English proficiency has become pivotal for university admission, particularly at the CEFR B2 level and IELTS band 6-6.5 across Europe. In Nordic universities, the substantial amount of assigned English reading materials requires a strong command of English reading skills, with vocabulary knowledge being a crucial component. This study explores 309…

There now exists an established body of work outlining the challenges international students can face as part of the acculturation process, including a range of academic and non-academic pressures to overcome. For many students, writing essays in academic English for the first time is problematic. This article considers pedagogical approaches for…

Questions exist as to whether AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can aid learning. This study examined whether in-class exercises involving error detection in text generated by ChatGPT can aid students' foreign language writing. Participants were Arabic-English speakers who were classified as ranging from modest to competent English users according to…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

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…

Comparing language tests and test preparation materials holds important implications for the latter's validity and reliability. However, not enough studies compare such materials across a wide range of indices. Therefore, this study investigated the text complexity of IELTS academic reading tests (IRT) and IELTS reading practice tests (IRPrT).…

The main aim of this article is to introduce the steps followed in designing effective teacher-appraisal forms to be completed by the students, and teacher-self-reflection forms to be completed by the teachers. After explaining the steps and the reasons behind taking them, we will report on the findings of the study we have conducted following the…

This article reports on an experimental study that set out to investigate and compare the effectiveness of a direct and an indirect approach to data-driven learning (DDL) in facilitating Chinese learners' mastery of a challenging type of lexico-grammatical resource (i.e. hedges) in an undergraduate English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing…

This study compares the effect of ZPD feedback with explicit feedback on accuracy in second language (L2) writing. It also examines the effect of focused vs. unfocused ZPD feedback on L2 writing development during teacher-student tutorial sessions. Four participants wrote five persuasive essays and were provided with ZPD or explicit feedback…

Many overseas students in Higher Education in the UK struggle to understand the compulsory texts for their course, and obtain lower scores for their modules than their monolingual peers. While the existence of this achievement gap is well established in the literature, little is known about the ways in which overseas students in HE with limited…

This innovations in practice article introduces a chatbot that was developed to support and motivate second language learners during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chatbot was designed to facilitate active, out-of-class language learning to supplement in-class input. It can adapt to learners' abilities and pace by chatting with them, thus providing…

In this study, we used Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth CMT) for the benefit of English for Academic Purposes' teaching and learning. CMT underpins how in metaphorical expressions, one concept is understood in terms of another. We argue that CMT can help students understand and master argumentation skills and essay structure, although there…

This viewpoint article provides a critical reflection on the gatekeeping and academic language practices of Anglophone universities, evaluating these in light of the promotional claims universities make about internationalization and global reach. I then consider the arguments put forward in each of the main articles in this special issue from…

This study investigated how English learners complete multimodal formative quizzes. Participants included 17,950 students enrolled in a mandatory English for Academic Purposes course at a university in Hong Kong. We retrieved data from Blackboard, a learning management system, and conducted a two-step cluster analysis to examine student…

The revived interest in the notion of 'evaluative judgement' in higher education is motivated by commitment of researchers and practitioners to effectively implement learning-oriented assessment and cultivate this high-order cognitive ability to develop students' capacity for self-regulated learning. Recent studies have examined the affordances…