The current study investigated the usage of the bilingual Vocabulary Size Test (VST) within Korean EFL environment. Thirty-two university students with an intermediate to high proficiency participated in this study. The students were given a Korean bilingual version of VST and reported their official English scores. The findings of this study are as following: (1) The VST scores showed a significant relationship with students’ proficiency scores which indicates that students with a bigger size of vocabulary had a higher proficiency of English. (2) When VST scores were divided into each frequency level, no particular frequency band demonstrated a significant relationship with English proficiency. Also, the difficulty of each level did not show a consistent pattern. Based on the results of VST, the influence of Korean EFL environment such as loanwords and the test-oriented education system was discovered. This study provides implications for teaching vocabulary in EFL environment and suggests the need for developing of a vocabulary size test for Korean context.

Laufer, Elder, Hill, and Congdon (2004) proposed the vocabulary strength framework reflecting the process of vocabulary knowledge development with a hierarchical order of four strength modalities: passive recognition, active recognition, passive recall, and active recall. Employing this framework, the present study aims to empirically examine its generalizability to EFL contexts and further explore its availability to validating the TEPS vocabulary section. Three sets of web-based tests for three proficiency groups (beginner (n=37), intermediate (n=31), and advanced (n=30)) are developed with words from three frequency bands (3000, 5000, and 7000). The test includes four sections representing four strength modes and an optional TEPS section for the two upper groups. A one-parameter Rasch model analysis reveals that item difficulties agree to the hierarchical sequence of difficulty order in the framework. Different vocabulary growth rates were found across modes and word bands. The TEPS item difficulties that are closer to recall than recognition may give a theoretical account of the measuring construct that the TEPS items tap upon.

The present study aims to explore the factors affecting Korean EFL high school students’ choice of picture options with key expressions in a writing test prompt, as well as the effects of option position and contents on their performance. It further aims to examine whether these effects vary with English writing proficiency. The performance of lower- and higher-level students in two prompts was analyzed along with their reasons for their choices. The prompt had three picture options with two key expressions in each option; the students chose one picture option and wrote a 20-word message declining a request using a reason specified in the option. Significant effects were not found for position within the prompts, but for the content of the options. The participants tended to choose a certain picture option over others mainly because of topical knowledge, difficulty level, or picture preference. The findings suggest a significant effect of picture contents, which yields implications for designing prompts with picture options for score validity.

The present study investigates and identifies the types of grammar errors that 84 Korean EFL (KEFL) learners made when they took the TOEIC Speaking test part five and compared the results with the previous studies. The 84 undergraduates participated and two native speakers of English analyzed the data. The data were classified into the taxonomy of four surface strategies: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Errors of omission were the highest consisting of 74.9%, followed by those of misformation at 19.9%, addition at 3.5%, and misordering at 1.7%. The findings had a difference from the previous studies adopted for comparison. The error frequencies were very different from those observed in writing, or interview tasks in the previous studies. Errors of misformation were the highest, followed by those of omission. This difference was considered to be caused by the short test taking time, and the task itself. The KEFL learners were unlikely to try to correct their errors within the limited time since very few self-corrections were observed in their spoken answers. This study suggests that explicit grammar instruction and correction are needed to teach speaking.

This study examines impartiality of an EFL academic language rest and compares academic language abilities for Indo-European (IE) and non Indo-European (NIE) language groups. Multiple-sample confirmatory factor analysis with mean structures was conducted on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) scores. Findings indicate that partial measurement invariance was established for both groups. The two-factor measurement model (LC and non-LC) was found the best fitting for both the groups, and factor loadings were comparable. Also, even though two intercepts (vocabulary and reading) were different across both groups, the difference was not practically meaningful. Accordingly, it was concluded that impartiality of the TOEFL score interpretation for the two groups could be supported. Findings also showed that mean academic language abilities (LC and non-LC) were not significantly different between the two groups, which lead to the conclusion that the receptive academic language abilities arc not influenced by the difference in L1 or in the way of language education they received. The claims about decisions and consequences of the use of the TOEFL were also discussed.

Differential item functioning (DIF) has been studied as a statistical method of finding item bias, and DIF studies have been conducted on tests of verbal abilities such as reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. Recently, researchers of language testing sought to understand the causes of DIF. The purpose of this study was to find possible sources of explaining DIF on an EFL vocabulary test, which can then benefit EFL learners and teachers as well. This study thus applied three DIF detection methods (the likelihood ratio test, SIBTEST, and the Mantel-Haenszel test), followed by a regression analysis using item categories and difficulties as predictors of explaining DIF. As a result, only the “Academic” category was statistically significant, positively contributing to DIF in favor of male examinees. Male examinees were better at academic lexical words than female learners of EFL at the same vocabulary knowledge level. This also means that female learners were relatively strong at nonacademic words in comparison to male EFL learners. This finding may lead to more effective curriculum of teaching English. The need for more evidence from replicated studies with better item categorization is also warranted.