Fairness of language tests and testing practices has always been a concern among test developers and test users. In the past decade educational and language assessment researchers have begun to focus directly on fairness and related matters such as test standards, test bias and equity and ethics for testing professionals. The 19th annual Language Testing Research Colloquium held in 1997 in Orlando, Florida, brought this overall concern into sharp focus by having 'Fairness in Language Testing' as its theme. The conference presentations and discussions attempted to understand the concept of...

Learner Strategy Use and Performance on Language Tests investigates the relationships between learner strategy use and performance on second language tests. To this effect, it examines the construct validity of two questionnaires, designed within a model of human information processing, that purport to measure testakers' self-reported cognitive and metacognitive strategy use. It then examines the construct validity of the FCE Anchor test, developed by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, to measure second language proficiency. It is a useful resource for those interested...

Proceedings of the 2001 ALTE conference.

This book reports on a two-part study: the validation of a test of spoken English for Norwegian secondary school pupils and the corpus-based investigation of the role played by 'smallwords'.

Inevitably, it is in the most commonly used languages that the vocabulary of language testing and assessment is most highly developed, and for which most of the literature has been produced. A multilingual glossary has a significant role to play in encouraging the development of language testing in less widely taught languages. The idea of producing a multilingual glossary of assessment and language testing terms has grown out of the needs experienced by members of the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE) while engaged in work on language testing projects. It is anticipated that...

The focus on careful reading in theoretical literature has meant that we have somewhat ignored reading behaviours such as skimming, scanning and search reading in the teaching and testing of reading. These theories do not explain how readers process texts quickly and selectively. The development of the Advanced English Reading Test (AERT) for university students in the People's Republic of China under the auspices of the National College English Test Committee was the vehicle for investigating the nature of and the relationships between skimming, scanning, search reading and careful reading....

This critical history covers 70 years of two major UCLES / Cambridge ESOL international exams: the First Certificate in English (FCE) and the Certificate in Advanced English (CAE). The story begins with the development and first sitting of the FCE (then called the Lower Certificate in English) in 1939. The book then traces subsequent developments, including the initiation of FCE under its current name in 1975, the introduction of CAE in 1991, as well as reviews, major revisions, and modifications, leading to the update of FCE and CAE for December 2008. On the way, the history attempts to...

This book studies the effect of background knowledge on reading comprehension and investigates the claim from the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) that tertiary level students for whom English is a second language should be given reading proficiency tests in their own academic subject areas. The volume includes a comprehensive overview of recent research into reading, in both a first and second language, an account of the development of the reading subtests for IELTS, a full description of the pilot and main phases of the empirical study, a discussion of the relative importance of...

This book investigates the influence of test taker characteristics on performance in tests of English as a foreign language by exploring the relationships between these two groups of variables. Data from a test taker questionnaire and performance on the First Certificate in English (FCE) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) were used for the study. The research was conducted in a construct validation context and aimed to increase our understanding of the individual differences among test takers that influence their test performance. The application of a structural modeling...

Verbal protocol analysis (VPA) is a methodology that is being used extensively by researchers. Recently, individuals working in the area of testing, and in language testing in particular, have begun to appreciate the roles VPA might play in the development and evaluation of assessment instruments. VPA is a complex methodology however, and individuals choosing to use the technique require some degree of training in order to maximize the benefits in adopting this approach, and in order to avoid some of the more common misunderstandings and pitfalls associated with the use of verbal data. Usiing...