Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…

Program evaluation in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) has a history dating from the 1960's. The focus of previous program evaluations has been on language achievement at the end of the program of study (Lynch, 1996). However, to improve or maintain program quality, teacher…

Approaches used by linguists to examine the way in which speakers or writers modify their commitment to the propositional content of their utterances are discussed, and it is noted that a frequent criticism is the failure of inexperienced speakers or writers to modulate their utterances properly. This paper considers economic reports and in…

The concept of authenticity in foreign language pedagogy is discussed with particular reference to the methodology of instructing through the medium of authentic texts. It is suggested that the use of authentic texts in a classroom setting actually deauthenticates those elements that made the texts originally authentic; i.e., placing them in a…

This paper examines language trends in 21st century Asia and reports on the development of Applied Linguistics (AL) in the region. It has a dual focus: the first analyses the unique preoccupations of Asian and Asia-based applied linguists that have given rise to present research directions and preferences. These, however, seem to be not much…