Language tests are useful for many purposes, including monitoring language learning progress and evaluating language programs. This study investigated the interpretations and usefulness of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview -- Computer (OPIc) scores across four languages at a large US…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

This study represents program-level action research. A U.S. university Spanish language program had a goal for students to reach the ACTFL (2012) Intermediate Mid level after 2 years. An empirical question that resulted after regular end-of-year testing was whether the students were doing their best on assessments. To investigate this, 253…

Captions provide a useful aid to language learners for comprehending videos and learning new vocabulary, aligning with theories of multimedia learning. Multimedia learning predicts that a learner's working memory (WM) influences the usefulness of captions. In this study, we present two eye-tracking experiments investigating the role of WM in…

This study investigates caption-reading behavior by foreign language (L2) learners and, through eye-tracking methodology, explores the extent to which the relationship between the native and target language affects that behavior. Second-year (4th semester) English-speaking learners of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish watched 2 videos…

This study investigates whether raters' knowledge of test takers' first language (L1) affects how the raters orient themselves to the task of rating oral speech. The authors qualitatively investigated the effects of accent familiarity on raters' score assignment processes. Twenty-six trained raters with a second language of Mandarin Chinese,…

This study examines the relationship between learners' production of modified output and their working memory (WM) capacity. The task-based interactions of 42 college-level, native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a foreign language were examined. A relationship was found between learners' WM test scores and their tendency to modify output.…

This study investigated whether raters' second language (L2) background and the first language (L1) of test takers taking the TOEFL iBT® Speaking test were related through scoring. After an initial 4-hour training period, a group of 107 raters (mostly of learners of Chinese, Korean, and Spanish), listened to a selection of 432 speech samples that…

This study investigated the effects of captioning during video-based listening activities. Second- and fourth-year learners of Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian watched three short videos with and without captioning in randomized order. Spanish learners had two additional groups: one watched the videos twice with no captioning, and another…

Students' computer access and literacy in the context of CALL has seen very little empirical investigation. This study surveyed 911 students in basic college foreign language programs to estimate their readiness for hybrid language instruction. The questions on the survey covered issues concerning students' ownership and accessibility of…

Rapid demographic changes and an increasing recognition of the critical need for professionals who are proficient in languages other than English have led to an interest in developing language programs and classes for "heritage language learners" students who are raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken and who speak or at…

The increasing number of students who enter U.S. schools from homes where languages other than English are spoken, and the recognition that proficiency in non-English languages is a valuable national resource, have generated interest in the field of heritage language instruction. A heritage language student is a language student who is raised in a…