Although the operational scoring of the TOEFL iBT speaking section features the overall judgment of an examinee's speaking ability, the evaluation of specific components of speech such as delivery (pace and clarity of speech) and language use (vocabulary and grammar use) may be a promising approach to providing diagnostic information to learners. This study used an evidence-centered design appr...

university of tehran administers a test known as the university of tehran english proficiency test (the utept) to phd candidates on a yearly basis. by definition, the test can be considered a high-stakes one. the validity of high stakes tests needs to be known (roever, 2001). as mesick (1988) maintains, if the validity of high stakes tests are not known, it might have some undesirable consequen...

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinesespeaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary assessment, two practice reading comprehension passages...

This study explores the construct validity of speaking tasks included in the TOEFL iBT (e.g., integrated and independent speaking tasks). Specifically, advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools, MANOVA difference statistics, and discriminant function analyses (DFA) are used to assess the degree to which and in what ways responses to these tasks differ with regard to linguistic characteri...

University of Tehran administers a test known as The University of Tehran English Proficiency Test (the UTEPT) to PhD candidates on a yearly basis. By definition, the test can be considered a high-stakes one. The validity of high stakes tests needs to be known (Roever, 2001). As Mesick (1988) maintains, if the validity of high stakes tests are not known, it might have some undesirable consequen...

Recently, we did some comparative evaluation of the commercial English-to-Japanese MT systems by using the TOEFL, Test of English as a Foreign Language. The passages in the Reading Comprehension part of the Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension section were extracted from a TOEFL guide book [1], and were translated into Japanese by using the MT systems. Then the translated tests were taken by th...