Background and aims: A substantial minority of autistic individuals score within typical ranges on standard language tests, suggesting that autism does not necessarily affect language acquisition. This idea is reflected in current diagnostic criteria for autism, wherein language impairment is no longer included. However, some work has suggested…

The rising status of English as a global language prompts a call for a paradigm shift in English language teaching in order to correspond to the new sociolinguistic landscape. However, studies related to English language assessment, which can catalyze the transformation especially in a test-oriented context like Thailand, remain limited. This…

How does early educational quality affect longer-term academic outcomes? We shed light on this question via a natural experiment in the Philippines--the implementation of a mother tongue education policy in public schools in kindergarten to Grade 3. This policy led to an unexpected decline in educational quality, but differentially in a subset of…

The current study investigated 29 first-year Japanese university students' usage of an online vocabulary notebook that automatically searched eight different word and phrase lists to provide students with reference information about their self-selected vocabulary. Over the course of a 14-week period, participants read English books and articles…

The effects of colonialism in education and society have deep and difficult legacies. This book argues that it is necessary to better understand the deep roots of colonialism in order to realize justice and overturn forms of oppression in education policy, in classrooms, or in family and community-based education. Highlighting research from across…

Informed by Segalowitz's (Cognitive bases of second language fluency, Routledge, 2010) L2 speech production model and MacIntyre et al.'s (Mod Lang J 82(4):545-562, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1998.tb05543.x) L2 willingness to communicate model, this study sought to understand the influence of cognitive, affective and sociocultural…

This study examines the complex interplay between language ideologies and oral reading assessments for Black English-speaking students within Reading Recovery, a literacy intervention for first graders. Using a comparative case study, I analyzed the practices of three teachers to explore how they code, interpret, and adapt running record…

This article reports on two quantitative studies of English learners' (ELs) interactions with constructed-response items from a Grade 5 state science test. Study 1 investigated the relationships between the constructed-response item-level variables of English Reading Demand, English Writing Demand, and Background Knowledge Demand and the…

Multilingual practices of translanguaging -- fluid, complex, and dynamic processes of using one's complete linguistic repertoire -- have been increasingly embraced by researchers and educators in bilingual education. Applying this perspective within the field of assessment has proven more challenging. In this project, we explore the role of…

Background: PIRLS 2021 results revealed that South African Grade 4 learners performed significantly lower compared to other countries in reading comprehension and that they did not reach the standardised international mean score of 500. It was also evident from the results that English learners performed relatively higher than isiZulu learners.…

As the most prestigious and popular standardized achievement test to certify examinees' proficiency of the English language at the national level, Foreign Language Examination (YDS) has been mostly taken by academic staff, undergraduate and graduate students, state employees, and military personnel for years in Turkey. The current study set out to…

Purpose: This study was designed to assess the utility of a tool for automated analysis of rare vocabulary use in the spoken narratives of a group of school-age children from low-income communities. Method: We evaluated personal and fictional narratives from 76 school-age children from low-income communities (M[subscript age] = 9;3…

Ideologies regarding what is "good" teaching undergird common teaching practices and pedagogical decisions, which may support and/or run counter to the broader policy environment in which they occur (Gibson, 1998). Drawing from a six-month ethnography of 10th-grade newcomer students from Mexico and their teachers in a Central Texas…

Using the 2.4-million-word written Spanish subsection of the Corpus of Utah Dual Language Immersion, collected from a large-scale standardized writing assessment of K-12 Spanish second language (L2) students, this study focuses on lexical complexity as operationalized by three measures: lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical…

The introduction of assessment orientated policy in 2016 marks a significant change in Scottish education as it will establish standardised national testing. Teachers in Gaelic medium education are well placed to offer insights as they have had considerable autonomy regarding assessment and this paper is the first to consider the impact of this…