from summaries written by experts and students to evaluate the quality of summaries written by the students. This paper reports students' attitudes towards the use of the two templates and its differential statistical effects on the judgment of students' summarization performance. It was…

Some educational contexts almost mandate the application of multiple-choice (MC) testing techniques, even if they are deplored by many practitioners in the field. In such contexts especially, research into how well these types of item perform and how their performance may be characterised is both appropriate and desirable. The focus of this paper…

Results from the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) indicate that English as a Second Language (ESL) and English Literacy Development (ELD) students have comparatively low success and high deferral rates. This study examined the 2002 and 2003 OSSLT test performances of ESL/ELD and non-ESL/ELD students in order to identify and…