We believe that is culturally situated. In this conceptual article, we problematize some of the phrasing used for prosody indicators and explore how three of the most spoken languages in the United States (other than English) enact aspects of prosody when reading. We probe potential linguistic and sociocultural implications and contribute to the…

Reading is a complicated cognitive procedure of deciphering symbols to create meaning. It's a complicated relationship that the reader has with the text and is lead by a reader's previous knowledge, experiences, attitude, and culture. Second language (L2) reading comprehension is perhaps a more complicated procedure and there's a need to ensure…

The current article evaluates a national English language proficiency test known as the "MSRT test" which is used to determine the eligibility of candidates for admission to and completion of higher education programs in Iran. Students in all majors take this standardized, high-stake criterion-referenced test to determine if they have…

The growing number of children in primary schools in Germany who have German as their second language (L2) has raised questions about the fairness of performance assessment. Fair tests are a prerequisite for distinguishing between L2 learning delay and a specific learning disability. We evaluated five commonly used reading and spelling tests for…

In response to McLean (2021), Laufer (2021) makes three claims which are either not supported by research or are based on studies with important limitations. First is that a vocabulary size, instead of a level, can be used to match learners with lexically appropriate materials despite test creators and research not supporting this. Second is that…

Freshman students learning English as foreign language have problems in comprehending English texts such as inability to identify main ideas, paragraph topics, supporting details and the organizational structure of a text. They have difficulty writing a summary or making an outline of the main ideas and important supporting details in a single, or…

In 2016, there were 4.9 million students identified as English language learners (ELLs) in U.S. public schools who undergo testing. Students identified as ELLs are allowed to use paperback bilingual dictionaries during testing as an accommodation. When deciding whether to provide the accommodation, teachers need to consider several factors. First,…

The central purpose of this paper is to examine validity problems arising from the multiple-choice items and technical passages in the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test (TOEFL iBT) reading section, primarily concentrating on construct-irrelevant variance (Messick, 1989). My personal TOEFL iBT experience, along with my…

This paper is concerned with multimodal literacy involving the different kinds of knowledge required to fully access texts with multiple semiotic resources used in reading comprehension test tasks. Such literacy requirements have not drawn researchers' attention to date, mainly because the foreign language teaching and testing project has…

This report summarizes the longitudinal performance of Austin Independent School District bilingual and English as a second language programs' students on state academic reading and math assessments by examining scores across 5 school years, from 2013-2014 through 2017-2018. Students' performance is summarized by program.

A number of studies claim that knowledge of 5,000-8,000 of the most frequent words should provide at least 95% coverage of most unsimplified texts in English, arguably enough to guess or ignore most unknown words while reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1991; Nation, 2006). However, perhaps hidden in that 95% figure…

Test anxiety often interferes with a reliable evaluation of language learning, frustrating teachers and students alike. Most researchers have found a significant inverse relation between anxiety and written test performance. Although this situation leads to a distortion of test scores, suggestions for treating and coping with test anxiety have…

The Reading Proficiency Interview (RPI) is a new reading proficiency test format that was created in response to the US government's need to rapidly produce a cost effective and credible reading proficiency assessment format for small-population languages. The RPI was developed in response to a requirement by the National Language Service Corps…

Since Finnish is not an Indo-European language, studying foreign languages in general and then also studying special fields through the medium of foreign languages may provide an extra difficulty for Finnish students. Most university language centres in Finland have organized reading comprehension courses in several foreign languages for the…

Context theory is a very important theory in English teaching, especially the teaching of reading. This paper first analyzes the theory of context, including the features of context and some principles in context theory. Then the paper discusses the application of context theory in English teaching of reading, including some problems met in…