The usefulness of explicit knowledge of the second language is a matter of controversy in the field of second language acquisition. In this regard, it has been argued that explicit representations might be useful for some structures but not for others (R. Ellis, 2006; Roehr & Gánem-Gutiérrez, 2009). The goal of this study was to examine…

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…

Most English-medium programs at European universities require prospective students to take standardised tests for English as a foreign language (EFL) to be admitted. However, there are contexts in which individual teachers' judgements serve the same function, thus having high-stakes consequences for the higher education entrance of their students.…

The main objective of this article is to demonstrate with the help of learner corpus data the practical relevance of the phraseological dimension of language for writing assessment in higher education. Phraseological competence is now widely recognized as an important part of fluent and idiomatic language use, but its development has not received…

In this study, we investigated criterial discourse features in L2 writing through the use of recurrent word combinations, a.k.a. lexical bundles, taking a corpus-driven and expert-judged approach by examining L2 English data across various proficiency levels from L1 Chinese learners. Proficiency was determined by a robust rating procedure which is…