This study explores whether and to what extent the background information supplied by 10,155 immigrants who took an official language test in Norwegian affected their chances of passing one, two, or all three parts of the test. The background information included in the analysis was prior education, region (location of their home country),…

This article presents the author's response to Xiaoming Xi's paper titled "How do we go about investigating test fairness?" In the paper, Xi offers "a means to fully integrate fairness investigations and practice". Given the current importance accorded to fairness in the language testing community, Xi makes a case for viewing fairness as an aspect…

The "cloze" test is one possible investigative instrument for predicting text comprehensibility. Conceptual coding of student replacement of deleted words has been considered to be more valid than exact coding, partly because conceptual coding seemed fairer to poorer readers. This paper reports a quantitative study of 447 Australian…

Previous test fairness frameworks have greatly expanded the scope of fairness, but do not provide a means to fully integrate fairness investigations and set priorities. This article proposes an approach to guide practitioners on fairness research and practices. This approach treats fairness as an aspect of validity and conceptualizes it as…

"Pseudowords", or non-real words, were introduced to the Yes/No (YN) vocabulary test format to provide a means of checking for overestimation of word knowledge by test takers. The purpose of this study is to assess the assumption that more pseudoword checks (false alarms) indicate more instances of overestimation of word knowledge in YN…

Discusses the elusiveness of precision in language testing in relation to three major issues of linguistic analysis: 1) universality; 2) combining power; and 3) incorporation of extra language data. The results of a recent English Language Testing Service (ELTS) Test support this relationship. Language testing should accept the centrality of…

Describes a study of multiple-choice and open-ended questions, each presented in the native language and in the second language, on the same second language text. Different methods resulted in different scores. Some methods were found to be more difficult than others and to have a greater effect on students of low-level proficiency. (SED)

Compares student attitudes toward oral or written tests and the relationship of attitude to performance of 170 students enrolled in the advanced reading course of English as a foreign language at Haifa University (Israel). Students preferred written over oral tests. No meaningful relationship was observed between students' attitudes and test…

The extent to which items from the Test of English as a Foreign Language and the First Certificate in English function differently for test-takers of equal ability from different native language and curricular backgrounds was investigated. Results suggest a need for methods like logistic regression to examine nonuniform differential item…

Argues that tests have always been used as a means of political and social control. Maintains that test results are unreliable, especially at the extremes, that their predictive power is weak and that language testers need to be skeptical and need to insist on complete information on candidates' backgrounds for selection decision making. (10…

As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes…

Examined the effects of taking notes during a listening comprehension test containing short monologues. A multiple-choice questionnaire surveyed student reaction to the opportunity. Allowing students to take notes had little effect on their performance, and urging them to do so significantly impaired it. (16 references) (Author/CK)

Notes the increasing use of English language testing in Australia for nonlinguistic purposes in contexts governed by political pressures. Explores recent test examples and the pragmatic considerations giving rise to such test development. (28 references) (Author/CK)

Examines the processes employed by subjects in Hong Kong engaged in an English-as-a-Second-Language discourse cloze test. Think-aloud protocols obtained from test-takers indicate the reasoning and strategies employed in selecting items to complete gaps in the cloze passage. Findings reveal the test-taking behavior of the subjects and presents a…

In this study, planning time was manipulated as a variable in a trial administration of a semi-direct oral interaction test. Discourse analytic techniques were used to determine the nature and/or significance of difference in the elicited discourse across two conditions in terms of complexity and accuracy. Findings suggest that planning time may…