Welcome to the ICELDA homepage
The Inter-institutional Centre for Language Development and Assessment (ICELDA) is a partnership of four multilingual South African universities: Pretoria, Stellenbosch, North-West and Free State. ICELDA designs language tests, and supports research in language testing. It is the outcome of a collaboration, since 2004, among the partnering universities. It is no coincidence that these founding partners are universities that are studiously multilingual: such institutions have a heightened and urgent awareness of language.
The Test of Academic Literacy Levels (TALL) and its Afrikaans counterpart, Toets van Akademiese Geletterdheidvlakke (TAG), are the most reliable tests of academic literacy levels that we know of. TALL has reliability levels (measured in terms of a very conservative measure, Cronbach's alpha) that averages at 0.93, which is more than 20% higher than international benchmarks for high stakes tests. About two dozen articles analysing various dimensions of the tests have been published in accredited journals (see bibliography). These analyses are well received at international and national conferences, and we have begun to experiment with the use of the tests in other environments, notably Namibia and Singapore.