Validation of High School Tests: Teaching Syllabus vs. Testing Procedures

The present book aim to highlight one important issue before any high school teacher's eyes: it is necessary to understand the purpose of testing in high schools. What is the role of high school tests? Should they be considered as real tests? Or can they be perhaps best regarded as a ceremony, a cathartic ritual to be undergone alone with other examinations of this type before holiday? We hope that book may lead teachers to focus more on testing procedures as a complementary step in language learning and teaching. This will help them to see that everyone has areas of strength and areas of challenge, and that it is worthwhile to use every opportunity, even the testing sessions, for improving the learners achievements in language proficiency

A Comparative Analysis of Culture Specific Items in Two English Translations of Savushun

Abstract , and the other one translated by Zand (1991

A Model for Developing Rating Scale Descriptors: Assessing EFL writing process

The role of writing in social interactions is becoming more and more evident in modern communities. The increasing use of personal computers and the rapid growth of the Internet have emphasized the importance of writing skill among the four skills. As a result, the ability to speak and write a second language is becoming widely recognized as an important skill for educational, business, and personal reasons. The use of performance assessment as a measure of writing language skills in English as a second or foreign language has become a common practice all over the world. This book provides an assessment model that can help teachers to observe and evaluate student writers' performances during the writing process. We hope that applying such a model for writing assessment can provide teaching practitioners with a better diagnostic tool for the evaluation of learners who are more likely to perform differently in different stages of the writing process

The relationship between multiple intelligences and reading proficiency of Iranian EFL students

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between multiple intelligences (MI) and reading proficiency of Iranian EFL pre-university students and to look into the role that gender plays. To find out the relationships among the naturally occurring variables, the researcher employed a descriptive and ex post facto design. The participants were 128 randomly selected pre-university students. The researcher utilized three instruments, namely: 1) a demographic questionnaire; 2) the Persian version of Mckenzie's MI Inventory; and 3) a standardized reading proficiency test retrieved from paper-based TOEFL® tests. Analyzing the data using t-test, it was found that there was a statistically significant difference in the mean of musical-rhythmic intelligence scores of the low achievers and the high achievers which was positive and stronger among the low achievers. Accordingly, it seems that the high achievers may have lower musical intelligence, which also indicates that better readers may be less intelligent 'musically'. A statistically significant difference was also found between the mean bodily-kinesthetic intelligence scores of the two genders which was positive and stronger among the females. No significant difference was found between the male and female students in their reading proficiency scores