It has been argued in the literature on (language) testing that any act of testing/assessment can impact: (1) educators' curriculum design; (2) teachers' teaching practices; and (3) students' learning behaviors. This quality of any given testing situation or act of assessment has been called washback, or backwash if you will. Washback falls into…

The present study examined two input modification techniques, namely lexical elaboration (LE) and typographical enhancement (TE), and the combination of these two (LE & TE) to seek the difference among them as far as incidental vocabulary learning through reading is concerned. Ninety six Iranian EFL students whose reading proficiency was at…

When viewed through a generic, one-size-fits-all perspective, use of input enhancement does not appear effective. Through analysis of individual grammatical features and different learner proficiency levels, a significant impact may be revealed. To study the impact of input enhancement on diverse grammatical features, 16 short reading texts and…

In this study, systems of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) in different countries were compared. The focus country was Turkey, which has low achievement in English. Other countries compared were Denmark, Hungary, and Portugal, which had considerably higher achievements in teaching English. The selection of these countries was based on…

This study examines the reading performance of selected students at the Pre-College program of the Mahidol University International College (PC-MUIC) as they are required to attain a score of 520 in the TOEFL-ITP (or equivalent performance in IELTS) to enter MUIC. Specifically, this research aims to evaluate whether the reading skills that…

This study aimed to explore the effect of computer assisted language learning (CALL) on the undergraduate students' achievement on the TOEFL exam. The study was designed as quasi-experimental research. The participants in the study were 34 sophomore students in the Department of Foreign Language Education in Middle East Technical University. The…

The review presented and discussed in this paper explores the theoretical underpinnings and research findings of the washback of high-stakes tests in the field of language teaching and testing as well general education and suggests areas and ways of researching the phenomenon in the future. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)