Developing diagnostic vocabulary tests to inform support for at-risk students in higher-education
We will describe diagnostic vocabulary testing strategies being developed at two Canadian post-secondary institutions. This work is in support of broader strategies aimed at early identification of at-risk students and the subsequent provision of pro-active and differentiated academic support post-entry.
Some students begin higher education without the skills needed to cope with the linguistic demands of diploma and degree programs in English. Language tests required for international student admission may not always be good predictors of academic success (Read, 2016), and alternative entrance pathways allow domestic students to bypass formal language testing. Diagnostic language testing has been proposed as a way for at-risk students with low academic language proficiency to be identified and assisted (Fox, von Randow, & Volkov, 2016). Diagnostic vocabulary tests, in particular, have promise because they allow the disparities that exist between the word-difficulty of course texts and the word-knowledge of individual learners to be operationalized (Schmitt, Jiang, & Grabe, 2011), and this can be used to match learners to level-appropriate texts.
Nation’s Vocabulary Size Test (see Beglar, 2010) was administered online to 463 first-term students at a Canadian technical college and also to 344 English as an Academic Language (EAP) international students admitted to a Canadian university. The reliability of both tests is high (α > .87). We will present a Rasch analysis of this first iteration in a longitudinal study, present our plans to optimize future tests using different L1-English cognate information, and to detail how test data will be used to inform academic support.
References
Beglar, D. (2010). A Rasch-based validation of the Vocabulary Size Test. Language Testing, 27(1), 101–118.
Fox, J., von Randow, J., & Volkov, A. (2016). Identifying students at-risk through post-entry diagnostic assessment. In V. Aryadoust, & J. Fox, Trends in language assessment research and practice: The view from the Middle East and the Pacific Rim (pp. 266-285). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Read, J. (2016). Some key issues in post-admission language assessment. In J. Read, Post-admission language assessment of university students (pp. 3-20). New York: Springer.
Schmitt, N., Jiang, X., & Grabe, W. (2011). The Percentage of Words Known in a Text and Reading Comprehension. The Modern Language Journal, 95(1), 26–43.
