Many empirical findings of previous studies have suggested a connection between motivational factors and L2 writing. Nonetheless, the impact of motivational factors on the genre-based L2 writing has not gained much attention. The present study explored the extent to which the characteristics of two writing tasks involving different genres interact…

Purpose: This study examined bilinguals' performance on functional executive function map tasks such as the Zoo Map from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome and the extent to which working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition measures predicted bilinguals' performance on these tasks. Additionally, we explored the utility of…

This report describes the initial automated scoring results that were obtained using the constructed responses from the Writing and Speaking sections of the pilot forms of the "TOEFL Junior"® Comprehensive test administered in late 2011. For all of the items except one (the edit item in the Writing section), existing automated scoring…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which performance on the TOEFL iBT speaking section is associated with other indicators of Japanese university students' abilities to communicate orally in an academic English environment and to determine which components of oral ability for these tasks are best assessed by TOEFL iBT. To…