This paper presents the findings of a study which aimed at exploring the washback of the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) English examinations on English teaching and learning practice at secondary schools in Bangladesh. For this purpose, a qualitative research (employing interviews with English teachers, FGDs with students and classroom…

The purpose of this article is to explore the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) assessment under its Institutional Testing Program (ITP) modality as it acts as a curriculum artifact along Mexican undergraduate degree programs considered within the exit criteria. A discourse historical approach (DHA) (Wodak, 2008; Wodak & Meyer,…

Research is scarce about the lexical processes undertaken by thousands of L2 learners worldwide who already command one or more languages. Some aspects involved in lexical organisation and production, such as clustering and switching, have been traditionally approached through manual methods, which depend on subjective judgments of semantic…

In second language listening assessment and pedagogy, practitioners hold different views on whether to repeat a listening text in contexts where inferences about listening ability are to be drawn from task performance. To address this issue, we investigated the effects of repeating the listening text (double play) on listener performance,…

The extent to which L2 television is viewed by foreign language learners will depend on the degree to which it is understood. The addition of captions has been shown to support comprehension (e.g., Birulés-Muntané & Soto-Faraco, 2016; Montero-Perez, Peters, & Desmet, 2014), especially when proficiency is low (e.g., Lavaur & Bairstow,…

Dynamic visuospatial support (DVS) is an effective tool for helping people learn linguistic tones (Hannah et al., 2017, Morett et al., 2022, Zhen et al., 2019), and learn words with these tonal categories (Baills et al., 2019, Morett et al., 2015). Progress in the field of embodied cognition and learning has led to recent emphasis on the pitch…

Web-based games can be an alternative learning media for students to improve their vocabulary mastery in reading. Nevertheless, few studies look at how web-based games can be used as a teaching tool to help junior high school students improve their vocabulary, especially in the context of reading. The main objective of this research is to know the…

Developing language skills is a must for being proficient in any language for successful communication which is one of the most sought-after soft skills in the world today. Given the poor English proficiency of Bangladeshi students, this study investigated the status of listening skills, one of the vital primary language skills, in classroom…

Acquiring technological literacy and acceptance has a significant influence on academic emotion regulation (AER), academic resilience (AR), willingness to communicate (WTC), and academic enjoyment (AE), which are crucial for the success of university students. However, this area has not been adequately explored in research, particularly in the…

Three experiments explored how retrieval practice and corrective feedback affect a third language (L3) vocabulary learning. In the first two experiments, Chinese-English bilinguals without prior French language experience studied English (Second Language, L2)--French (L3) word pairs in repeated studying or retrieval practice without (Experiment…

This article describes the findings of a study on the correlations between English as second language (ESL) motivation, understood as a product of the stimulus appraisal system, and writing proficiency in English among undergraduate Indian ESL learners. The principal objective of the study was to analyze the correlation between the undergraduate…

This article introduces the CELI corpus, a new learner corpus of written Italian consisting of ca. 600,000 tokens, evenly distributed among CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) proficiency levels B1, B2, C1 and C2. The collected texts derive from the language certification exams administered by the University for Foreigners…

This study explores the role of cognitive task complexity in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum development and its impact on learner engagement, motivation, and learning outcomes. A mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, was employed to gain comprehensive insights into the topic. The qualitative…

Listening comprehension is a crucial skill in English as a Foreign Language education, yet listening assessment still needs to be explored. This study aims to understand how listening is assessed in a Colombian private language institution and its potential connection to students' underperformance in listening proficiency tests. We characterize…

The use of four-skills language exams to support the achievement of curriculum goals in Japan is an under-researched yet critical topic. This study focuses on washback from the Cambridge B1 Preliminary and B2 First exams, which were used as fixed-point tests at a senior high school. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, utilizing data from…