College and university admissions officers are the gatekeepers who decide which individuals may join the "country club" of higher education. As such, the decisions they make have a significant impact on the lives of individuals, especially those who are willing to travel across the globe and risk living in an unfamiliar country in order…

Linguistic self-confidence is an underlying factor in L2 motivation and positive L2 learning outcomes. However, few studies have investigated its hypothesized relationship to objective L2 learning outcomes or the relationship between self-confidence and cognitive and affective individual differences that influence L2 learning. In this study,…

Today's world has been embracing social, political, and economical changes that result in the replacement of people for immigration and citizenship purposes. Those waves of change cause some countries to receive the movement of new people, which requires the countries to take precautions. In doing so, in the citizenship context various mechanisms…

The study aims to measure the effect of Task-based language teaching on grammatical achievement and the motivation of EFL learners at Dong Nai Technology University. The research will conduct a quick grammar test to administer 48 students at the school to achieve this goal. After sitting the test, the learners will undergo a 6-week course applying…

This article reports on an experimental study that set out to investigate and compare the effectiveness of a direct and an indirect approach to data-driven learning (DDL) in facilitating Chinese learners' mastery of a challenging type of lexico-grammatical resource (i.e. hedges) in an undergraduate English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing…

This study examined the effect of feedback, feed up (comments on goals and students' success in achieving goals) and feed forward (comments on the next step in learning during the semester) on writing motivation, writing self-efficacy, and writing anxiety. Two hundred and ten female intermediate language learners (age[subscript mean] = 17.2) were…

This research sought to investigate EFL nursing students' use of vocabulary learning strategies to learn medical terminology and further assess strategies used in relation to learning outcomes measured by two types of vocabulary knowledge: meaning recall (passive recall) and meaning recognition (passive recognition). The participants, 138 EFL…

Language teachers are expected to engage in classroom assessment practices and report on learners' progress aligned with proficiency standards, as well as prepare learners for external examinations. The term "language assessment literacy" (LAL) describes what the constituency of language instructors needs to know about assessment…

This article examines the relationship between Japanese undergraduate students' English language proficiency and English language-related challenges faced when studying an international business course through English. It also examines English language proficiency thresholds students need to reach in each academic skill (i.e. reading, listening,…

The Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, 2nd Edition (CTOPP-2; Wagner et al., 2013) is commonly used in k-12 public schools to assess basic cognitive processing skills foundational for reading achievement. Psychometric support for its use with dual language learners (DLLs), a group representing over 10% of the school-aged population in…

This study compares the effect of ZPD feedback with explicit feedback on accuracy in second language (L2) writing. It also examines the effect of focused vs. unfocused ZPD feedback on L2 writing development during teacher-student tutorial sessions. Four participants wrote five persuasive essays and were provided with ZPD or explicit feedback…

In a knowledge society characterized by an abundance of information sources that present conflicting perspectives on socio-scientific controversies, it is extremely important for readers to construct effective mental models of such controversies. Nevertheless, readers' mental representations of controversial information are assumed to be biased…

Language placement tests (LPTs) are used to assess students' proficiency in a progressive manner in the target language. Based on their performance, students are assigned to stepped language courses. These tests are usually considered low stakes because they do not have significant consequences in students' lives, which is perhaps the reason why…

Much has been done on assessment literacy (AL) components and job demand-resources (JD-R). However, an interdisciplinary look at AL components as the predictors of JD-R and its possible consequences for the engagement and burnout of teachers' assessment performance has been neglected. To fill this gap, the present study explored this issue in the…

Testing organizations are faced with increasing demand to provide subscores in addition to the total test score. However, psychometricians argue that most subscores do not have added value to be worth reporting. To have added value, subscores need to meet a number of criteria: they should be reliable, distinctive, and distinct from each other and…