Test design can be compared with the design of buildings and other structures in architecture. Both activities require the development of detailed plans and blueprints that generate the actual buildings or test forms. When the blueprints are created, architects know what to what use the building is going to be put. Without knowledge of purpose they simply would not be able to design a building. Similarly, test designers need to know what inferences we intend to make from scores, and what decisions are to be made on the basis of those scores. Tests without purpose generate validity chaos. Similarly, when buildings change their use, architects must retrofit the building and follow standard procedures to ensure that health and safety regulations are being met, and that the proposed changes make the building fit for its new users. We argue that test designers must follow similar principles if the purpose of a test is to be changed or extended, or used on a group of test takers for whom it was not originally intended. We term this process test retrofit, and use the example of immigration testing to illustrate the argument.

In the paper, the development of college English teaching and testing in China in the past two decades will be reviewed focusing on the promulgation and implementation of the National College English Teaching Syllabuses since the 1980s and the launch of the National College English Test (CET) in the late 1980s. The second part of the paper focuses on the achievements made and problems encountered in the development of college English teaching and testing. The English proficiency of college students in China will be presented by referring to the CET Syllabus. Examples of students’ performance in the CET will be given to illustrate their communicative competence. The imbalanced development of the English proficiency of college students across the country will also be discussed and possible explanations given for the discrepancy. The paper will then move on to a discussion on the impact of language testing on teaching with special reference to the washback of the CET on college English teaching in China. Both beneficial and detrimental effects of the CET on teaching and learning will be presented and the social consequences of the large-scale standardized test will be discussed in some detail. The paper ends with a brief introduction to the recent reform of the college English teaching and testing in China.

Foreign language education in Korea has a long history. Since the introduction of Chinese characters in the 2nd century, many foreign languages have been taught in Korea. European languages were introduced in the late part of the 19th century, but the teaching of them experienced a setback during the Japanese colonial period. After liberation in 1945, English became the most important foreign language, while other foreign languages were called “second foreign languages”. German and French were the two most popular “second foreign languages” in the early years after liberation, but Japanese increased its weight as German and French gradually lost their appeal to high school students. Chinese is also steadily gaining in popularity. A corollary of this change was the government’s retraining program to convert German and French language teachers to Japanese or Chinese language teachers. The present paper discusses these and other changes in the status of “second foreign languages”, and recommends that the government take some drastic measures to revive the balanced development of “second foreign-language education”.

Various studies have been conducted to minimize the subjectivity and increase the accuracy in assessing written texts, and the present study focused on the scoring rubrics which were the basic criteria for evaluating writing. Three different scoring rubrics (holistic, analytic and multiple-trait scoring method) were compared in evaluating argumentative essays written by Korean high school students. The present study aims to investigate the rater-reliability of the three scoring methods, holistic, analytic, and multiple-trait scoring methods. Scores of the five raters which were obtained from using the three scoring methods were compared. It was found that there were significant mean differences in the three scoring methods. Raters gave the relatively low scores when they used the holistic scoring. Next, the highest inter-rater reliability was found in the multiple-trait scoring. All the three scoring methods showed an acceptable level of reliability above .07. However, raters showed the highest reliability when they used a multiple-trait scoring rubric. Also, high correlation was found among components of analytic and multiple-trait scoring methods, indicating that the multiple-trait scoring rubric can replace the analytic scoring rubric. Finally, raters expressed a favor over the multiple-trait scoring. The result of this study suggests some implications for writing assessment in Korean secondary English classes.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of prompt types on EFL learners’ writing performance. 6 university students and 10 university students were provided with bare and prose prompts and the fluency of their writings was measured by analyzing the length of product (word count) and mean length of T-units (MLTU) was used to measure syntactic complexity. Furthermore, independent T-tests were administered in addition to qualitative analysis in order to determine whether the differences between the two types of prompts were significant. The results showed that while high school students’ writing wrote longer texts and had higher MLTU on the prose prompt than the bare prompt, a large portion of their writing was copied from the prompt when they were provided with the prose prompt. The university students’ writing showed that they wrote longer texts and had higher MLTU on the bare prompt than the prose prompt. In addition, they had responded after the test that they were able to write more freely when they were given the bare prompt. The findings of this study suggest that test developers need to consider the effects of prompt types and examine the quality of the writings more carefully.