A writer's L1 is generally believed to influence their L2 English writing significantly. However, the extent to which L1 backgrounds influence Asian learners' L2 English writing has not been wholly elucidated due to the lack of data covering various learners in Asia. Therefore, this study analysed more than one-million-word essays written by 2,318…

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…

Language tests, including international high-stakes English proficiency tests widely used around the world, are to be viewed as ideological constructs connected with power relations and center-periphery demarcations at different social levels. In this paper, we examine the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) as an instance of…

The challenges facing non-native English-speaking students (NNESSs) in adapting to the conventions of academic writing at the tertiary level in English-medium institutions have been widely canvassed in scholarly research. Nonetheless, there does not appear to be a great deal of research that investigates the experiences of Arabic-speaking students…

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…

The steady increase in content courses being taught through the medium of English in non-Anglophone countries has been matched by a rapidly growing output of research and commentary on the topic. There are also a number of providers now offering professional development for English Medium Instruction (EMI) teachers. We carried out a systematic…

The current study explored and compared the employment of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers (MDMs) by the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) speaking test takers at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. To conduct this discourse analysis research, a mixed-methods approach with concurrent transformative…

English proficiency has become pivotal for university admission, particularly at the CEFR B2 level and IELTS band 6-6.5 across Europe. In Nordic universities, the substantial amount of assigned English reading materials requires a strong command of English reading skills, with vocabulary knowledge being a crucial component. This study explores 309…

Within the communicative language teaching approach, current instructional materials often lack explicit guidance or fail to provide L2 learners with a wide range of resources in the target language. Conversation analysis (CA), which focuses on authentic talk, has been proposed as a potential resource for language classrooms. This study examines…

Social media is a communication tool that facilitates EFL students to improve their speaking proficiency as it enables them to fully engage in oral communication, exchange information, and form long-term bonds in this modern era. This study intended to investigate EFL students' social media as speaking strategies used vis-a-vis their speaking…

This study explores the effectiveness of using ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) language model, as an Automated Essay Scoring (AES) tool for grading English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' essays. The corpus consists of 50 essays representing various types including analysis, compare and contrast, descriptive, narrative, and opinion…

This study explores the impact of sociocultural theory-based instruction on enhancing L2 learners' writing skills including grammatical accuracy, coherence, cohesion, task response, and lexical resources for the IELTS. To this end, a cohort of 40 participants, spanning intermediate and advanced proficiency levels, was divided into experimental and…

The study explored the impact of proficiency, frequency, L1-L2 congruency, and semantic transparency on the knowledge of multi-word units (MWUs) among Iranian L2 learners (N = 256). A gap-filling test was used to assess learners' productive knowledge, employing a high-frequency MWU list created with the lemmatised concgramming method. The list,…

The present study explored the effects of interactionist Dynamic Assessment (DA) and age on the writing accuracy of IELTS candidates. This research investigated the existence of an interactional effect between the age of learners and the type of treatment they received. First, 140 IELTS candidates were split into two age groups, adult and young.…

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…