Weblinks

Resources in language testing: www.surrey.ac.uk/ALRG/resources.html
This is an excellent site that provides links to very many other sites of interest to language testers.

ACTFL proficiency guidelines: www.languagetesting.com

ILR skill level descriptions: www.govtilr.org/ILRscale1.htm

ALTE Association of Language Testers in Europe: www.alte.org

British National Corpus (BNC): www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk
This site tells you how you can access the corpus and buy the BNC sampler (which is not expensive and which I have found a useful resource)

Wordsketches: www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/aboutindex.html
This site gives details of fifty-odd English verbs and the frequency with which they appear in various contexts in the British National Corpus.

International Language Testing Association : www.iltaonline.com

Cambridge ESOL: www.cambridgeesol.org

Websites on Item Banks and Item Banking

Two sites which provide further basic information on item banking are:

www.ericdigests.org/1999-2/item.htm

where you will find a short article identifying advantages and disadvantages of item banking and advice on constructing an item bank;

and
www.cambridgeesol.org/rs_notes/offprints/pdfs/RN3p4-6.pdf

which describes a functioning item banking system for English language tests.

There are a great many other sites on the web which may interest you, including some which advertise item banking software. I suggest that you use Google to do searches, entering ‘item bank’ and ‘item banking’.