There now exists an established body of work outlining the challenges international students can face as part of the acculturation process, including a range of academic and non-academic pressures to overcome. For many students, writing essays in academic English for the first time is problematic. This article considers pedagogical approaches for…

This study employed a multi-methods design to investigate the impact of preparation on Chinese test-takers' perceptions of the integrated TOEFL iBT speaking and writing design. Combining results from over 1700 surveys and 10 interviews, it was found that these Chinese test-takers, who are the most vulnerable group in the multimillion testing…

Many L2 learners preparing for high-stakes, on-demand English language tests (e.g., IELTS, TOEFL) undertake classroom-based test preparation involving the provision of teacher written feedback commentary (WFC) on writing that simulates test tasks. The assumption is teachers' knowledge of both the language and testing system helps develop…

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…

This study sought to identify the challenges and needs of TOEFL iBT candidates in achieving C1 level scores in the speaking and writing sections of the exam. To this end, the researcher employed a mixed-method approach to collect data from a population of 46 students, both male and female, between the ages of 22 and 30. The participants were…

Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too common in U.S. urban schools. To co-construct such pedagogies, however, teachers and students must negotiate between the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses that circulate within their school context. Drawing from data collected from a qualitative…

High school students with high-incidence disabilities and struggling writers face considerable challenges when taking writing assessments designed for college entrance. This study examined the effectiveness of a writing intervention for improving students' performance on a college entrance exam, the writing assessment for the ACT. Students were…

The writing module of the IELTS has proven to be a challenging section for test takers. Part of this difficulty may stem from the divergence between what test takers expect to learn in such courses and what is delivered by instructors. To address this issue, a 24-item questionnaire (Student Questionnaire A) relating to IELTS writing preparation…

Composition researchers have become increasingly concerned with the issue of knowledge transfer: the use of knowledge and skills learned in one setting to complete tasks in a different setting. In terms of writing-related knowledge transfer, research suggests that rigid rules and formulas for writing do not transfer as successfully as flexible…

Formally launched in September 2018, the ACT® Certified Educator™ program is a professional learning and credentialing program designed to help educators improve their teaching and tutoring strategies and skills and be fully equipped to support student learning in the core content areas of the ACT® test. In this study, participants' views of the…

The instruction of metadiscourse markers to L2 writers has been recommended by some scholars to assist them in employing a certain tone in persuading readers. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of research investigating the effect of process-based instruction on hedging and boosting devices to L2 learners. To fill this gap, the present study aimed at…

The notion of "textuality" encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether "cohesion" was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text.…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is the standard in the college admissions process, leading to the inclusion of preparation classes in Intensive English Program (IEP) curricula. But does preparing for the TOEFL in isolation yield optimal results for IEP college hopefuls? In this article, we will share information about the…

Strategies instruction has improved the writing of high school struggling writers in previous studies, including students with disabilities. This study examined the effectiveness of argumentative writing instruction for the ACT writing exam using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model with high school students with disabilities or…

This study used eye-tracking, in combination with stimulated recalls and reflective journals, to investigate L2 learners' engagement with automated feedback and the impact of feedback explicitness and accuracy on their engagement. Twenty-four Chinese EFL learners revised their writing through Write & Improve with Cambridge, a new automated…