Many English-medium universities employ a compensatory model to establish cutscores on English language proficiency tests for student admissions. In this model, students can have different scores on different sections of the test provided their overall score meets the admission cutscore. This practice raises questions regarding potential variation…

Language proficiency testing has long played a role as both facilitator and barrier in global migration. This paper outlines how Canada and other traditional migrant destination countries use English-language proficiency testing for immigration, asylum and resettlement, and citizenship. It identifies commonalities between these three related areas…

Placement tests are used to support a particular need in a local context--to determine the best starting place for a student entering a specific programme of language study. This brief report will focus on the development of an innovative placement test with self-directed elements for our local needs at a university in Canada for students studying…

Designed to gauge the actions, skills, and strategies that students use to identify, extract, and synthesize information from multiple source materials, integrated writing tasks are particularly challenging for ESL writers. Previous research tended to focus on a limited number of integrated tasks, mostly summaries of one or two sources, thus…

The Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program (CELPIP) Test was designed for immigration and citizenship in Canada. CELPIP is a computer-based English-language proficiency test which covers all four skills. This test review provides a description of the test and its construct, tasks, and delivery. Then, it appraises CELPIP for…

This study examined the writing score and writing feature changes of 562 repeat test takers who took the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program--General (CELPIP--General) test at least three times, with a short (30-40 day) interval between the first and second attempts and a longer (90-180 day) interval between the first and third…

This study at a Canadian university grew out of the need to know whether students acquired academic vocabulary incidentally through text exposure (extensive reading) in class. The ability to explicitly teach all the words on the academic word list is an unreasonable expectation for a one-semester course. This study, therefore, investigated whether…

Children's oral language proficiency (OLP) is integral for developing literacy skills. Storytelling or retelling is often used by parents and educators to elicit children's OLP, yet it is less commonly used for assessment purposes. Leveraged by natural language processing and machine learning, this study examined the extent to which computational…

This study investigates the role of emotional linguistic input in learning novel words with abstract and concrete denotations. It is widely accepted that concrete words are processed more easily than abstract ones. Several theories of vocabulary acquisition additionally propose a critical role of sensorimotor and emotional information during novel…

Since its implementation in 2004, the Canadian English Language Benchmark Assessment for Nurses (CELBAN) has been accepted as evidence of language ability for licensure of internationally educated nurses (IENs) in Canada. This article focuses on the complexities of sustaining an occupation-specific assessment over time. The authors reference the…

Internationally educated nurses' (IENs) English language proficiency is critical to professional licensure as communication is a key competency for safe practice. The Canadian English Language Benchmark Assessment for Nurses (CELBAN) is Canada's only Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB) referenced examination used in the context of healthcare…

Seeking evidence to support content validity is essential to test validation. This is especially the case in contexts where test scores are interpreted in relation to external proficiency standards and where new test content is constantly being produced to meet test administration and security demands. In this paper, we describe a modified…

Many English language proficiency (ELP) tests used for university admissions and placement now include integrated writing tasks that require examinees to use external sources when writing. Integrated writing tasks improve test authenticity and impact, but they raise several validity questions, such as what academic language skills they engage and…

The Canadian Academic English Language (CAEL) assessment is a proficiency test for university admission. Most research has focused on the paper edition, not the recent computer edition (CE). Validity research on other proficiency tests found that relationships between proficiency scores and academic achievement measures can be tenuous because…

Bilingual children's dominance can predict a variety of language and cognitive outcomes. The purpose of this study was to test the validity of parents' classifications of 3- to 6-year-old bilingual children's dominance against relative receptive vocabulary scores. In Study 1, the parents' classifications of Mandarin-English bilingual children's…