Development of a Test of Spoken Dutch for Prospective Immigrants

Deep neural network acoustic models for spoken assessment applications

“…For example, the test of spoken Dutch (De Jong et al, 2009) has been in operation since 2005 within the immigration and naturalization examination framework for the Netherlands. The test is designed to assess Dutch oral language skills of candidates who wish to immigrate permanently to the Netherlands.…”

Fairness Versus Justice in Language Testing: The Place of English Literacy in the Australian Citizenship Test

“…Either they focus rather narrowly on defending the quality of the test through test validation procedures, which Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 14:08 19 November 2014 stop short of dealing with the underlying policy rationale for the test, or they focus more broadly on the social and policy context of test use, from a critical perspective. The former position is usually associated with those who have taken responsibility for the development of the tests used to implement policy (e.g., de Jong, Lennig, Kerkhoff, & Poelmans, 2009;Saville, 2009). These researchers focus on providing an adequate justification of the quality of their instruments and base their investigations on the reasonableness of test score inferences in terms of concepts from validity theory such as construct irrelevant variance and construct underrepresentation, and the extent to which the test is biased against certain groups.…”

The English you need to know: Language ideology in a citizenship classroom

“…In some nations, the proficiency benchmarks are set so low that passing the test does not ensure that applicants have the skills sufficient for active civic engagement in the target language (De Jong et al, 2009;Kunnan, 2009aKunnan, , 2009bSchüpbach, 2009). In others, the required levels of proficiency may be set unreasonably high, making them unachievable by most adult L2 learners, who, therefore, become marginalized because they are unable to reach near-native levels of proficiency (Bjornson, 2007;Piller, 2001).…”