There has been much debate in assessment research about the inclusion of Global English accents in high-stakes listening tests. This study explored test-takers' attitudes toward the inclusion of different English accents in the Duolingo English Test (DET) 2021 test version and their associations with listening test scores. One hundred sixty…

This evaluation report examines extensive reading (ER) speed and words read by students at a Japanese university using a digital ER platform called Xreading and compares them to standardized test reading performance using the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). The study focuses on first- and second-year students who…

Many English language proficiency (ELP) tests used for university admissions and placement now include integrated writing tasks that require examinees to use external sources when writing. Integrated writing tasks improve test authenticity and impact, but they raise several validity questions, such as what academic language skills they engage and…

Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…

Thousands of education institutions worldwide rely on IELTS scores as criteria for accepting international students whose first language is not English. Individual studies have found varying degrees of strength of correlations and conflicting results between IELTS entry scores and subsequent academic success. These conflicting results were…

This study conducts a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of OpenAI's language model, ChatGPT 4, for grading Task 2 writing of the IELTS exam. The objective is to assess the alignment between ChatGPT's grading and that of official human raters. The analysis encompassed a multifaceted approach, including a comparison of means and reliability…

This study explored the role of vocabulary breadth and depth in second language learners' performance in IELTS academic reading tests in China. Sixty-two Chinese learners of English as a foreign language completed a vocabulary size test, a vocabulary depth test, and an IELTS reading test. Results showed that vocabulary breadth and depth both…

Although most international students arrive with required language qualifications, many struggle with the linguistic demands of their programmes. This study explored whether the test-preparation industry undermines the qualifications with which students arrive. English proficiency of 153 Chinese student in the UK was tested on the Duolingo English…

This study examines the impact of teacher metapathy, or teachers' capacity to comprehend and sympathize with students' emotional and cognitive requirements, on the academic outcomes of IELTS applicants, such as total band scores, motivation, and language learning orientation. Ten IELTS teachers from five language training centers and 100 IELTS…

This study investigates the relationships among working memory (WM), syntactic parsing ability (SP), and L2 reading performance across varying proficiency levels. A cohort of 120 L1-Persian EFL learners was categorized into beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency groups based on their IELTS scores. Participants completed a reading span…

For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

Based on 312 samples, this study investigated the relationship between two dimensions of L2 vocabulary knowledge (VK) and listening comprehension (LC) by comparing written and oral vocabulary measurements and further examined the mediating effect of L2 vocabulary fluency (VF) by using Bootstrapping and Monte Carlo Method. Results show that: (1)…

One of the major issues in SLA is developing language tests that could produce good measures of implicit knowledge. This study examines the validity of an English Elicited Imitation (EI) test as a measure of L2 implicit grammatical knowledge. Forty freshman university students in Turkey took a set of language tests: an EI test, two storytelling…

English-medium universities often accept scores from various English language proficiency (ELP) tests as evidence of ELP from non-English background students. This practice raises the question of how these tests compare in terms of their ability to predict academic achievement. This longitudinal study addresses this question by examining the…

The current study investigates how second language (L2) listening comprehension is associated with three dimensions of L2 vocabulary knowledge: size, depth, and fluency. Vocabulary knowledge tests administered to 290 participants measured L2 auditory vocabulary size, depth, and fluency. Afterward, participants took an International English…