Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I…

In the field of applied linguistics, the English article is the acknowledged teaching and learning difficulty and receives lots of attention in second language acquisition (SLA). This paper, based on the Syntactic Misanalysis Account (SMA) advocated by Trenkic in which L2 articles are analyzed as adjectives by L2ers, proposes the English article…

Understanding and accounting for gender performance differences on high stakes examinations has become a particular concern for educational researchers to ensure test fairness for all examinees. In the context of second/foreign language proficiency testing, research suggests that males and females do not react differently at the item level.…

This article examines language learner strategy use reported by 121 Chinese learners of English through a questionnaire and the relationships between their strategy use and language performance on a national English proficiency test: College English Test-Band 4. Results showed that this group of learners reported using more metacognitive…