Issues in constructing an international item bank: Differences in item behaviour across countries

An international test item bank can help to meaningfully link language performance to European standards and compare foreign language levels of students from different countries. For this we must make sure that students from these countries who are equally good at a language skill have the same chance of giving a correct answer to each item in the item bank. In this article it is shown that items in such an item bank may show item bias. What factors cause these items to operate differently across the different countries is a very interesting and important issue in the area of cross-cultural foreign language testing.