Background: The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (Council of Europe 2001) has, over the past decade, come to be widely used as a reference tool for teaching, learning and assessment (Alderson 2002; North 2014). The focus of the current study is on scaling the China Standards of English (CSE) vocabulary descriptors for College English education in Mainland China, where College Engli...

Background: The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) developed by Council of Europe has been gaining popularity since its publication in 2001, and reshaping the practice in language teaching, learning and assessment not only across the European continent but also in many other places such as Japan (CEFR-J project). Some pioneering work was done in China over the last ten years, leading...

The objectives of this study were (a) to examine the writing performance of L2 learners on the level-specific tasks based on Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and (b) to study the likely difference between students' self-assessed level of writing and those reported by raters. The study was conducted with 138 Iranian students at BA and MA levels in Alborz Institute of Higher Educatio...

Background: The present study examined the validity of a university-based speaking assessment (Test of Oral Proficiency in English, TOPE for short) in mainland China. The speaking assessment was developed to meet the standards (Standard for Oral Proficiency in English, SOPE for short) set for teaching and learning of the oral English by the university. Methods: The degree of interaction among c...

This paper reports on a 1-year longitudinal study that aimed at investigating the relationship between intermediate EFL learners’ development of reading and writing proficiency while delineating a range of linguistic features present in a set of 30 reading comprehension texts and 350 written essays. Data (reading comprehension exam scores and written essays) were collected from a junior high sc...

On the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) scale, the average reading comprehension level of the Dutch population is B1 and the average level of text provided by Dutch government organisations requires a considerably higher reading skills level (C1). This means that part of the population may have difficulty reading texts delivered to them by their own government. We bui...

BACKGROUND Criterion-referenced interpretations of tests are highly necessary, which usually involves the difficult task of establishing cut scores. Contrasting with other Item Response Theory (IRT)-based standard setting methods, a non-judgmental approach is proposed in this study, in which Item Characteristic Curve (ICC) transformations lead to the final cut scores. METHOD eCat-Listening, a...

At present there are relatively few vocabulary lists for Swedish describing modern vocabulary as well as being adapted to language learners’ needs. In Europe including Sweden there exist approaches to unify ways of working consistently with language learning, one example worth naming in this respect is the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) which provides guidelines for systematic ap...

This exploratory article describes (1) the self-reported instructional practices of a group 103 Kindergarten to Grade 12 French-as-a-second-language (FSL) teachers from school boards across Ontario, Canada before and after intensive extensive professional learning about Common European Framework Reference (CEFR) (2) areas strength opportunities for improvement in FSL proficiency 434 students On...