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…

This study explores the relationship between English Learners (ELs) in the Texas school system and their outcomes on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) tests and the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS). Schumann's Acculturation Model and Krashen's Input Hypothesis were used as theoretical…

The principle of fairness in testing traditionally involves an assertion about the absence of bias, or that measurement should be impartial (i.e., not provide an unfair advantage or disadvantage), across groups of test takers. In more general-purposes language testing, a test taker's background knowledge is not typically considered relevant to the…

This book adopts as conceptual focus the technical mode of experience, exploring this characteristic mode of design as the angle from which the discipline of applied linguistics takes its cue. What makes applied linguistic concept formation possible? A number of elementary concepts and ideas are so basic to the discipline that they can neither be…

Many university students in Taiwan have complained that the general English class is not very exciting nor useful for the workplace due to its exam-oriented and teacher-centered instruction focus. Such negative impressions often lead to a low motivation toward learning English and affect students' learning outcomes. This study aimed to establish…

English-medium universities often accept scores from various English language proficiency (ELP) tests as evidence of ELP from non-English background students. This practice raises the question of how these tests compare in terms of their ability to predict academic achievement. This longitudinal study addresses this question by examining the…

The study investigates whether comprehension of derived words in text context requires a complete understanding of word parts. It explores comprehension of derived words as a function of learner proficiency and contextual clues. Ninety English-as-a-foreign-language learners at three proficiency levels participated in three successive tests…

This paper explores how "English learners (ELs)" or who we prefer to call "multilingual learners" are labeled and positioned in policy documents and leading education research documents respectively. Attending to the urgent call for serving the growing number of linguistically and culturally diverse learners, this study delves…

Research utilizing morphological priming has found that L2 speakers show facilitation from derived L2 primes, which could suggest morphological processing during derived L2 word recognition. However, the process of L2 derived word recognition is still poorly understood, with some arguing that the observed priming effects may not be morphological…

English language proficiency (ELP) assessment scores are used by states to make high-stakes decisions related to linguistic support in instruction and assessment for English learner (EL) students and for EL student reclassification. Changes to both academic content standards and ELP academic standards within the last decade have resulted in…

Sometimes a treatment, such as receiving a high school diploma, is assigned to students if their scores on two inputs (e.g., math and English test scores) are above established cutoffs. This forms a multidimensional regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze the effect of the educational treatment where there are two running variables…

The extrapolation of test scores to a target domain - that is, association between test performances and relevant real-world outcomes - is critical to valid score interpretation and use. This study examined the relationship between Duolingo English Test (DET) speaking scores and university stakeholders' evaluation of DET speaking performances. A…

This paper examines the role of metacognitive awareness in academic writing in a mixed-method study. In addition to validating an instrument assessing metacognitive knowledge and strategies in the context of academic writing, the study uncovered how Chinese multilingual students' metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive strategies, and metacognitive…

This report describes a calibration, scoring, and reporting method applicable to an assessment requiring aggregation at multiple levels. We demonstrate the method using an example of an assessment that targets a small and diverse population, an English language proficiency assessment for English learners with the most significant cognitive…

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…