This study examines the impact of teacher metapathy, or teachers' capacity to comprehend and sympathize with students' emotional and cognitive requirements, on the academic outcomes of IELTS applicants, such as total band scores, motivation, and language learning orientation. Ten IELTS teachers from five language training centers and 100 IELTS…

English-medium universities often accept scores from various English language proficiency (ELP) tests as evidence of ELP from non-English background students. This practice raises the question of how these tests compare in terms of their ability to predict academic achievement. This longitudinal study addresses this question by examining the…

This evaluation report examines extensive reading (ER) speed and words read by students at a Japanese university using a digital ER platform called Xreading and compares them to standardized test reading performance using the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). The study focuses on first- and second-year students who…

Thousands of education institutions worldwide rely on IELTS scores as criteria for accepting international students whose first language is not English. Individual studies have found varying degrees of strength of correlations and conflicting results between IELTS entry scores and subsequent academic success. These conflicting results were…

Self-Directed Informal Digital Learning of English (SD-IDLE) plays a crucial role in informal language learning. This study aims to examine the SD-IDLE nature of English learning among Indonesian university students and its impact on language learning and personal development. The research used a sequential explanatory mixed methods design,…

This study investigates the relationships among working memory (WM), syntactic parsing ability (SP), and L2 reading performance across varying proficiency levels. A cohort of 120 L1-Persian EFL learners was categorized into beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency groups based on their IELTS scores. Participants completed a reading span…

For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

This article investigates the central role of topic in the IELTS Speaking Test (IST). Topic has developed a dual personality in this interactional setting: topic-as-script is the scripted statement of topic on the examiner's cards prior to the interaction, whereas topic-as-action is how topic is developed by the candidate during the course of the…

There has been much debate in assessment research about the inclusion of Global English accents in high-stakes listening tests. This study explored test-takers' attitudes toward the inclusion of different English accents in the Duolingo English Test (DET) 2021 test version and their associations with listening test scores. One hundred sixty…

Many overseas students in Higher Education in the UK struggle to understand the compulsory texts for their course, and obtain lower scores for their modules than their monolingual peers. While the existence of this achievement gap is well established in the literature, little is known about the ways in which overseas students in HE with limited…

This study investigated how English learners complete multimodal formative quizzes. Participants included 17,950 students enrolled in a mandatory English for Academic Purposes course at a university in Hong Kong. We retrieved data from Blackboard, a learning management system, and conducted a two-step cluster analysis to examine student…

It is becoming increasingly important for individuals for whom English is a second language to demonstrate their linguistic credentials for academic, work and employment purposes. One option is to undertake International English Language Testing System (IELTS), which involves attempting to meet the linguistic entrance criteria set by a gatekeeping…

Background: A strong interest in researching World Englishes (WE) in relation to language assessment has become an emerging theme in language assessment studies over the past two decades. While research on WE has highlighted the status, function, and legitimacy of varieties of English language, it remains unclear how raters respond to the results…

One of the major issues in SLA is developing language tests that could produce good measures of implicit knowledge. This study examines the validity of an English Elicited Imitation (EI) test as a measure of L2 implicit grammatical knowledge. Forty freshman university students in Turkey took a set of language tests: an EI test, two storytelling…

Although most international students arrive with required language qualifications, many struggle with the linguistic demands of their programmes. This study explored whether the test-preparation industry undermines the qualifications with which students arrive. English proficiency of 153 Chinese student in the UK was tested on the Duolingo English…