According to the OECD (2013a), these respondents tended to have lower proficiency levels.
As expected, compared to native speakers our EFL learners reached lower proficiency levels on the PISA scale.
A major difference among higher and lower proficiency levels can be found in the interactional and managing interaction functions.
As a result, students with higher proficiency levels tended to dominate interactions, while students with lower proficiency levels often struggled to contribute meaningful dialogue.
This seems appropriate for a test that purports to assess English at a high level of proficiency, whereas a greater emphasis on items of narrow and very narrow scope would be appropriate on tests targeting lower proficiency levels.
As much as possible, avoid using filler and colloquialisms ('um...'..., 'like...'...,'Yeah, totally.') as non-native speakers, especially ones of lower proficiency levels, may get hung up on these thinking the filler language is vocabulary that they don't possess.
Once the proficiency level lowers below a certain threshold, intra-syllabic consistency is also likely to be affected, creating even more variability.
This lack of modulation may contribute to, or reflect, the lower face-processing proficiency levels at this age (Fig. 2 a, and as shown in the out-of-scanner tasks).
The Connecticut Mastery Test reading scores are more encouraging, but in 2007 still showed 43percentt of fourth graders unable to read at goal (a standard somewhat lower than the national test's proficiency level).
This suggests they either inflated their language ability to look better than they actually are, or their working English proficiency level is much lower than their passive understanding of the language.
