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The main purpose of this study is to investigate guessing in the Yes/No (YN) format vocabulary test. One-hundred-and-five university students took a YN test, a translation task and a multiple-choice vocabulary size test (MC VST). With matched lexical properties between the real words and the pseudowords, pseudowords could index guessing in the YN test as correlations between false alarms and real word guessing were high (> .80). This finding provides important validity evidence for correction formulas that employ false alarm information to adjust the YN test scores. Another important finding is that the neighborhood size of pseudowords was related to false alarm rates, which has useful implications for the designing of future YN tests. Finally, the corrected scores of the YN test correlated highly (> .70) with those of the translation task. In comparison, correlations between the YN corrected scores and the MC VST scores were lower, indicating a difference in guessing between the two tests.

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Pragmatic proficiency has been incorporated in the EFL teaching and testing syllabi in China, but the corresponding tests still focus on linguistic competence. The gap between the teaching and testing is mainly due to the lack of generally accepted measures of communicative abilities such as pragmatic competence. This study developed a multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) to assess the pragmatic knowledge of Chinese EFL learners in relation to the speech act of apology. The development involved several stages. First, students in China were asked to identify situations in which apologies might be required and to report how likely the situations were to occur in their daily lives. Next, metapragmatic assessment involving both Chinese and North American students was used to ascertain the social variables which applied in each scenario. This was followed by studies to validate the scenarios and to develop multiple-choice options for each scenario. Finally, a pilot test was conducted with 105 Chinese university students. The results provided evidence for the reliability and validity of the test, and suggest that after further investigation it may be feasible to assess the pragmatic competence of Chinese learners by means of a MDCT in the future.

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