Introducing Challenges in Language Testing Around the World

Author(s):  
Betty Lanteigne ◽  
Christine Coombe ◽  
James Dean Brown
Keyword(s):  
English Today ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun-Ju Kim

Native speakers of English are a minority; there are far more non-native speakers in the world (cf. Kachru 1997, Pennycook 2001). In addition, native speakers' standard or ‘correct’ English, in terms of its grammar and phonology, is not always useful or even appropriate in international contexts (cf. Gisborne 2000, Newbrook 1998, Shim 1999). However, despite global changes in the use of the language, the norms for ENL (English as a Native Language) remain dominant, most notably for the assessment of oral proficiency. Yet it is a major deficiency in the use of international oral tests that the proficiency of non-native speakers is measured against unrealistic and irrelevant standards (cf. Jenkins, 1996). The present paper focuses on the need to revisit the testing of English oral proficiency for non-native speakers, bearing in mind that English is used for world-wide communication and that being able to understand one another (cf. McKay, 2002) is the most important goal.


Author(s):  
Betty Lanteigne ◽  
Christine Coombe ◽  
James Dean Brown
Keyword(s):  

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. i-ii

As Stephen Stoynoff points out in his state-of-the-art review of four major international ESOL examinations, more than 500,000 examinees take each of these tests annually, making them among the most widely used ESOL examinations in the world. The inferences and decisions made with the scores from these tests have significant consequences for examinees, score users, and society. Thus, his review will contribute to the professional discourse in several ways: by providing a context for discussing some of the fundamental considerations and persistent issues in language assessment, by demonstrating how language testing research and concerns for test consequences are affecting the test design and validation activities related to these four extremely influential assessments of L2 ability, and above all by encouraging a thorough consideration of important aspects of these high-stakes assessments. The paper is accompanied by a comparative review of books by Christine Coombe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 209-224
Author(s):  
Frank Giraldo

With a communicative approach to language testing, performance assessment has taken on a prominent role in testing systems around the world. Specifically, task-based assessment (TBA) is now being used to make inferences about people’s language ability and what they can do with this construct under realistic communicative scenarios. This reflection paper discusses central issues in TBA, and in doing so, it shows that TBA can be observed through a classroom-assessment lens, an idea I present as Instructional Task-Based Assessment (ITBA). The paper starts by reviewing the meaning of tasks, then discusses problems with TBA and finally offers a checklist for teachers to explore TBA in classroom contexts. I also include limitations of the proposal and conclusions


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Gantman ◽  
Robin Gomila ◽  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽  
...  

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lifshitz ◽  
T. M. Luhrmann

Abstract Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learning with emerging prediction-based models of perception.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazim Keven

Abstract Hoerl & McCormack argue that animals cannot represent past situations and subsume animals’ memory-like representations within a model of the world. I suggest calling these memory-like representations as what they are without beating around the bush. I refer to them as event memories and explain how they are different from episodic memory and how they can guide action in animal cognition.


1994 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 139-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Rybák ◽  
V. Rušin ◽  
M. Rybanský

AbstractFe XIV 530.3 nm coronal emission line observations have been used for the estimation of the green solar corona rotation. A homogeneous data set, created from measurements of the world-wide coronagraphic network, has been examined with a help of correlation analysis to reveal the averaged synodic rotation period as a function of latitude and time over the epoch from 1947 to 1991.The values of the synodic rotation period obtained for this epoch for the whole range of latitudes and a latitude band ±30° are 27.52±0.12 days and 26.95±0.21 days, resp. A differential rotation of green solar corona, with local period maxima around ±60° and minimum of the rotation period at the equator, was confirmed. No clear cyclic variation of the rotation has been found for examinated epoch but some monotonic trends for some time intervals are presented.A detailed investigation of the original data and their correlation functions has shown that an existence of sufficiently reliable tracers is not evident for the whole set of examinated data. This should be taken into account in future more precise estimations of the green corona rotation period.


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