Using a commercially produced proficiency test in a one-year core EFL curriculum in Japan for placement purposes.

Culligan, B., & Gorsuch, G. (1999). Using a commercially produced proficiency test in a one-year core EFL curriculum in Japan for placement purposes. JALT Journal, 21(1), 7-25.

Culligan and Gorsuch (1999) discussed the adequacy of employing commercially produced proficiency tests for making placement decisions. Second level English proficiency Test (SLEP), composed of reading and listening tests, was administered twice to 487 Japanese university students as pretest and posttest. Based on a norm-referenced item analysis, known as item discrimination (ID), it was discovered that less than half the items did not discriminate between high and low scoring students. The result of a criterion-referenced item analysis, referred to as difference index (DI), indicated that students learned only one-third of the items in the program. The researchers concluded that SLEP should not be used for making placement decisions because the reliability was only .81 for the entire test, with the total number of items being 150 and it had a wide range of standard error of measurement. No sectional reliability coefficients were reported. They also mentioned that SLEP was inadequate because the test did not estimate their students’ speaking proficiency, which was the major goal of the program. They suggested that only items with a certain item discrimination value be used. They also recommended the use of item response theory to make more precise placement decisions (2000).