TOEFL Junior^® Design Framework

Abstract

This paper presents the theoretical and empirical foundations of the TOEFL Junior® assessment and its development process. The TOEFL Junior test was developed to address the increasing need for objective measures of English language proficiency for young adolescent learners, who are being introduced to English as a second or foreign language at a much younger age than ever before. This paper presents the test purposes and intended uses, target population, target language use domains, and test constructs of the TOEFL Junior test. Also included is a description of the overall test structure and scoring system, which demonstrates how the constructs are operationalized. Finally, we outline research topics to support the interpretive argument of the use of the test. This document is expected to serve as a reference point during investigations of validity evidence to support the intended test uses over time.

Speaking proficiency of young language students: A discourse-analytic study

“…Components of adult second language (L2) learners' speaking proficiency have been widely researched within the contexts of rating-scale development and test validation (Brown, Iwashita, & McNamara, 2005;Frost, Elder, & Wigglesworth, 2011). Many standardized YLS oral performance assessments have been developed that are based on our understanding of this body of adult L2 learner research, and construct definitions and task designs often draw upon aspects of speaking that are derived from research on which the focus was adult learners (So, Wolf, Hauck, Mollaun, Rybinski, Tumposky, & Wang, 2015). It can be argued that the unique characteristics of young learners, with their developing cognition, varying degrees of socio-emotional maturation and world experience, may affect how they interpret and understand assessment tasks.…”

“…The study was conducted within the context of a larger research effort that aimed to provide validity evidence for a YLS assessment developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS), the TOEFL Junior Comprehensive test (for a detailed description of the test, see So et al, 2015). We used the test as an instrument for examining the broader construct of speaking proficiency for YLSs, given the availability of data.…”

Motivational Factors in Computer-administered Integrated Skills Tasks: A Study of Young Learners

“…design of the tasks that took into account young learners' interests and cognitive abilities. So et al (2017) explain that in the development process of the TOEFL® Junior™ Comprehensive test, tasks were chosen so that they are developmentally appropriate and interesting in terms of both content and task structure and that they reflect target language use in English-medium instruction contexts. Indeed, the school-related topics and scenarios in the Listen-Speak and Listen-Write tasks reflect Hasselgreen and Caudwell's (2016, p. 1) observation that "[s]chool is the most normal arena for language learning, and frequently also for language use" for young L2 learners.…”

“…We would argue that a potential reason for this finding might be related to the design and content of the test and the conditions in which the tasks were administered in our research. As discussed earlier, the TOEFL® Junior™ Comprehensive test battery has been developed taking young learners' cognitive characteristics, their language use domain and interests into account (So et al, 2017), and the participants took the test in the computer labs of their school, in a familiar and comfortable setting. These factors might, at least partly, explain our participants' positive task and test motivation.…”

Can the National Center Test in Japan be replaced by commercially available private English tests of four skills? In the case of TOEFL Junior Comprehensive

“…It consisted of four sections: reading, listening, speaking, and writing (Table 3). As can be seen in Table 3, the score bands of reading and listening are quite distinct from those of speaking and writing, which So et al (2015) explain as follows:…”