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Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as key element and well established) in written contexts. A total of 343 tertiary students completed a background questionnaire (including demographic information, IELTS scores, and learning experience), the ACTs, and the Vocabulary Size Test. Forty-four participants also took part in post-test interviews to share reflections on the tests and retook the ACTs verbally. The findings showed that the scoring inference based on analyses of test item characteristics, testing conditions, and scoring procedures was partially supported. The generalization inference, based on the consistency of item measures and testing occasions, was justified. The extrapolation inference, drawn from correlations with other measures and factors such as collocation frequency and learning experience, received partial support. Suggestions for increasing the degree of support for the inferences are discussed. The present study reinforces the value of validation research and generates the momentum for test developers to continue this practice with other vocabulary tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them for widespread use. A great deal of work on vocabulary assessment can be seen in terms of the somewhat problematic distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. Breadth refers to assessing vocabulary size, based on a large sample of words from a frequency list. New research is raising questions about the suitability of word frequency norms derived from large corpora, the choice of the word family as the unit of analysis, the selection of appropriate test formats, and the role of guessing in test-taker performance. Depth of knowledge goes beyond the basic form-meaning link to consider other aspects of word knowledge. The concept of word association has played a dominant role in the design of such tests, but there is a need to create test formats to assess knowledge of word parts as well as a range of multi-word items apart from collocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated Vietnamese EFL learners’ knowledge of verb–noun and adjective–noun collocations at the first three 1,000 word frequency levels, and the extent to which five factors (node word frequency, collocation frequency, mutual information score, congruency, and part of speech) predicted receptive knowledge of collocation. Knowledge of single-word items at the same word frequency levels was also examined. The results indicated that the participants were not close to a level of mastery of collocational knowledge at any word frequency level; knew less than 50% of each type of collocation overall; and that their knowledge of collocation significantly decreased at each level. The analysis also revealed that there were significant large positive correlations between knowledge of collocations and single-word items, and that node word frequency was the strongest predictor of receptive knowledge of collocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compared three common vocabulary test formats, the Yes/No test, the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS), and the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT), as measures of vocabulary difficulty. Vocabulary difficulty was defined as the item difficulty estimated through Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis. Three tests were given to 165 Japanese students, resulting in five measures of vocabulary knowledge and four measures of word difficulty. Analyses included item and score factor analysis, unidimensionality, local independence, and correlations. Results indicate that these are reliable tests. Tests of unidimensionality suggest these tests are essentially measuring one major latent trait, which can be interpreted as a factor for word knowledge. Strong correlations of the scores with each other provide evidence of concurrent validity, and for the interpretation of the scores as indicative of word knowledge. Correlations with other methods of estimating word difficulty, such as transformed frequency, length of word, or number of syllables, suggest that of these methods, the log of frequencies from very large corpora gives the best estimate of word difficulty. However, direct testing of vocabulary difficulty appears to, in the words of Kreuz (1987), “provide a better account of recognition latencies than do counts based on printed word frequency” (p. 159). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The content that test-takers attempt to convey is not always included in the construct definition of general English oral proficiency tests, although some English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) speaking tests and most writing tests tend to place great emphasis on the evaluation of the content or ideas in the performance. This study investigated the relative contribution of linguistic criteria and the elaboration of speech content to scores on a test of speaking proficiency. A speaking test was designed and administered to Japanese undergraduates to determine what criteria English teachers associate with general oral proficiency. Nine raters were recruited to rate 30 students’ monologues on three topics, using intuitive judgments of oral proficiency (referred to as Overall communicative effectiveness). Following this, they assigned scores to the monologues using five criteria: Grammatical accuracy, Fluency, Vocabulary range, Pronunciation, and Content elaboration/development. The raters were also asked to provide open-ended written comments on the factors contributing to their intuitive judgments. Statistical analyses of the scores – Rasch measurement, multiple regression, and multivariate generalizability (G) theory analysis – revealed that Content elaboration/development made a substantive contribution to the intuitive judgments and composite score. The present study enriches our understanding of general oral proficiency and the construct definition of proficiency tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the associations between the speaking proficiency of 181 adult learners of Dutch as a second language and their linguistic competences. Performance in eight speaking tasks was rated on a scale of communicative adequacy. After extrapolation of these ratings to the Overall Oral Production scale of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001), 80 and 30 participants (on average per speaking task) were found to be, respectively, at the B1 and B2 levels of this scale. The following linguistic competences were tapped with non-communicative tasks: productive vocabulary knowledge, productive knowledge of grammar, speed of lexical retrieval, speed of articulation, speed of sentence building, and pronunciation skills. Discriminant analyses showed that all linguistic competences, except speed of articulation, discriminated participants at the two levels of oral production. Subsequent comparisons showed that the distance between B1ers and B2ers was smaller in knowledge of high-frequency words than in knowledge of medium- and low-frequency words. Extrapolation from scores on the vocabulary test yielded estimations of productive vocabularies of, on average, 4000 and 7000 words for B1ers and B2ers, respectively. The grammar test assessed grammatical knowledge in 10 domains. B2ers were found to outperform B1ers on all parts of the test. Thus, the differences in lexical and grammatical knowledge of B1ers and B2ers appear to be a matter of degree, rather than a matter of category or domain. The paper ends with a research agenda for a linguistic underpinning of the CEFR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]