Proficiency descriptors based on a scale-anchoring study of the new TOELF iBT reading test

Language Testing

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 417-444

  Garcia Gomez, Pablo ^a   Noah, Aris ^a   Schedl, Mary ^a   Wright, Christine ^a   Yolkut, Aline ^a  

^a EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34447282550     PISSN: 02655322     EISSN: 14770946     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0265532207077209     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Alderson, J.C. 1990a: Testing reading comprehension skills (Part one). Reading in a Foreign Language 6, 425-38.
2. Alderson, J.C. 1990b: Testing reading comprehension skills (Part two). Reading in a Foreign Language 7, 465-503.
3. Alderson, J.C. 2000: Assessing reading. New York: Cambridge University Press.
4. Alderson, J.C. and Lukmani, Y. 1989: Cognition and reading: Cognitive levels as embodied in test questions. Reading in a Foreign Language 5, 353-70.
5. Barrett, T.C. 1968: What is reading? In Clymer, T., editors, Innovation and change in reading instruction. 67th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, University of Chicago Press.
6. Bloom, B.S., Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H. and Kratwohl, D.R., editors, 1956: Taxonomy of educational objectives: Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay.
7. Carroll, J.B. 1993: Test theory and the behavioral scaling of test performance. In Fredericksen, N., Mislevy, R.J. and Bejar, I., editors, Test theory for a new generation of tests. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 297-322.
8. Davies, A. and Widdowson, H. 1974: The teaching of reading and writing. In Allen, J.P.B. and Corder, S.P., editors, Techniques in applied linguistics, Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9. Davis, F.B. 1968: Research in comprehension in reading. Reading Research Quarterly 3, 499-545.
10. Enright, M.K., Grabe, W., Koda, K., Mosenthal, P., Mulcahy-Ernt, P. and Schedl, M. 2000: TOEFL 2000 Reading Framework: A Working Paper. TOEFL Monograph Series Report 17. Educational Testing Service.
11. Enright, M.K. and Schedl, M. 2000: Reading for a reason: Using reader purpose to guide test design. TOEFL Internal Report, Educational Testing Service.
12. Freedle, R. and Kostin, I. 1993: The prediction of TOEFL reading comprehension item difficulty for expository prose passages for three item types: Main idea, inference, and supporting idea items. TOEFL Research Report 44, Educational Testing Service.
13. Freedle, R. 1997: The relevance of multiple-choice reading test data in studying expository passage comprehension: The saga of a 15 year effort towards an experimental/correlational merger. Discourse Processes 23, 399-440.
14. Gernsbacher, M.A. 1990: Language comprehension as structure building. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
15. Gernsbacher, M.A. 1996: The structure-building framework: What it is, what it might also be, and why. In Britton, B.K. and Graesser, A.C., editors, Models of text understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 289-311.
16. Gernsbacher, M.A. 1997: Two decades of structure building. Discourse Processes 23, 265-304.
17. Jaeger, R.M. 2003: NAEP validity studies: Reporting the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NCES. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 11.
18. Kintsch, W. 1993: Information accretion and reduction in text processing: Inferences. Discourse Processes 16, 193-202.
19. Kintsch, W. 1998: Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Oxford: Cambridge.
20. Kirsch, I.S. and Mosenthal, P.B. 1990: Exploring document literacy: Variables underlying the performance of young adults. Reading Research Quarterly 25, 5-30.
21. Linn, R.L. and Dunbar, S. 1992: Issues in the design and reporting of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Journal of Educational Measurement 29, 177-94.
22. Lumley, T. 1993: The notion of subskills in reading comprehension tests: An EAP example. Language Testing 10, 211-34.
23. Lunzer, E., Waite, M. and Dolan, T. 1979: Comprehension and comprehension skills. In Lunzer, E. and Garnder, K., editors, The effective use of reading. London: Heinemann Educational, 37-71.
24. Mosenthal, P.B. 1996: Understanding the strategies of document literacy and their conditions of use. Journal of Educational Psychology 88, 314-32.
25. Munby, J. 1978: Communicative syllabus design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26. Nissan, S., De Vincenzi, F. and Tang, K.L. 1996: An analysis of factors affecting the difficulty of dialogue items in TOEFL listeningcomprehension. TOEFL Research Report 51, Educational Testing Service.
27. North, B. 2000: The development of a common framework scale of language proficiency. New York: Peter Lang.
28. Phillips, G.W., Mullis, I.V.S., Bourque, M.L., Williams, P.L., Hambleton, R.K., Owen, E.H. and Barton, P.E. 1993: Interpreting NAEP scales, NCES 93421. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education.
29. Schedl, M., Gordon, A., Carey, P.A. and Tang, L.T. 1996: An analysis of the dimensionality of TOEFL reading comprehension items. TOEFL Research Report 53, Educational Testing Service.
30. Sheehan, K.M. 1997: A tree-based approach to proficiency scaling and diagnostic assessment. Journal of Educational Measurement 34, 333-52.
31. Sheehan, K.M., Ginther, A. and Schedl, M. 1999: The development of a proficiency scale for the TOEFL reading comprehension section. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Association for Applied Linguistics, Stamford, CT (March, 1999).
32. Tatsuoka, K., Birenbaum, M., Lewis, C. and Sheehan, K. 1993: Proficiency scaling based on conditional probability functions for attributes. ETS Research Report RR-93-50-ONR, Educational Testing Service.