Accurately identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in students who speak a home language other than English has proven to be an enduring challenge. Consequently, students with DLD miss out on critical interventions, and those who are acquiring their two languages in a typical manner are placed in settings that do not meet their…

While several test concordance tables have been published, the research underpinning such tables has rarely been examined in detail. This study aimed to survey the publically available studies or documentation underpinning the test concordance tables of the providers of four major international language tests, all accepted by the Australian…

People are often asked to self-evaluate their abilities, and these evaluations may not always reflect objective reality. Here, we investigated this issue for bilingual adults' self-evaluations of language proficiency and usage. We specifically examined how people's self-reported language solidarity impacted their first- (L1) and second-language…

Background: The challenge of assessing all languages of multilingual children by clinicians who do not speak the children's heritage languages is a global problem amplified by the increase in recent migration as well as a lack of available assessment tools. Aim: To evaluate the feasibility of using a novel scoring schema to assist English-speaking…

As post-secondary institutions assume more responsibility for the language abilities of their graduates, more attention is being paid to post-admission language support to enhance student success. Previous research has indicated that a post-admission language diagnostic assessment procedure, when coupled with language support services, can be an…

There are few published estimates of vocabulary sizes amongst students in tertiary education. Research does not offer estimates of the vocabulary size tertiary students might be expected to possess, though estimates exist for K-12 education, some EFL contexts, and the general population. Such research is important. For reading comprehension during…

The purpose of this paper was to study the effectiveness of language acquisition using speaker instruction and listener instruction and examining the emergence of bidirectional intraverbals using a non-sense language. Current research suggests that speaker type instruction is more effective in aiding untrained relations (Contreras et al., 2020;…

Background: An earlier study in a school in England found that a series of brief values affirmation writing exercises, performed over the course of a school year by students aged 11-14, increased the mathematics attainment of students of low socioeconomic status (SES). Aims: This pre-registered follow-up of the original study aims to investigate…

Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner's native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese…

In this study, we examined the effect of previewing unfamiliar vocabulary on the real-time reading behavior of first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers. University students with English as their L1 or L2 read passages with embedded pseudowords. In a within-participant manipulation, definitions of the pseudowords were either previewed…

Taking a psycholinguistic perspective, this book investigates how second language (L2) learners' pragmatic abilities in English can be measured. It complements and extends earlier work on the testing of implicit and explicit grammar. The authors present a set of tests they developed using both well-established methods of measuring pragmatic…

The shift of focus from a cognitive to social view has drawn the attention of second language assessment researchers to delve into interactional competence as an intriguing topic in paired oral tests. To fill the gap on how interactional patterns compare across L1 and L2 interactions this study was specifically set to explore and compare 45 paired…

Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals' sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic…

The present study investigates L1 and L2 English speakers' knowledge of the "wh"-clausal construction along the parameters of (a) conventionality, distinguishing between high-frequency conventional and low-frequency unconventional formulations ("I asked him why they agreed/why did they agree"), and (b) proposition type,…

English language students often struggle to acquire and retain academic vocabulary due to limited exposure and insufficient opportunities for meaningful engagement with new words. Explicit, structured vocabulary instruction is essential to acquire word ownership, defined as understanding a word's meaning and using it in various contexts. This…