Intercultural communication research has highlighted the significance of intercultural communication apprehension/anxiety measurement and instrument development in diverse sociocultural contexts. This study embarked on developing and validating a scale, the Perceived Intercultural Communication Anxiety/Apprehension Scale (PICAS) in the English as…

This study aimed to propose a new method for scoring C-Tests as measures of general language proficiency. In this approach, the unit of analysis is sentences rather than gaps or passages. That is, the gaps correctly reformulated in each sentence were aggregated as sentence score, and then each sentence was entered into the analysis as a polytomous…

This article offers a critical review of the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology English Proficiency Test (MSRT), a high-stakes exam required for postgraduate graduation, scholarships, and certain employment positions in Iran. Despite its widespread use, the design and implementation of the MSRT raise concerns about its validity and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the vocabulary subsection of a high-stakes university entrance exam for Ph.D. programs using the argument-based approach. All the three different versions of the test administered in a period of five years and the responses of 12,500 test-takers were studied. The study focused on four…

In this study the validity of partial dictation as a measure of overall language proficiency was examined. Two partial dictation tests along with a C-Test, a cloze test, and a reading comprehension test, as criterion measures, were administered to a group of Iranian EFL learners. The coefficients of correlation between partial dictation and…

This study was set to cross-validate a bilingual Persian-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) against the monolingual English version and compare Iranian EFL learners' performance on the two versions. Various bilingual versions of the VST have been developed based on the assumption that bilingual versions are not affected by the…

In this study, the cloze-elide test was developed and administered under time constraints. This research is aimed to examine the validity and reliability of the speeded cloze-elide test and investigate its relationship with reading comprehension, C-Test, and multiple-choice cloze test. Processing speed is a vital indicator to distinguish high to…

The C-test as a measure of first and second language proficiency suffers from ceiling effect. That is, the C-test is very easy for native speakers and for advanced second language learners and many examinees obtain full scores. Therefore, the test cannot distinguish among advanced learners or native speakers. Speeded C-test is suggested as a…

The present study attempted to investigate the effects of audio input enhancement on EFL learners' retention of intensifiers. To this end, two research questions were formulated. In order to address these research questions, this study attempted to reject two null hypotheses. Pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design was employed to…

The present study aimed at investigating the effect of using collaborative translation tasks (CTTs) for teaching figurative language. The study also sought to explore the perceptions of the learners toward the efficacy of CTTs for learning figurative language through conducting interviews. The participants of the study included 60 English as a…

Many researchers were interested in validity of the language proficiency tests in the previous decades. The present study aims to study the construct validity of the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology Reading Comprehension module (MSRT) in the Iranian context. After administering a standard language proficiency test (OPT) 65…

Han's (2009, 2013) selective fossilization hypothesis (SFH) claims that L1 markedness and L2 input robustness determine the fossilizability (and learnability) of an L2 feature. To test the validity of the model, a pseudo-longitudinal study was designed in which the errors in the argumentative essays of 52 Iranian EFL learners were identified and…

This paper reports an attempt to develop and validate a bilingual Persian version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST). Due to the particular educational system in Iran, there is a dire need for a test that can effectively estimate English learners' vocabulary sizes. Previous research (Nguyen and Nation, 2011) has indicated that bilingual versions of…

The purpose of the present study was twofold. Firstly, it tried to investigate the relationship between the technical English proficiency of the students of Mechanical Engineering in the universities of Iran and their technical translation proficiency in translating technical texts of Mechanics. Secondly, it attempted to evaluate the effectiveness…

This study set out to empirically determine the reliability and validity of the Vocabulary Levels Tests, both the passive and productive versions. Furthermore, attempt was made to investigate the nature of the students' vocabulary knowledge with regard to their passive and active knowledge of the L2 words as a whole and at different word frequency…