All assessment policies and practices are based on monolingual constructs whereby test-takers are expected to demonstrate their language proficiency in one language at a time. Thus, the construct underlying these assessment approaches and/or scales (e.g., the CEFR) is of language as a closed and finite system that does not enable other languages…

Discusses the historical and present situation in second language testing in the United States, with respect to the major measurement trends represented. Suggests a number of desirable development activities for the future that may help to build on several current initiatives in the field that already show substantial promise for facilitating…

Discusses coverage of language testing issues in the "Modern Language Journal" over the last 80 years. Suggests that overall the articles devoted to language testing show a valuable concern with the use rather than the form of language tests. (Author/VWL)

Presents study conducted using high school Spanish students to demonstrate that either a cloze test or a redundancy test could be used in place of either the MLA total score or an interview test. (Author/BK)

Discussion of six potential sources of anxiety in the second language classroom, student manifestations of anxiety, and possible remedies covers such areas as personal and interpersonal anxieties, learner beliefs about language learning, instructor beliefs about language teaching, instructor-learner interactions, classroom procedures, and language…

Reports a study gauging the average oral proficiency as measured by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) of college students (n=20) studying German at the end of their fourth semester. Discussion centers on reasonable expectations for high school graduation and for college language…

Examined the development of the word knowledge of two groups of advanced learners of French as a second language by means of a slightly revised version of a particular test format. Studied the type of distractor most suited to the participants, distinguished the role of three types of associations, and linked qualitative aspects of word knowledge…

Documents three coordinated, exploratory studies that developed empirically a framework to describe the decisions that experienced writing assessors make when evaluating English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language (ESL/EFL) written compositions. The studies are part of ongoing research to prepare a new scoring scheme and tasks for the writing component…

Tested how domain-related knowledge, syntactic complexity, and reading topic influence inference generation in the written recalls of English-speaking participants after they read Spanish historical texts. Three types of inferences were examined: within-text inferences, elaborative inferences, and incorrect inferences. (Author/JL)

Reports on a study comparing student performances and test reliabilities for the German Speaking Test, a semi-direct tape-mediated oral proficiency test (GST) developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics, and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Oral Proficiency Interviews. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the "fill-in" test, explains how to construct it, and gives statistical evidence for its effectiveness in testing English as a foreign language reading comprehension. In addition, a comparison is made between this test and the more conventional multiple-choice and cloze tests, citing the advantages and disadvantages of each.…

Examined the validity of the pragmatic approach to test difficulty put forward by Child (1987). This study investigated whether the Child discourse-type hierarchy predicts text difficulty for second-language readers. Results suggested that this hierarchy may provide a sound basis for developing foreign-language tests when it is applied by trained…

Spanish students in four inner-city high schools were first tested for conceptual tempo and then given the Test of Oral Proficiency in Spanish (TOPS). It is concluded that speeded and timed tests not only allow impulsive examinees to answer too soon, but often pressure normally reflective examinees to respond impulsively. (EJS)

This is the eighteenth in a series of catalogues of documents in the ERIC system that are of interest to teachers and researchers in foreign languages and linguistics. The documents cited in the present list appeared in the monthly ERIC abstract journal "Resources in Education" (RIE) from July through December 1976. The list is compiled from all…

This is the fifteenth in a series of catalogues of ERIC documents of interest to teachers and researchers in foreign languages and linguistics. The documents cited in the present list appeared in "Resources in Education" from January through June 1975. Titles are listed under the following headings and subheadings: (1) general: administration,…