Student accounts of the Ontario Secondary School literacy Test: a case for validation

The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) is a cross-curricular literacy test issued to all secondary school students in the province of Ontario. The test consists of a reading and a writing component, both of which must be successfully completed for secondary school graduation in Ontario. This study elicited 16 first language and second language student accounts of their OSSLT test-taking processes immediately after the March 2006 test administration. The analysis of these students’ accounts provided valuable information about the validity of the inferences drawn from the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. These accounts suggest the complexity of the processes that the students engaged as they attempted to demonstrate their reading and writing skills on the test. The study has implications for test developers and test users regarding the interpretation of student test performance on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test

Research, theory and practice in L2 phonology: a review and directions for the future

As language models are shifting away from monolingualism in favour of bilingualism, multilingualism and plurilingualism, the field of second language or foreign language (L2) phonology is ripe for change. These shifts embody greatly changed views of linguistic competence — from monocompetence, defined as knowledge of an autonomous, unvarying and uniform system acquired in a homogeneous speech community, to multicompetence, defined here as use of an interactive, variable and non-uniform system acquired in a heterogeneous world of intersecting groups and individuals. These changing views of language and linguistic competence represent significant challenges to recognized wisdom in the teaching and learning of language in general and pronunciation in particular. It is therefore time for theoreticians, researchers and teachers to re-evaluate second language acquisition (SLA) and L2 phonology in relation to shifting views of language, to consider where we have been, where we are now, and where we are headed