The meaningfulness of two curriculum-based national tests of English as a foreign language

This paper addresses the aspect of the meaningfulness of a national assessment in English as a foreign language, applying the fairness framework proposed by Kunnan (2018). We compared students’ performance on two receptive language skills of listening and reading on two subsequent national evaluations in Finland, taken by students at the end of compulsory basic education and at the end of general upper secondary education, respectively. The research questions focus on (1) the relationship between students’ performance on the two tests and their gender, language of schooling and parents’ educational level, and (2) the relationship between the students’ receptive language proficiency at the e…