The primary purpose of this project was to develop and report on an application which is designed to produce vocabulary tests en masse for large-scale English teaching programs. The application, called Word Quiz Creator (WQC), is a Java application that takes selected sublists of the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) and creates multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank quiz items by drawing sample sentences from on-line and off-line corpora.

In a useability experiment, items created by WQC were compared to items created manually by an experienced test creator. The items were evaluated by experienced teachers as well as tested on student volunteers in an experimental setting.  Results showed generally that WQC created items that were nearly on a par with the manually-produced items.

A description of WQC and the results of these useability experiments were reported at two different conferences during the summer of 2014. Valuable feedback was obtained from other researchers on how to improve the performance of WQC and several teacher practitioners (particularly those working at institutes with large-scale language programs) expressed an interest in downloading the application for their own use. A distribution version of WQC for download and use by researchers and teachers is now in preparation.