NVLT monolingual VLI 4.

2021

Language teachers are often faced with the responsibility of selecting or developing language tests for their classrooms and programs. However, deciding which testing alternatives are the most appropriate for a particular language education context can be daunting, especially given the increasing variety of instruments, procedures, and practices available for language testing. Such alternatives include not only test types with long traditions of use-such as multiple choice, matching, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank tests; cloze and dictation procedures; essay exams; and oral interviews-but also tests differing in scope and structure from these well-known options. For example, technological developments have led to a number of new language testing formats, including computer-based and computer-adaptive tests , audiotape-based oral proficiency interviews , and web-based testing (Roever 1998).

The last three decades have seen developments in the exam production and evaluation process. Because Language testing at any level is a highly complex undertaking that must be based on theory as well as practice. Language testing traditionally is more concerned with the production, development and analysis of tests. Recent critical and ethical approaches to language testing have placed more emphasis on the qualities of a good test. Of the major features of a good test involved in performance assessment, Reliability, Validity, Practicality, Discrimination And Authenticity in particular have been of great concern to language testers and educators. In this regard, it is the intent of this paper to briefly discuss these five issues of a good test with special reference to language performance assessment.

In B.S. Plake and J.C. Impara (Eds.), The Fourteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook, pp.157-159, 2001

Hispania, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 746-747, 1973

1995

This paper traces developments in educational psychology and measurement that led to the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) and the application of educational measurement terms such as validity and reliability to testing. Use of a table of specifications for planning language tests, procedures for obtaining greater interand intra-rater reliability on composition tests are noted. An overview is given of recent criticisms of language testing in Japan. Considerations for item writing are examined briefly, and the major item types in language testing are described and discussed, including multiple choice (in reading and listening), matching (reading), a variety of cloze procedures (reading and grammar), scanning (reading), paraphrasing (reading and grammar), information transfer (reading and writing), editing, guided paragraph writing, paragraphs and essays, question and response (listening and speaking), paraphr...

Language Testing, 2001

This issue of Language Testing focuses on an area that continues to fascinate and trouble many of us: assessing language for specific purposes (LSP). The five articles in this issue present a range of challenging issues and findings that will inform our understanding of LSP assessment, but also further problematize it. This is no bad thing as English spreads wider still around the world and more and more users see English as a wholly instrumental skill in their lives. The issues apply, of course, equally to languages other than English.

Language Testing, 1985

You design your test, I design my test and every teacher else designs his/her own test in the way he/she likes it ignoring the fact that our tests should be based on certain characteristics. This argument, however, includes issues such as what to test, how to test and on what bases you design a test: have been all discussed in this paper with the help of accounting briefly for four approaches to language testing. Thus, the four approaches (translation approach, psychometric-structuralists approach, integrative approach and communicative approach) have been accounted for comparatively and contrastively.

2003

Test adaptation is a process by which a test (or assessment instrument) is transformed from a source language and/or culture into a target language and/or culture. This dissertation includes a description of the development of GMAT® Verbal en Español, a Spanish-...