In this study, we present the development of individualized feedback for a large-scale listening assessment by combining standard setting and cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) approaches. We used the performance data from 3,358 students' item-level responses to a field test of a national EFL test primarily intended for tertiary-level EFL…

Communication strategies (CS) have been generally used to overcome oral communication problems in delivering the intended messages. While studies on CS mostly involved simulated communication contexts, the current study deviates from the past studies on CS by identifying the types of CS employed by candidates of real job interviews and examining…

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to determine whether English learners who participated in transitional kindergarten perform equally or better than English learners who did not participate in transitional kindergarten in the areas of oral language, written language, and overall language as measured by the…

The research investigated pragmatic transfer in responses to English tag questions by L1 Thai learners based on Interlanguage Pragmatics, specifically pragmatic transfer (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). The L1 Thai learners were categorized into two groups according to their English proficiency levels: advanced and intermediate. Oral and written…

Team teaching is re-emerging as a relevant research topic in language education due to the complexity and realities of globalization (Williams, Evans, & Metcalf, 2010). This qualitative study examined the characteristics of high-performing teams and their leadership in foreign language programs. Fifty-four college-level teachers, department…

From the current available research, it is evident that further evidence is needed to understand Second Language Acquisition (SLA) processes under planned bilingualism approaches in English as a Second Language (ESL) environments. This study employs an explanatory single case strategy to investigate the oral proficiency and SLA experiences of a…

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) model posits that reading is the product of word decoding and language comprehension and that oral language (listening) comprehension is the best predictor of reading comprehension once word-decoding skill has been established. The SVR model also proposes that there are good readers and three types of poor…

In an increasingly multilingual world, the question of how to improve foreign language speaking skills of pupils in British schools is of paramount importance to language teachers and policy-makers today. This paper examines how an explicit focus on metacognitive strategy use within secondary school foreign language lessons impacts pupils'…

The purpose of the present study is to assess second language (L2) spoken English using automated scoring techniques. Automated scoring aims to classify a large set of learners' oral performance data into a small number of discrete oral proficiency levels. In automated scoring, objectively measurable features such as the frequencies of lexical and…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

Rater variation in performance assessment can impact test-takers' scores and compromise assessments' fairness and validity (Crooks, Kane, & Cohen, 1996). Rater variation can also undermine a test's validity and fairness; therefore, it is important to investigate raters' scoring patterns in order to inform rater training. Substantial work has…

The current study examined the effects of text-based relational (i.e., cohesion), propositional-specific (i.e., lexical), and syntactic features in a source text on subsequent integration of the source text in spoken responses. It further investigated the effects of word integration on human ratings of speaking performance while taking into…

This paper considers how to establish the minimum required level of professionally relevant oral communication ability in the medium of English for health practitioners with English as an additional language (EAL) to gain admission to practice in jurisdictions where English is the dominant language. A theoretical concern is the construct of…

The triad dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) has been widely used for assessing second language performance and development. Unlike accuracy and fluency, the construct of Chinese syntactic complexity has not been comprehensibly conceptualized or operationalized. Moreover, not tailored to the typological differences such as the…

This paper reports on task interaction, task success and word learning among second language (L2) learners of different levels of word recognition from speech (WRS) proficiency who used a CALL application previously shown to be effective in the development of L2 WRS. Participants (N = 65) were categorised into three levels of L2 WRS proficiency…