The United States government is perennially in need of employees with proficiency in critical foreign languages to communicate with foreign counterparts and maintain relationships worldwide. In order to fulfill this need, the government devotes significant resources training federal employees to advanced levels of language proficiency through…

Approaches to learning a second/foreign language can be affected by such individual differences as personality traits, motivational variables, and task difficulty. Personality traits have been proven to influence academic achievement, but their effects on motivation and language learning approaches remain unanswered. The first purpose of the study…

In Asia, in order to keep up with internationalization, the English-Medium Instruction (EMI) course has become a phenomenon in higher education. In turn, EMI literature has increasingly focused on the role of instructor's pedagogy in reducing students' negative response to EMI courses. Additionally, we further explore, from the students'…

The study investigated the alignment process of the International English Language Competency Assessment (IELCA) suite examinations' four levels, B1, B2, C1 and C2, onto the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) by explaining and discussing the five linking stages (Council of Europe (CoE 2009). Unlike previous studies, this study used the…

This paper investigates the language fluency problems of skilled immigrants from mainland China to Canada. It capitalises on interview data to explore the relationships between Chinese immigrants' identities, second language practices, and language skills. It reports the informants' difficulty in integrating into their workplaces and their…

In the second language acquisition domain, researchers have devoted tremendous efforts to studying the relationship between L2 learning and some socio-affective factors, such as anxiety, motivation, etc. However, little research has been done to examine whether and how perfectionism, a psychological trait, affects L2 learning and L2 performance.…

The study of motivation in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) contexts has hitherto one-sidedly been concerned with motivation to learn the foreign language, without regard for CLIL's eponymous focus on the inextricable connection between language and content. To fill this gap, this article focusses on CLIL learners' motivation not…

Evaluation on the foreign student's competence of Indonesian language is required to assess their achievement. This research aimed to identify the difficulty level of test instrument, analyze the difference of foreign students' competence for Indonesian language and to analyze the correlation of students' competence over various objective test…

We present a proof-of-concept study that sketches the use of compression algorithms to assess Kolmogorov complexity, which is a text-based, quantitative, holistic, and global measure of structural surface redundancy. Kolmogorov complexity has been used to explore cross-linguistic complexity variation in linguistic typology research, but we are the…

This study investigates the effect of proficiency- vs. performance-based elicited imitation (EI) assessment. EI requires test-takers to repeat sentences in the target language. The accuracy at which test-takers are able to repeat sentences highly correlates with test-takers' language proficiency. However, in EI, the factors that render an item…

Although the flipped class has been hotly discussed, the clicker-aided flipped EFL class (CFEC) still remains a mystery for most scholars. This study aims to determine the correlations between the initial EFL proficiency and other variables of the clicker-aided EFL flipped class. The sample was made up of randomly selected 79 participants (Female…

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in a Vocabulary I and Reading I courses, participated in the study. Before instruction, both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) pre-test. Comparisons of the pre-test scores showed no significant differences between the experimental and control group in decoding skills…

This quantitative study focuses on the relationship between foreign language learners' aptitude and proficiency test scores. Four groups of 136 beginning students received six months of Initial Acquisition Training (IAT) in four different language categories, according to the level of complexity for an English speaker: French (Category I),…

Despite the growing recognition that second language (L2) listening is a skill incorporating the ability to process visual information along with the auditory stimulus, standardized L2 listening assessments have been predominantly operationalizing this language skill as visual-free (Buck, 2001; Kang, Gutierrez Arvizu, Chaipuapae, & Lesnov,…

Background: While numerous articles on Criterion® have been published and its validity evidence has accumulated, test users need to obtain relevant validity evidence for their local context and develop their own validity argument. This paper aims to provide validity evidence for the interpretation and use of Criterion® for assessing second…