Recently, a large number of vocabulary tests have been made available to language teachers, testers, and researchers. Unfortunately, most of them have been launched with inadequate validation evidence. The field of language testing has become increasingly more rigorous in the area of test validation, but developers of vocabulary tests have…

This study sought to investigate how states communicate results for academic achievement and English language proficiency (ELP) assessments to parents who are English learners (EL). This objective was addressed by evaluating: (a) whether score reports and interpretive guides for state academic achievement and ELP assessments in each state were…

This study reports the results of a mixed-methods investigation on the impact of a virtual reality (VR) tool on Iranian EFL learners' willingness to communicate (WTC) and oral proficiency. Twenty upper-intermediate EFL learners were divided into experimental and control groups role-playing as museum guides with and without Google Expeditions VR…

Although the ethnography of speaking is one of the approaches used to analyze discourse (Schiffrin, 1994; Cameron, 2012), its benefits and uses can be applied in the field of language assessment when designing a drug-dispensing, classroom-based test task. In this article, pharmacy specialists and students functioning as members of the…

The objectives of this study are to investigate and compare the total and individual metacognitive strategies used by professional tour guides in four English for Domestic Tourism lessons, and to explore the relationships between the use of metacognitive strategies in these lessons and characteristics of professional tour guide trainees. A total…

The underlying methodological approach of the CEFR is defined as being "action-oriented" and task-based (Council of Europe. 2001. "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment." Cambridge University Press: 9), although it explicitly leaves room for a variety of approaches, since the CEFR…

The aim of this study was to determine whether large variations in the pass rates of different versions of the Taiwanese tour guides' English test were due to inherent differences in the difficulty of the tests. Rasch analysis software was used to measure the difficulty of all items on the 2009 and 2013 versions. It was found that the ability…

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has been increasingly used to inform language policies and teaching practices in Japan. The Japanese Ministry of Education proposed in 2011 that objectives of English curricula at the secondary education level ought to be stated using the "Can do" schemata of the CEFR and…

This paper is a study of a method for teaching German gender and plural assignment developed by the late Donald Steinmetz. My primary source for classroom material was the unpublished handbook for students that Steinmetz co-authored with Donald Nelson, The Joy of Gender: A Student Handbook made available to me by his son, Erik Steinmetz. In the…

There is an increasing sensitivity to the challenges posed by the language of examination papers and of instruction in scientific subjects, especially for non-native speakers of English. It has been observed that in addition to technical subject-specific vocabulary, non-technical words such as instructional verbs have been sources of difficulty,…

In this paper an updated overview of the main errors that Spanish students make when writing the English exam in the University Entrance Examination is provided. To do so, a Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA) (Dagneaux, Denness & Granger, 1998) was conducted on a representative sample of the students who took the exam in June 2008 in Jaen,…

Purpose: The normative group of a norm-referenced test is intended to provide a basis for interpreting test scores. However, the composition of the normative group may facilitate or impede different types of diagnostic interpretations. This article considers who should be included in a normative sample and how this decision must be made relative…

This journal consists of guides to instructional materials and articles on subjects of interest to teachers in bilingual education programs. The following articles and regular features appear in this issue: (1) "Social Class or Culture? -- A Fundamental Issue in the Education of Culturally Different Students," by Frank Angel, an excerpt from a…