Taiwan's central government launched the 2030 Bilingual National Policy in 2018 to develop Taiwan into a Mandarin-English bilingual nation by 2030. It is anticipated that the chain of talent development--education, selection, training, and utilization--should interlock with each other to effectively reach the goal. Being in charge of national…

When implementing standard setting procedures, there are two major concerns: variance between panelists and efficiency in conducting multiple rounds of judgments. With regard to the former, there is concern over the consistency of the cutoff scores made by different panelists. If the cut scores show an inordinately wide range then further rounds…

In a selected response test, aberrant responses such as careless errors and lucky guesses might cause error in ability estimation because these responses do not actually reflect the knowledge that examinees possess. In a computerized adaptive test (CAT), these aberrant responses could further cause serious estimation error due to dynamic item…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the washback effects of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) on English teaching in two applied foreign language departments in Taiwan. One had prescribed its GEPT requirement to its day-division students whereas the other had not. Overall, the GEPT did not induce a high level of washback on…

The General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) was developed in 1999, commissioned by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. The purpose of the test is to provide individuals with a gauge of their English language proficiency and assist employers and educational institutions in selection and placement. Also, it aims to encourage the study of English…

This study examines Taiwanese English as a foreign language (EFL) graduate students' perspectives on paraphrasing strategies. A two-layer scenario survey was developed to identify the reasoning behind students' judgments that certain paraphrasing is appropriate or inappropriate. The first-layer scenario survey is in a true-false format that…

This study investigated language learning strategies used by 418 EFL learners in Taiwan and looked for relationships between learning strategy use and the patterns of strategy use based on language proficiency. The participants reported using compensation strategies most frequently and affective strategies least frequently. The most frequently…

Since 2000, the General English Proficiency Test, a newly developed test of English, has been phased in by the Language Training and Testing Center in Taiwan. It has become the most universally used test of English in Taiwan, a fact that can be evidenced by its aggregate number of registered test takers. This article first describes the…

Public speaking can be very threatening to any native speakers of English, not to mention non-native EFL learners. Impromptu speech, perhaps the most challenging form of public speaking, is however being promoted in every city of the EFL countries. The case in Taiwan is no exceptional. Every year, dozens of impromptu speech contexts are held…

Examination boards are often criticized for their failure to provide evidence of comparability across forms, and few such studies are publicly available. This study aims to investigate the extent to which three forms of the General English Proficiency Test Intermediate Speaking Test (GEPTS-I) are parallel in terms of two types of validity…