At Rice University we have had our own on-line placement tests for 5 years in the following languages: Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. We test all 4 language skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. Our faculty who are OPI testers wrote the tests following the ACTFL proficiency guidelines. Our tests were reviewed by ACTFL. We use ExTemplate, our own language learning management system which you can review at the following address: http://lang.rice.edu/extemplate/ ExTemplate is Unicode compliant and supports most languages included right to left languages. Students take the tests on-line in August before arriving to campus. Faculty teams rotate to grade the tests (on-line) throughout August. Students can view their results within one week of taking the tests. http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lrc/placement.html We share ExTemplate and our tests with interested institutions as long as they have the technical support required. Claire ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Claire Bartlett Director, Language Resource Center Voice: (713) 348-6156 Assoc. Dir., Center for the Study of Languages LRC: (713) 348-6157 120 Rayzor Hall, MS 37 fax: (713) 348-6168 Rice University [log in to unmask] 6100 Main Street Houston, TX 77005-1892 http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lrc * President, IALLT http://www.iallt.org (International Association for Language Learning Technology) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ********************************************************************************** LLTI is a service of IALLT, the International Association for Language Learning (http://iallt.org/), and The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (http://www.languageconsortium.org/). Join IALLT at http://iallt.org. Otmar K. Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask]) **********************************************************************************