This longitudinal, multi-semester study investigates the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) in university-level communicative Spanish classrooms to find out how instructor feedback affects student performance on IPA assessments, if at all, and in what ways do teachers and students use feedback from the IPAs in their teaching and learning, if…

In this article, the author offers recommendations for pedagogical practice based on the assessment results of uppercase letter-name knowledge among Spanish-speaking preschool children from low-income backgrounds.

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that states make efforts to offer statewide achievement tests in languages, other than English, that are present to a significant extent in the state. Currently, four states offer Spanish reading or language arts assessments as part of their statewide testing program. In these states, practitioners may be…

Research on the language-literature divide in undergraduate second language programs documents the challenge of engaging literature learners in classroom discourse which is conducive to their developing interpersonal speaking skills as measured on the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Scale. In this study, Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs) were…

The Hybrid Text Comprehension cloze (HyTeC-cloze) (Kleijn et al. Lang Test 36:553--572, 2019) is a procedure developed for the Dutch language that has been proved to be a valid and reliable measure of text comprehension beyond the sentence level. Given its advantages, including its relatively rapid construction and scoring and performance compared…

This study took a dynamic approach to second language (L2) comprehensibility, examining how listeners construct comprehensibility profiles for L2 Spanish speakers during the listening task and what features enhance or diminish comprehensibility. Listeners were 24 native Spanish speakers who evaluated 2-5 minute audio clips recorded by three…

The comparability of various assessments of literacy achievement and growth adopted for use by the Houston Independent School District (HISD) was the focus of this study. Renaissance 360 is the universal screener used by campuses throughout the district. In contrast, Benchmark Running Records (BRR) are campus-specific, and each campus is able to…

Advancing equity in early childhood education is crucial as our broader society faces issues of inequities across systems, including education. Professionals must honor children's home language and cultural contexts, coming from a perspective of value and respect rather than from a traditionally dominant Eurocentric perspective. Through this…

The self-report and think-aloud approaches are the two dominant methodologies to measure metacognition. This is problematic, since they generate respondent and confirmation biases, respectively. The Meta-Performance Test is an innovative battery, which evaluates metacognition based on the respondent's performance, mitigating the aforementioned…

Background: Gaps between dual language learners (DLLs) and monolingual English-speaking children have been reported at kindergarten entry, and many DLL children are classified as long-term English learners, having less access to the general curriculum in the upper grades (NASEM, 2017). The supposed underperformance of DLLs might be due to the…

Recent literature in the field of L2 vocabulary assessment has advocated for the development of written receptive vocabulary tests such as Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs) that use: (a) meaning-recall item formats, (b) a minimum of 40 item counts per 1,000-frequency band to improve level estimates, and (c) lemmas (not word-families) as the lexical…

This study examines how three bilingual education teachers engaged with a transitional bilingual policy while balancing the demands of monolingual high-stakes assessments in ways that contributed to advocacy on behalf of their bilingual learners. The consequences of high-stakes accountability can be exacerbated in bilingual settings, because in…

In this chapter, we analyse the practices and attitudes of German teachers regarding assessment of refugee students learning Spanish or English as foreign languages. The data were collected through interviews with ten Spanish or English teachers dealing with refugee students in their classrooms in secondary schools in Hamburg in 2017 (Thölkes,…

To this day, there are only a few studies that have used a controlled instructional intervention on specific linguistic structures to investigate if language instruction is beneficial for heritage learners (HLs), in the same way it is for second (L2) language learners, and more research in this area is rapidly needed (Bowles, 2018). The results…

Online (OL) second language (L2) courses are becoming more widely offered in the United States; however, little information exists about the effectiveness of OL L2 courses beyond one semester or course. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess Spanish students' oral proficiency after completing one year of OL only L2 courses. At the end…