This study investigates the impact of raters' language background on their judgements of the speaking performance in the College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) of China, by comparing the rating patterns of non-native English-speaking (NNES) teacher raters, who are currently employed to assess performance on the CET-SET, with those of…

Health literacy, defined as an individual's capacity to process health information in order to make appropriate health decisions, is the focus of increasing attention in medical fields due to growing awareness that suboptimal health literacy is associated with poorer health outcomes. To explore this issue, a number of instruments, reported to have…

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…

Researchers exploring the use of language use in radiotelephony communication have tended to focus on the limitations of the non-native English user and the threats which their limited control of English may pose for aviation safety (e.g. Atsushi, 2003, 2004). Hence the recent International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) policy places the onus…

This paper investigates the code-switching behaviour of two native speaker teachers teaching their mother tongue--French and Korean, respectively--to predominantly English monolingual students in New Zealand secondary schools. A close analysis of these teachers' classroom discourse and their perceptions about classroom language use reveals a range…

Discusses some of the conceptual problems underlying distinctions between native and nonnative speaker, between foreign and second language learners, and the related difficulty of eliciting valid and reliable data about language background. Problems are illustrated with reference to a scheme developed in Australia involving the classification of…

Used Rasch analytic procedures to study item bias or differential item functioning in both dichotomous and scalar items on a test of English for academic purposes. Results for 139 college students on a pilot English language test model the approach and illustrate the measurement challenges posed by a diagnostic instrument to measure English…

This article examines the language choices made by native-speaker teachers of Japanese, Korean, German and French in foreign language (FL) classrooms in New Zealand secondary schools. It explores these teachers' patterns of alternation between English, the majority language, and the TL, using both AS-units (Analysis of Speech units), devised by…