TOEFL Junior Research Articles

Evaluating the TOEFL Junior® Standard Test as a Measure of Progress for Young English Language Learners

Standardized tests are often designed to provide only a snapshot of test takers' knowledge, skills, or abilities at a single point in time. Sometimes, however, they are expected to serve more demanding functions, one of them is assessing change in knowledge, skills, or ability over time because of learning effects. The latter is the case for the newly developed TOEFL Junior® Standard test, which measures improvement in young learners' proficiency in English as a foreign language. In this study, we used nonexperimental‐repeated measures data from approximately 4,600 students from multiple countries to examine the extent to which observed patterns in within‐individual changes in test scores were consistent with changes in underlying language proficiency because of learning. Because most students were actively participating in English language learning programs, the time interval between test administrations, which varied among students, served as a proxy for the extent of English language learning opportunities. We used hierarchical linear models to model growth in test performance as a function of the time interval between test administrations and found a positive, statistically significant relationship; that is, test takers with longer intervals between retesting exhibited greater gains than did test takers who retested at shorter intervals. The estimated relationship for the total score corresponded to between .16 and .24 test standard deviations of growth per year, depending on model specification. The findings are robust to sensitivity analyses that explore potential biasing factors. Overall, the findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the TOEFL Junior Standard test is capable of reflecting change in English language proficiency over time.

TOEFL Junior® Design Framework

This paper presents the theoretical and empirical foundations of the TOEFL Junior® assessment and its development process. The TOEFL Junior test was developed to address the increasing need for objective measures of English language proficiency for young adolescent learners, who are being introduced to English as a second or foreign language at a much younger age than ever before.This paper presents the test purposes and intended uses, target population, target language use domains, and test constructs of the TOEFL Junior test. Also included is a description of the overall test structure and scoring system, which demonstrates how the constructs are operationalized. Finally, we outline research topics to support the interpretive argument of the use of the test. This document is expected to serve as a reference point during investigations of validity evidence to support the intended test uses over time.

Analyzing and Comparing Reading Stimulus Materials Across the TOEFL® Family of Assessments

The TOEFL® family of assessments includes the TOEFL® Primary™, TOEFL Junior®, and TOEFL iBT® tests. The linguistic complexity of stimulus passages in the reading sections of the TOEFL family of assessments is expected to differ across the test levels. This study evaluates the linguistic complexity of each passage in a corpus of TOEFL stimulus passages. The analysis was conducted using the TextEvaluator®, a comprehensive text analysis system developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS). For each TOEFL reading passage, TextEvaluator provides an overall complexity score and 8 component scores that measure text complexity in specific domains. The results suggest that the overall complexity scores of the reading passages selected for use at different test levels are significantly different. According to the analysis of the component scores, the TOEFL Primary, TOEFL Junior, and TOEFL iBT passages are similar with respect to some aspects of text variation and distinct with respect to others. Score ranges based on the distributions of the overall complexity scores and the distributions of the component scores of all the passages at each test level can be used as guidelines to develop or select new passages.

Language ability of young English language learners: Definition, configuration, and implications

In this study I examined the dimensionality of the latent ability underlying language use that is needed to fulfill the demands young learners face in English-medium instructional environments, where English is used as the means of instruction for teaching subject matters. Previous research on English language use by school-age children provided evidence that language proficiency for academic studies relates to, yet differs from, the language ability needed for social communications. Focusing on learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), I investigated the nature of language proficiency of school-age EFL learners in light of their learning experience. Analyses were based on test performance from the TOEFL Junior® Comprehensive test a proficiency assessment of English as a foreign language for young learners between the ages of 11 and 15, developed by the Educational Testing Service. The results showed that the two ability constructs (i.e., academic and social language), although theoretically distinct and educationally relevant, were statistically indistinguishable based on EFL learners’ test performance. It was also found that the test performance could be explained best by a higher-order model, indicating that the language ability of these young EFL learners was structurally similar to that usually found with adult learners in a foreign language environment. The outcomes highlight the interrelatedness of learning environment, age and language proficiency. On the one hand, the nature of the ability construct can vary across groups of learners due to differences in learning environments. On the other hand, learners of different ages who share similar learning environments could be similar in terms of the latent representation of their language proficiency. The study concludes that the interpretation of young EFL learners’ language proficiency needs to take into consideration how language components are developmentally related to each other as a function of learning experience in a foreign language environment.

Are Teacher Perspectives Useful? Incorporating EFL Teacher Feedback in the Development of a Large-Scale International English Test

This aticle presents a case study incorporating English teachers’ perspectives into the development of a large-scale international English assessment, the recently developed TOEFL Junior® Comprehensive test. It discusses how stakeholder feedback gathered during test development supports the validity argument for score interpretation and the use of a newly developed test. When the pilot version of the test was administered, focus-group interviews were conducted to gather teacher perspectives on the test. Teachers of English as a foreign language in Korea from different types of institutions—public schools, private mainstream schools, and private after-school English enrichment programs—were invited to participate. This article discusses how the interviews were conducted and summarizes the teachers’ major comments about the test. Then, it discusses how the teachers’ recommendations and suggestions were reflected in the final test design decisions. During the decision-making process, the teachers’ comments were examined in light of various statistical results, such as interitem correlations and generalizability analyses. The article concludes with a broader discussion of how teachers’ perspectives, which have not often been incorporated into the development of large-scale international assessments, can make an important difference in designing a test and, consequently, enhance the validity of the test.

An investigation of the use of TOEFL® Junior™ Standard scores for ESL placement decisions in secondary education

A common use of language tests is to support decisions about examinees such as placement into appropriate classes. Research on placement testing has focused on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in higher education contexts. However, there is little research exploring the use of language tests to place students in English as a Second Language (ESL) support classes in secondary education. The present study examined the relationship between secondary school students’ language test scores from a standardized English-language test and the placement of these students into ESL classes by their language teachers. Ninety-two ESL students in two English-medium schools took TOEFL® Junior™ Standard. For the same students, data collection also included teachers’ judgments regarding the ESL classes the students should attend. Strong correlations between test scores and the teacher-assigned ESL levels were found. Moreover, the results from the logistic regression analysis indicated a great degree of overlap between the teacher-assigned ESL levels and the levels predicted from the TOEFL Junior Standard scores. The findings of this study provide some preliminary evidence to support the use of TOEFL Junior Standard as an initial screening tool for ESL placement. The limitations and implications of these findings for ESL placement decisions in secondary education are also discussed.

ASSESSING THE TEST INFORMATION FUNCTION AND DIFFERENTIAL ITEM FUNCTIONING FOR THE TOEFL JUNIOR® STANDARD TEST

ABSTRACTThe TOEFL Junior® Standard Test is an assessment that measures the degree to which middle school‐aged students learning English as a second language have attained proficiency in the academic and social English skills representative of English‐medium instructional environments. The assessment measures skills in three areas: listening comprehension, language form and meaning, and reading comprehension. This study focused on two specific psychometric characteristics of the assessment: (a) For which segments of its score scales does the assessment provide sufficient information to support the use of the scores in placement decisions? (b) Do items exhibit significant (or C‐level) differential item functioning (DIF) when comparisons are made between test‐takers from different countries? For the first question, both of the forms we analyzed appear to provide sufficient information to support placement decisions across the majority of the score scale for all 3 sections of the assessment. For the second question, we found that a moderate number of items exhibited significant DIF, while the linguistic analyses conducted on the DIF results showed plausible construct‐relevant explanations for most of the findings.

Islamic Senior High School Students’ Language Learning Strategies and their English Achievement

This study investigated the correlation between language learning strategies and English achievement, and explored the influence of language learning strategies on English achievement of eleventh grade students’ of MAN 3 Palembang. A total of 141 eleventh grade students participated in this study. The questionnaire and test were used to collect the data. For this purpose, the language learning strategies (SILL) questionnaire developed by Oxford (1989) measured language learning strategies and TOEFL junior (2015) was used to know students’ English achievement. There were three levels from high to low based on the results of SILL questionnaire and five categories English achievement test. Descriptive stastistic, pearson product moment correlation and regression anlaysis were employed to analyze the data. Based on the data analysis, it was found that r (.665) > rtable (.165) with significant level which was lower than 0.05. Thus, it indicated that there was significant correlation between language learning strategies and English achievement. It was implied that good language learners caused good in English achievement.

Applying Language Learning Strategies in the Foreign Language Listening Comprehension: A Study of Islamic Senior High School Students

The main purpose of the present study was to empirically investigate the possible correlation and the influence between students’ language learning strategies and listening comprehension. The population of this study was 138 eleventh grade students of Islamic Senior High School number 2 Palembang. The sample was all of eleventh grade students in social class. The total number of the student was 138. Since 16 students were absent, so the sample consisted of 122 students. To collect the data in order to measure the students’ language learning strategies and listening comprehension, SILL (strategy inventory in learning language) and listening comprehension test from TOEFL Junior test were used in this study. The Pearson correlation was used in analyzing the data using SPSS 16. The result from questionnaire showed that most of the students used metacognitive strategies were in medium level and sometimes used language learning strategies. The result from listening comprehension test showed that most of the students were in very poor level. Furthermore, there was no significant correlation between the two variables that can be seen from the correlation coefficient or r-obtained (-.011) was lower than r-table (0.1779) then the level of probability or sig. value (.902) was higher than .05. From the result, it can be concluded that there was no significant correlation between language learning strategies and listening comprehension of eleventh grade students of Islamic Senior High School number 2 Palembang.