Following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the Iranian context. Secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

Over the recent years, the study of language learning strategies has received much attention worldwide in general, and in Iran in particular. Many scholars have tried to investigate the function of language learning strategies in EFL learning and teaching. Not enough attention, however, has been paid to language skills, especially speaking skill, in Iran. Therefore, the present study aimed at s...

Introduction: In early typical language development, children understand words before they are able to use them in speech. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) generally show impairments in both the comprehension and the production of language. However, the relative degree of delay or impairment in each of these sub-domains may also be atypical and remains less well-understood. Materia...

This paper reports results obtained in benchmark tests conducted within the ARPA Spoken Language program in November and December of 1993. In addition to ARPA contractors, participants included a number of %olunteers", including foreign participants from Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The body of the paper is limited to an outline of the structure of the tests and presents hig...

This article focuses on the use of computers in Language Testing. The first part of the article gives a general introduction to three different kinds of tests administered with a computer: (1) computer-based tests (CBTs), (2) computer-adaptive tests (CATs), and finally (3) web-based tests (WBTs). On the other hand, the second part of the article focuses on self-assessment and web-based tests, p...

Using existing data from several locations across the U.S., this study examined the impact of students’ language background on the outcome of achievement tests. The results of the analyses indicated that students’ assessment results might be confounded by their language background variables. English language learners (ELLs) generally perform lower than non-ELL students on reading, science, and ...

We outline an unsupervised language acquisition algorithm and offer some psycholinguistic support for a model based on it. Our approach resembles the Construction Grammar in its general philosophy, and the Tree Adjoining Grammar in its computational characteristics. The model is trained on a corpus of transcribed child-directed speech (CHILDES). The model’s ability to process novel inputs makes...