Children are taught the names of the letters of the alphabet – a“ay”,
b “bee”, c“see”, etc. – and when they see a new or unfamiliar word, e.g.
bag, they repeat the letter names – “bee ay gee”. It is thought that this
“spelling” of the word helps the child to recognize it.
see also phonicsalphabetic writing n
a writing system made up of separate letters which represent sounds (see
alphabet).
Some examples of alphabetic writing systems are:
a Roman (or Latin) script, used for many European languages including
English. It has also been adopted for many non-European languages,
e.g. Swahili, Indonesian and Turkish.
b Arabic script, used for Arabic and languages such as Persian, Urdu and
Malay, which also uses roman script.
c Cyrillic script, used for Russian and languages such as Ukrainian and
Bulgarian.
see also idiographic writing,syllabic writing
alpha ( 7 ) error n
see type i error
ALTE n
an abbreviation for Association of Language Testers in Europe
alternate form reliability n
also equivalent form reliability, parallel form reliability
one approach to estimate the reliability of a test. In this approach, two
or more forms of a test that are different but equivalent in content and
difficulty are administered to the same group of test takers. Then a cor-
relation coefficient between the total scores of the alternate forms of
the test is calculated. The resulting correlation coefficient is interpreted as a
numerical index of the extent to which the alternate forms are equivalent
to each other or consistent in measuring test takers’ abilities. For practical
reasons, however, this method of assessing test reliability is used less
frequently than an internal consistency reliability approach.
alternate forms n
also equivalent forms, parallel forms
two or more different forms of a test designed to measure exactly the same
skills or abilities, which use the same methods of testing, and which are of
equal length and difficulty.
alphabetic writing