Test of English as a Foreign Language is a standardized test to measure the English language ability of non-native speakers wishing to enroll in English-speaking universities. The test is accepted by more than 11,000 universities and other institutions in over 190 countries and territories. TOEFL is one of several major English-language tests worldwide, including IELTS, Duolingo English Test, Cambridge Assessment English, and Trinity College London exams.
Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a Princeton address.
The International English Language Testing System is an international standardized test of English language proficiency for non-native English language speakers. It is jointly managed by the British Council, IDP and Cambridge English, and was established in 1989. IELTS is one of the major English-language tests in the world. The IELTS test has two modules: Academic and General Training. IELTS One Skill Retake was introduced in 2023, which allows a test taker to retake any one section of the test.
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment, abbreviated in English as CEFR, CEF, or CEFRL, is a guideline used to describe achievements of learners of foreign languages across Europe and, increasingly, in other countries. The CEFR is also intended to make it easier for educational institutions and employers to evaluate the language qualifications of candidates for education admission or employment. Its main aim is to provide a method of learning, teaching, and assessing that applies to all languages in Europe.
The Malaysian University English Test is a test of English language proficiency, largely used for university admissions in Malaysia. The test is set and run by the Malaysian Examinations Council. MUET is largely recognised in Malaysia and Singapore, with limited recognition in other countries worldwide.
The Eiken Test in Practical English Proficiency, informally Eiken and often called STEP Eiken or the STEP Test, is an English proficiency test conducted by the Eiken Foundation of Japan, a public-interest incorporated foundation. The foundation is backed by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).
Automatic pronunciation assessment is the use of speech recognition to verify the correctness of pronounced speech, as distinguished from manual assessment by an instructor or proctor. Also called speech verification, pronunciation evaluation, and pronunciation scoring, the main application of this technology is computer-aided pronunciation teaching (CAPT) when combined with computer-aided instruction for computer-assisted language learning (CALL), speech remediation, or accent reduction. Pronunciation assessment does not determine unknown speech but instead, knowing the expected word(s) in advance, it attempts to verify the correctness of the learner's pronunciation and ideally their intelligibility to listeners, sometimes along with often inconsequential prosody such as intonation, pitch, tempo, rhythm, and stress. Pronunciation assessment is also used in reading tutoring, for example in products such as Microsoft Teams and from Amira Learning. Automatic pronunciation assessment can also be used to help diagnose and treat speech disorders such as apraxia.
Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL), or Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Instruction (ICALI), involves the application of computing technologies to the teaching and learning of second or foreign languages. ICALL combines Artificial intelligence with Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems to provide software that interacts intelligently with students, responding flexibly and dynamically to student's learning progress.
Language proficiency is the ability of an individual to use language with a level of accuracy which transfers meaning in production and comprehension.
Luis von Ahn is a Guatemalan entrepreneur and a consulting professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is known as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009, and the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo.
John Bissell Carroll was an American psychologist known for his contributions to psychology, linguistics and psychometrics.
The Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) is a test developed by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to measure a non-native speaker's proficiency in spoken English. It is usually taken as a professional certification, especially by graduate teaching assistants and medical professionals in the American college and university system for communication with their students and patients, respectively. It is very similar to the Test of Spoken English (TSE), and is in fact a form of the TSE developed for institutions by using retired forms of the TSE.
Mute English is a term coined in the People's Republic of China to describe a phenomenon where people cannot speak English well and have a poor listening comprehension as a second language, typically through the traditional method of English language teaching where English is only taught as a subject. The phrase is a calque of the Chinese phrase "哑巴英语". The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as Dumb English.
Language assessment or language testing is a field of study under the umbrella of applied linguistics. Its main focus is the assessment of first, second or other language in the school, college, or university context; assessment of language use in the workplace; and assessment of language in the immigration, citizenship, and asylum contexts. The assessment may include listening, speaking, reading, writing, an integration of two or more of these skills, or other constructs of language ability. Equal weight may be placed on knowledge and proficiency, or greater weight may be given to one aspect or the other.
Duolingo, Inc. is an American educational technology company that produces learning apps and provides language certification. Duolingo offers courses on music, math, and 43 languages, ranging from English, French, and Spanish to less commonly studied languages such as Welsh, Irish, and Swahili. Other services include the Duolingo English Test (DET), an online certification program, and Duolingo ABC, a literacy app for children. The company uses a freemium model, with its optional premium service, Super Duolingo, being ad-free and offering more features.
Computational psychometrics is an interdisciplinary field fusing theory-based psychometrics, learning and cognitive sciences, and data-driven AI-based computational models as applied to large-scale/high-dimensional learning, assessment, biometric, or psychological data. Computational psychometrics is frequently concerned with providing actionable and meaningful feedback to individuals based on measurement and analysis of individual differences as they pertain to specific areas of enquiry.
L2 Syntactical Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA) developed by Xiaofei Lu at the Pennsylvania State University, is a computational tool which produces syntactic complexity indices of written English language texts. Along with Coh-Metrix, the L2SCA is one of the most extensively used computational tool to compute indices of second language writing development. The L2SCA is also widely utilised in the field of corpus linguistics. The L2SCA is available in a single and a batch mode. The first provides the possibility of analyzing a single written text for 14 syntactic complexity indices. The latter allows the user to analyze 30 written texts simultaneously.
Alina Anca von Davier is a psychometrician and researcher in computational psychometrics, machine learning, and education. Von Davier is a researcher, innovator, and an executive leader with over 20 years of experience in EdTech and in the assessment industry. She is the Chief of Assessment at Duolingo, where she leads the Duolingo English Test research and development area. She is also the Founder and CEO of EdAstra Tech, a service-oriented EdTech company. In 2022, she joined the University of Oxford as an Honorary Research Fellow, and Carnegie Mellon University as a Senior Research Fellow.
Advanced Placement (AP) International English Language is an AP Examinations course managed by Educational Testing Service (ETS) with the sponsorship of the College Board in New York. It is designed for non-native speakers to prepare for studying in an English-speaking university, particularly in North America. The course also gives students a chance to earn college credit. The three-hour exam assesses four language skills: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. The test paper has two sections: multiple-choice questions and free-response questions. APIEL committee consists of high school and university English teachers from Belgium, China, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States.
Randy Elliot Bennett is an American educational researcher who specializes in educational assessment. He is currently the Norman O. Frederiksen Chair in Assessment Innovation at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. His research and writing focus on bringing together advances in cognitive science, technology, and measurement to improve teaching and learning. He received the ETS Senior Scientist Award in 1996, the ETS Career Achievement Award in 2005, the Teachers College, Columbia University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016, Fellow status in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2017, the National Council on Measurement in Education's (NCME) Bradley Hanson Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement in 2019, the E. F. Lindquist Award from AERA and ACT in 2020, elected membership in the National Academy of Education in 2022, and the AERA Cognition and Assessment Special Interest Group Outstanding Contribution to Research in Cognition and Assessment Award in 2024. Randy Bennett was elected President of both the International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA), a worldwide organization primarily constituted of governmental and NGO measurement organizations, and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), whose members are employed in universities, testing organizations, state and federal education departments, and school districts.
