While several test concordance tables have been published, the research underpinning such tables has rarely been examined in detail. This study aimed to survey the publically available studies or documentation underpinning the test concordance tables of the providers of four major international language tests, all accepted by the Australian…

The quality of sign language interpreting (SLI) is a gripping construct among practitioners, educators and researchers, calling for reliable and valid assessment. There has been a diverse array of methods in the extant literature to measure SLI quality, ranging from traditional error analysis to recent rubric scoring. In this study, we want to…

Automated essay scoring (AES) has emerged as a secondary or as a sole marker for many high-stakes educational assessments, in native and non-native testing, owing to remarkable advances in feature engineering using natural language processing, machine learning, and deep-neural algorithms. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness…

This study examines the decision-making behaviors of raters with varying levels of experience while assessing EFL essays of distinct qualities. The data were collected from 28 raters with varying levels of rating experience and working at the English language departments of different universities in Turkey. Using a 10-point analytic rubric, each…

A short training program for evaluating responses to an essay writing task consisted of scoring 20 training essays with immediate feedback about the correct score. The same scoring session also served as a certification test for trainees. Participants with little or no previous rating experience completed this session and 14 trainees who passed an…

Elicited imitation (EI) has been widely used to examine second language (L2) proficiency and development and was an especially popular method in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, as the field embraced more communicative approaches to both instruction and assessment, the use of EI diminished, and the construct-related validity of EI scores as a…

In language programs, it is crucial to place incoming students into appropriate levels to ensure that course curriculum and materials are well targeted to their learning needs. Deciding how and where to set cutscores on placement tests is thus of central importance to programs, but previous studies in educational measurement disagree as to which…

Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean…

The assessment of oral language is now quite commonly done in pairs or groups, and there is a growing body of research which investigates the related issues (e.g. May, 2007). Writing generally tends to be thought of as an individual activity, although a small number of studies have documented the advantages of collaboration in writing in the…

This study used a mixed methods research approach to examine how native English-speaking (NS) and non-native English-speaking (NNS) teachers assess students' oral English performance. The evaluation behaviors of two groups of teachers (12 Canadian NS teachers and 12 Korean NNS teachers) were compared with regard to internal consistency, severity,…

The study reported here examined the evaluation criteria used to assess the proficiency and effectiveness of the language produced in an oral performance test of English conducted in an American university context. Empirical methods were used to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively transcriptions of the Oral English Tests (OET) of 44…

This article reports the results of a research study to determine the washback effect of an oral assessment system on some areas of the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The research combined quantitative and qualitative research methods within a comparative study between an experimental group and a comparison group.…

A growing concern in teacher-based assessment, particularly in assessing English language development in high-stakes contexts, is our inadequate understanding of the means by which teachers make assessment decisions. This article adopts a sociocultural approach to report on the background and findings of a comparative study of ESL teachers'…

Uses structural equation modelling to examine the relationship between learning strategy use and second-language test performance (SLTP) in 1,382 high- and low-ability test takers. Results showed metacognitive strategy use and SLTP models produced similar factorial structures for each group; cognitive strategy use models differed. This suggests…

The central purpose of this study was to empirically evaluate an in-depth vocabulary knowledge measure in the context of developing the new TOEFL test. The study was carried out with a sample of 207 international students attending an intensive English as a second language (ESL) program in a major Canadian university, in order to determine whether…