Abstract:

Placing students of a foreign language within a basic language program constitutes an ongoing problem, particularly for large university departments when they have many incoming freshmen and transfer students. This article outlines the author's experience designing and piloting a language placement test for a university level Spanish program. The paper offers rationale for the project as well as step-by-step instructions and commentary on how to build such a test. The aim of the project was twofold. First, the design and implementation of the test was meant to address a need of a large Spanish language program by offering a fast, reliable, and easy-to-administer Spanish placement test. Second, the use of multimedia-based test items was intended to improve and facilitate comprehensible input by test takers. Analysis of the data indicates that multimedia-based items show marginal improvement in item facility (IF) coefficients over text-only items.

Author: Francisco Zabaleta