Integrated speaking test tasks (integrated tasks) provide reading and/or listening input to serve as the basis for test-takers to formulate their oral responses. This study examined the influence of topical knowledge on integrated speaking test performance and compared independent speaking test performance and integrated speaking test performance…

Communities of practice is a term that has begun gaining grounds in various settings especially in business and recently in education (Argyris, 2008; Göhlich, 2016; Lave & Wegner, 1991). The purpose of this case study is to look into how students measure their personal perceptions of their educational community; how they rate their educator…

Researchers debate whether listening tasks should be supported by visuals. Most empirical research in this area has been conducted on the effects of visual support on listening comprehension tasks employing multiple-choice questions. The present study seeks to expand this research by investigating the effects of video listening passages (vs.…

The purpose of this study was to align verbal descriptions of test takers' language performance with distributions of the numerical scores they received on the three sections (Listening Comprehension, Structure and Written Expression, and Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary) of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The descriptors of…

It was hypothesized that a student's major-field area interacts with the text content in determining performance on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) reading passages. Results with 32,467 graduate school applicants, all nonnative English speakers, supported the study's hypothesis, as students in two major-field groups, the…