Appropriate placement of language learners continues to be challenging for postsecondary world language programs. The Seal of Biliteracy is now available in all of the states for high school students. While the Seal is an admirable program, using it in higher education can be problematic because the proficiency levels needed to attain the Seal…

Language testing research has suggested that placement accuracy can be an important factor in the consequences of placement decision-making. However, previous studies primarily have used a one-shot teacher judgment of placement accuracy, suffering from a lack of students' perspectives of their time-varying experiences. The present study aimed to…

Newcomers represent a large and understudied subgroup of students in California. The Oakland Unified School District has been disaggregating data on newcomer status for the last 7 years, providing a basis for analyzing graduation outcomes for newcomer compared to non-newcomer students. The data highlight the variance in outcomes based on program…

The accuracy of placement results undoubtedly affects students' subsequent learning achievements in language programs. Although there has been a growing body of studies in the field of heritage language (HL) education, research on HL placement remains scarce, and little is known about the most appropriate and effective ways to place heritage…

Placement tests are used to support a particular need in a local context--to determine the best starting place for a student entering a specific programme of language study. This brief report will focus on the development of an innovative placement test with self-directed elements for our local needs at a university in Canada for students studying…

Adultism within English learner (EL) policy in the United States relegates youth to the status of objects whose English proficiency and academic achievement is assessed, monitored, and developed. This study challenges this institutionalized adultism by centering youths' interpretations of their own schooling experiences. It uses an intersectional…

This paper focusses on the organisational responses of secondary schools to newly arrived migrant students. In Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), as in many other European regions, newly arrived students are placed in segregated classes that aim to prepare them for integration in mainstream education. Deriving from, on the one hand,…

In 2024, British Columbia's (BC's) English as an Additional Language articulation committee revised the alignments of the provincial EAP (English for Academic Purposes) learning outcomes with the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLBs). The CLBs and the EAP outcomes both assess English proficiency for the purposes of post-secondary admission, program…

The category of "English as a Second Language" or "ESL" student is no longer a label of someone in the process of learning English. Rather, linguistic categorization is a complex social processes of ascribed identity formation that positions students as deficits and others, circumscribing them out of belonging to both academic…

Educational tracking has been studied abundantly in previous research. However, the transitions of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMS) to these (tracked) educational settings are understudied. To facilitate the transition of NAMS to regular secondary education, many countries organise reception classes. This is a separate form of education for…

This study details the development of a local test designed to place university Spanish students (n = 719) into one of the four different course levels and to distinguish between traditional L2 learners and early bilinguals on the basis of their linguistic knowledge, regardless of the variety of Spanish they were exposed to. Early bilinguals…

In the spring of 2021, the Community College System in which the author works was in the middle of a planned three-year pilot of math and English self-placement ("Direct Enrollment") procedures. Concerns about the significant English language learner (ELL) population at one institution led to the development of a corequisite support…

Historically, many educators have attempted to help English Language Learners (ELLs) develop sufficient English skills to be reclassified so that they can be placed in general-education classrooms. At present, educators increasingly favor a policy of placing former ELLs in dual-language settings. But it remains unclear whether former ELLs in…

The statement stated in a multiple-choice question can be developed regarding two types of sentences: Interruptive (periodic) and cumulative (or loose). This study deals with different kinds of stems in designing multiple-choice (MC) items. To fill the existing gap in the literature, two groups of teacher students passing general English courses…

The aim of this experiment was to investigate how glossing influences second language (L2) reading comprehension in relation to text difficulty and the two local and global meaning representations. Fifty-eight undergraduate students were asked to read three easy, moderate, and difficult texts and, following each passage, answer twenty…