Expressions of impossibility refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use and things that are impossible to find. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic expressions of impossibility, and the difficulties that…

In this study, the cut-off scores obtained from the Angoff, Angoff Y/N, Nedelsky and Ebel standard methods were compared with the 50 T score and the current cut-off score in various aspects. Data were collected from 448 students who took Module B1+ English Exit Exam IV and 14 experts. It was seen that while the Nedelsky method gave the lowest…

Comparing language tests and test preparation materials holds important implications for the latter's validity and reliability. However, not enough studies compare such materials across a wide range of indices. Therefore, this study investigated the text complexity of IELTS academic reading tests (IRT) and IELTS reading practice tests (IRPrT).…

Time metaphorical expressions are common in all languages and in general as well as specialized contexts. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic time metaphorical expressions containing , and the difficulties that student-translators have in translating them; the translation strategies they use and the…

This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions, and difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions containing zero, two, three, twenty, sixty, hundred, thousand…etc., and another corpus of specialized…

The purpose of this study is to investigate Indigenous pupils' achievement in Mathematics with Bilingual (Bahasa Melayu and Temiar) versions of mathematics tests. Both tests were based on Mathematics computation and word problem items. This study involved eight Orang Asli (Indigenous) primary students from eight schools in the district of Sungai…

This exploratory study examines the role of foreign and second language contexts in the acquisition of conventional expressions. A group of 21 ESL learners was compared to 25 EFL learners randomly selected from a larger pool. Both groups completed an aural multiple-choice discourse completion task (MC-DCT), which was developed from a previously…

Collocation is an often-neglected language form that foreign language teachers and students should focus on to achieve competence in a target language. In this research, the researchers studied purposely to facilitate both second language teachers and students to produce correct and appropriate collocations. The purposes of this research were 1)…

Background: This study aims to develop a test for assessing pragmatic comprehension ability in Chinese as a second language (L2). Following the framework of an argument-based approach to test validation, this study attempts to obtain backing for the Evaluation and Explanation inferences. Methods: Test items were developed based on two sources of…

This study aims at investigating the challenges that Yemeni translation students encounter when translating neologisms from English into Arabic. It also aims at comparing students' translation with outcomes of machine translation (MT). The authors follow the descriptive and comparative methods in conducting this study. To achieve the objective of…

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…

Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely…

A previous study (Ke, I. 2012. From EFL to English as an international and scientific language: analysing Taiwan's high-school English textbooks in the period 1952-2009. "Language, Culture and Curriculum," 25(2), 173-187) on the trend of English textbooks in Taiwanese high schools showed that the proportion of the lessons embedded in…

Research Findings: This study builds on prior work related to the assessment of young dual language learners (DLLs). The purposes of the study were to (a) determine whether latent subgroups of preschool DLLs would replicate those found previously and (b) examine the validity of GOLD® by Teaching Strategies with empirically derived subgroups.…

Differential bundle functioning (DBF) analyses were conducted to determine whether seventh and eighth grade second language learners (SLLs) had lower probabilities of answering bundles of math word problems correctly that had heavy language demands, when compared to non-SLLs of equal math proficiency. Math word problems on each of four test forms…