Recently, psychometricians and researchers have voiced their concern over the exploration of language test items in light of Messick's validation framework. Validity has been central to test development and use; however, it has not received due attention in language tests having grave consequences for test takers. The present study sought to…

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…

Language proficiency policies act as critical gatekeepers for multilingual international students (MIS) who intend to pursue an education at English-medium universities. The current study revisits the question of the predictive validity of a standardized English proficiency exam--International English Language Testing System (IELTS)--in comparison…

Little is known about what academics focus on when providing assessment feedback to international students for whom English is an additional language (EAL). This study examines written assessment feedback provided to 11 EAL-speaking international students throughout a two-year Master of Social Work programme and investigates their perspectives of…

The Vocabulary Size Test (VST) measures English learners' decontextualised receptive vocabulary knowledge of written English and has nine bilingual versions with multiple-choice options written in other languages. This study used the English-Japanese version of the VST to investigate the extent to which loanword items were answered correctly by…

This study sought to scrutinize the interplay between interlanguage pragmatic learning strategies (IPLS) usage and learner autonomy among male and female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. It also examines whether gender plays a significant role in the adoption and efficacy of these strategies in the EFL learning context. The study…

This article examines the changes taken place over the decades after a test-based accountability system was in place and proposes an agenda for consequential research of the testing program. The article starts with a review of theories of test-based accountability (Supovitz, Journal of Educational Change 10:211-227, 2009) and a socially grounded,…

We closely replicated Wu and Ortega (2013), who found that an elicited imitation test (EIT) reliably distinguished low-level from high-level language abilities among instructed second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese. The original study sampled learners: (1) from second-level courses to represent low-level language abilities; and (2)…

The purpose of this research is to reveal and compare the language proficiency profiles of Purdue's Chinese and Indian graduate applicants in various disciplines to take a step towards the development of Language Proficiency Literacy (LPL) of graduate admissions decision makers. The study argues that before being able to offer LPL development…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock-teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The…

Purpose: This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian…

In L2 pragmatics, only a few studies have examined task complexity. Furthermore, the existing studies have predominantly focused on the cognitive dimension and have lacked consistent findings. González-Lloret and Ortega (2018) and Pallotti (2019) have thereby contended that socio-interactional features be incorporated into task design. Along this…

In this study, the construct of English competence for non-English major postgraduates is defined as the ability to effectively use various strategies and comprehensively exert the ability of reading, listening, writing, speaking and translation with academic, world, linguistic and intercultural knowledge in academic activities, classroom learning…

Research has suggested the important role of vocabulary knowledge in second language (L2) speaking proficiency. However, earlier studies tended to disregard the congruence in test format between assessing vocabulary knowledge and speaking skills with the former predominantly measured in written format. The current study measured vocabulary…

Many overseas students in Higher Education in the UK struggle to understand the compulsory texts for their course, and obtain lower scores for their modules than their monolingual peers. While the existence of this achievement gap is well established in the literature, little is known about the ways in which overseas students in HE with limited…