This study illustrates the use of score equity assessment (SEA) for evaluating the fairness of reported test scores from assessments intended for test takers from diverse cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds, using a workplace English proficiency test. Subgroups were defined by test-taker background characteristics that research has…

This study investigated the relative contributions of English morphological and vocabulary knowledge to second language (L2) reading comprehension among 100 adult Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The study also investigated the extent to which the roles of morphological and vocabulary knowledge in L2 reading comprehension…

Purpose: Drawing on the perspectives of cultural capital theory, this study investigated the impact of international internships on the performance of Japanese undergraduates on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) using a between-group pretest-posttest experimental design. Design/methodology/approach: Students participating…

English is increasingly being used as a medium instruction in business education at the tertiary level, with its growth fueled by university internationalization. As a result, many students enrolled in English medium business programs are learning through a second or foreign language, with variant levels of prior knowledge and experiences. This…

Metacognitive awareness is considered a crucial factor in reading comprehension. In the present study, the quantitative research method was applied using descriptive statistics, T-test, and ANOVA to identify: (1) What is second language (L2) Vietnamese students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies? (2) Are there any significant…

Conventional folk wisdom insists study abroad is an inherently valuable educational experience for young people. While traditional study abroad programs were typically a semester or a full year in duration, short-term study abroad programs of only a couple weeks are now the most common type of sojourn abroad. Problematically, evidence is mounting…

While research on informal digital learning of English (IDLE) increases in the fields of teaching English to speakers of other languages and computer-assisted language learning, few studies have examined the relationship between quantity and diversity of IDLE practices and different language learning outcomes. To address this gap, data were…

For many sociolinguists, the issue of shyness and hesitation phenomenon has been problematic for Japanese L1 and L2 speakers, particularly in gendered interactions. Over the past decade, more Japanese are shunning conversations, relationships, and isolating themselves, which is accelerating the demographic crisis in Japan. Thus, this paper focuses…

This survey was conducted to investigate how university students gain or lose confidence in English communicative domains over four years at university. Self-assessment has been a useful instrument for measuring learners' English proficiency, and the students in this study were required to self-assess their confidence levels in TOEIC Can-Do list…

This paper reports the compilation of a corpus of Taiwanese students' spoken English, which is one of the sub-corpora of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010). LINDSEI is one of the largest corpora of learner speech. The compilation process follows the design criteria…

This study investigates the benefits of designing second language (L2) learning tasks to operate on learner-generated content (related to actual content in their lives and experiences) as opposed to teacher-generated content typical of current approaches to L2 task design (fictitious ideas and events created to provide an opportunity for…

This present study investigated the relationships among L2 readers' reading attitude, reading strategy use, and reading proficiency in order to identify patterns caused by individuals' differences. For this study, 153 Korean university students replied to a reading attitude and reading strategy questionnaire. An ANOVA and frequency analysis were…

The aim of this study is to construct a model of a simple lexical network showing the strength and asymmetry of the connections between vocabulary items in the L2 mental lexicon of Japanese learners. The study focuses on eight nouns and investigates how they are networked, and whether the existing network structure formed by these nouns would be…

This paper examines the uptake of Rasch measurement in language testing through a consideration of research published in language testing research journals in the period 1984 to 2009. Following the publication of the first papers on this topic, exploring the potential of the simple Rasch model for the analysis of dichotomous language test data, a…

Reading strategies are beneficial to learners' reading comprehension. The strategies can be divided into different categories, such as global reading strategies, problem solving strategies and support strategies. Most previous studies investigated the importance of reading strategies in the paper-based reading. However, relatively few studies…