Abstract
Abstract
Since the early 1990s, there has been a growing awareness that combining quantitative and qualitative data from diverse sources could add value to several ongoing issues in language assessment/testing (LT) research. This entry describes an instrument development project for assessment and evaluation purposes using an MMR design. Language barriers can arise when members of linguistic minorities and their health professionals do not speak the same first language. This entry reports on the first part of an L2 assessment development project where construct definition was the focus. The purpose was to identify and validate a set of speech tasks relating to nurse interactions with patients and to derive the L2 ability required for nurses to carry out those tasks. The research design had two sequential phases. The first phase (qualitative) included a literature review leading to an initial list of speech tasks, and validation of this list with a nurse focus group, followed by verbal protocol with a nurse expert. The retained speech tasks were then developed into a questionnaire and administered to 133 nurses who assessed each speech task for difficulty in an L2 context. The second phase (quantitative) included descriptive statistics, Rasch analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and alignment of resulting speech tasks with the Canadian Language Benchmarks. Results showed that speech tasks dealing with emotional aspects of caregiving and conveying health‐specific information were reported as being the most demanding in terms of L2 ability and the most strongly associated with L2 ability required for nurse–patient interactions.