Group items tagged

The Standards-based Measurement of Proficiency (STAMP), a criterion-referenced, Web-based assessment tool, measures students' language proficiency at levels ranging from Novice-low to Intermediate-mid. STAMP currently measures reading, writing, and speaking proficiencies in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. CASLS strives to continually improve STAMP's test design while adding new languages and new levels. STAMP is available through CASLS' partner company, Avant Assessment.

In a world where anyone with an internet connection can access, create and share information, opinions and beliefs, it has become increasingly important that students are not only able to assess the credibility of sources but also to look more deeply at the underlying motivations, beliefs and bias of the creator.

When you hire a professional translation firm, you want to build a long-term relationship that will ensure accuracy, consistency and timely translations. I have compiled a list of tips for assessing the skills of a translation company.

I was looking for possible resources for Web 2.0 rubrics and this seems like a worthwhile resource. Has anyone used these yet?

Opportunity for language instructors to participate in piloting new proficiency tests.

online testing in Latin via twitter

# Difficulty : Rating 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest) of the difficulty of learning the language for an English speaker. Many additional factors will affect the difficulty you will experience when trying to learn a given language, especially the other languages you already speak. Such a rating system has obvious limitations but I take great care in assessing the difficulty of each language. Many of these ratings have been discussed on the language forum (see for example the discussion about Korean). People always complain that the rating given to their native language is 'too low' - I wonder how they would now since they never had to learn it as a foreign language. If you can make a case for a different difficulty rating for a specific language you are welcome to bring this up in the language forum. # Popularity : Subjective rating of how popular the language is with Western learners. This obviously varies a great deal from country to country, but is a good overall indicator of the availability of learning material for the language. I visit many physical language bookshops as well as some online ones and think I have a rather objective basis for establishing 'popularity' of a language with foreign language learners in the number of courses and books available for each language. # GDP : Nominal GDP of the countries where the languages is spoken. This gives an indication of the economic importance of the language on the international scene. We have not used PPP GDP as it emphasizes non-tradable goods. When a country uses several languages we used the percentage of speakers of the language multiplied by the country's GDP. If you feel that economic factors are meaningless in language learning, please disregard this column. # Countries : Number of countries where the language is an official language or where there are important communities who speak this language at home. This gives you an indication of the spread of the language across the globe. Some languages (English, Spa

This site is wonderful for oral assessment.

Great response system for classrooms where students don't have mobile technology to use but the teacher does. Each student gets a card that they use for multiple choice or T/F answers. The card is permanently assigned to them by number for the purpose of data collection and feedback specific to a student.