John Read 
Post-admission Language Assessment of University Students [PDF ebook] 

English-medium universities around the world face real challenges in ensuring that incoming students have the language and literacy skills they need to cope with the demands of their degree programmes. One response has been a variety of institutional initiatives to assess students after admission, in order to identify those with significant needs and advise them on how to enhance their academic language ability. This volume brings together papers from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Oman, South Africa and the United States, written by language assessment specialists who discuss issues in the design and implementation of these post-admission assessments in their own institutions. A major theme running through the book is the need to evaluate the validity of such assessments not just on their technical quality but on their impact, in terms of giving students access to effective means of developing their language skills and ultimately enhancing their academic achievement.

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INTRODUCTION: Some key issues in post-admission language assessment by John Read.- Part I IMPLEMENTING AND MONITORING UNDERGRADUATE ASSESSMENTS.- Examining the validity of a post-entry screening tool embedded in a specific policy context by Ute Knoch, Cathie Elder and Sally O’Hagan.- Mitigating risk: The impact of a diagnostic assessment procedure on the first-year experience in engineering by Janna Fox, John Haggerty and Natasha Artemeva.- The consequential validity of a post-entry language assessment in Hong Kong by Edward Li.- Can diagnosing university students’ English proficiency facilitate language development? By Alan Urmston, Michelle Raquel and Vahid Aryadoust.- Part II ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF DOCTORAL STUDENTS.- What do test-takers say? Test-taker feedback as input for quality management of a local oral English proficiency test by Xun Yan, Suthathip Ploy Thirakunkovit, Nancy L Kauper and April Ginther.- Extending post-entry assessment to the doctoral level: New challenges and opportunities by John Read and Janet von Randow.- Part III ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT DESIGN.- Vocabulary recognition skill as a screening tool in English-as-a-lingua-franca university settings by Thomas Roche, Michael Harrington, Yogesh Sinha and Christopher Denman.- Construct refinement in tests of academic literacy by Albert Weideman, Rebecca Patterson and Anna Pot.- Telling the story of a test: The Test of Academic Literacy for Postgraduate Students (TALPS) by Avasha Rambiritch and Albert Weideman.- CONCLUSION: Reflecting on the contribution of post-admission assessments by John Read.- Index.