A large number of limited English proficient (LEP) students in the United States spend only a small fraction of their school day with ESL teachers. Yet regular classroom teachers are unprepared in how to integrate the LEP student into the regular classroom. This article analyzes the results of a survey of regular classroom teachers' perceptions of LEP students and ESL teachers. An openended questionnaire was administered to 162 New Jersey teachers who had LEP students in their classrooms but who had had no training in ESL. A content analysis of the responses revealed five broad categories of concern: programmatic setting and instruction, training needs, LEP students and their parents, peer interaction, and the role of the ESL teacher. The responses indicate the difficulties which regular classroom teachers encounter in integrating LEP students socially and academically into the regular setting. Accordingly, it is recommended that ESL teachers and teacher training programs devote greater attention to preparing the regular classroom teacher for dealing more adequately with the educational needs of LEP students.

This report examines the content characteristics of the Test of English as Foreign Language (TOEFL) from a communicative viewpoint based on current theory in applied linguistics and language proficiency assessment. After a review of relevant literature, the authors developed and applied a fourpart operational framework for analyzing the communicative characteristics of a language proficiency test.The first component of this framework consists of the grammatical, sociolinguistic, and discourse competencies required by test tasks.The second component consists of eight factors that could influence test performance.The third component consists of judgements of the relevance of the content of test items to academic and social language use. The final component relates the langauge and language tasks appearing in TOEFL items and sections to a criterion-referenced scale of language proficiency. In this case, the Interagency Language Roundtable scale was used.Finally, the report discusses test design features that might improve the quality of language proficiency tests."

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