According to the IELTS official website, IELTS candidates usually score lower in the IELTS Writing test than in the other language skills. This is disappointing for the many IELTS candidates who fail to get the overall band score they need. Surprisingly enough, few studies have addressed this issue. The present study, then, is aimed at shedding…

IELTS is used as a screening gatekeeper and plays a crucial role in Omani students to meet job requirements. This paper reports on Omani English-major undergraduate students' reflections on their experience of the reading section of Academic IELTS. The main aim of the study was to elucidate their difficulties and coping strategies to inform…

Research shows that test method can exert a significant impact on test takers' performance and thereby contaminate test scores. We argue that common test method can exert the same effect as common stimuli and violate the conditional independence assumption of item response theory models because, in general, subsets of items which have a shared…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) learners of English could learn to produce stranded prepositions through structural priming. Structural priming is the tendency for speakers to repeat the structure of previously experienced sentences, without intention or conscious awareness of such behaviour, and is thought to be associated…