For native and nonnative English speakers, employment increasingly requires proficiency in communication, given its critical role in employees' ability to successfully carry out work-related activities. Although communicating competently is important for employability, survey findings have suggested that employers believe that colleges are not…

Energy Conservation Theory of Second Language Acquisition (ECT-L2A) (Han, Bao, & Wiita, 2017b), an interdisciplinary theory juxtaposing a physics perspective and an applied linguistics perspective, conceptualizes individuals' ultimate attainment as a function of dynamic transformation of endogenous and exogenous energies throughout the…

An Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) may be evaluated either during the interview procedure (direct-method) or from a tape-made oral interaction (semi-direct method). Such variety in methods of assessment can influence test takers' scores extensively. However, it is not conclusive whether such differences are due to test format or something else.…

Higher education institutions in the United States provide placement essay tests to ensure international students' readiness for college courses. The high-stakes nature of placement tests makes educators and researchers seek significant components of differentiating levels of placement tests. This study investigated the prediction of two levels…

To understand long-term motivations for second language (L2) learning/socialisation, this study analyses the biographical narratives of 30 Hong Kong Chinese who are proficient in Japanese by using ethnographic interviews. From a situated learning perspective, our research findings originate in the participants' transformational episodes and centre…

The process of studying a foreign language in Russian higher education institutions is carried out in a specially organized linguo-didactic language environment which is understood as a methodological framework designed in accordance with the peculiarities of a linguo-cultural community. It is aimed at combining learning methods and techniques to…

To what degree can multilingual students profit from bilingual teaching approaches, even when they lack experience in the academic or technical register in their home languages? This study explores this research question in a mixed methods design for a German/Turkish bilingual intervention aimed at fostering conceptual understanding of fractions…

This paper reports on a classroom-based investigation into a tertiary English-medium instruction (EMI) programme in China, with a focus on subject teachers' perceptions and practices in EMI and students' motivation and needs in English learning. Given a lacuna in existing EMI research, it examined how EMI instruction was delivered by subject…

Investigating the comparability of students' performance on TOEFL writing tasks and actual academic writing tasks is essential to provide backing for the extrapolation inference in the TOEFL validity argument (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008). This study compared 103 international non-native-English-speaking undergraduate students'…

The study focuses on the strategies English as a foreign language (EFL) learners choose to take on in requests without evaluating them against the norm of a native speaker, as the concept of native speaker is ideologically problematic in the time of super-diversity. The study uses cultural scripts proposed in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics…

Since the introduction of the Chinese colonial education system into Tibet in the 1960s, the Tibetan language has been caught in the crossfire. Because of Tibetan language's perceived strong relationship with national identity and its alleged separatist implications, the Chinese leadership has always maintained an uneasy and sceptical outlook on…

Survey research (n = 366) examined educators' beliefs about the efficacy of five pedagogical models (English as a second language ("ESL") "self-contained," "ESL push-in," "ESL pullout," "bilingual," and "dual language") for English language learners who differ in English literacy…

Recent research on the relationship between reading and writing in foreign language (FL) context is limited. However, an examination of the issue is critical for FL literacy curriculum design. The present study, contextualized in an English as a foreign language (EFL) test preparation program in China, explores the reading-writing relationship by…

The present study investigates the effects of extensive reading on developing the language knowledge and reading abilities of high school learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) over the course of one school year. Participants were divided into control (n = 205) and experimental groups (n = 200), with the former receiving regular grammar…

Back-interpreting practice refers to interpreting the translated version of a speech back to its source language. The learning opportunities provided by backinterpreting practice can be explained by Swain's (1985) comprehensible output hypothesis, Laufer and Hulstijn's (2001) involvement load hypothesis, and Schmidt's (1990) noticing hypothesis.…