This study presents an analysis of a Nepali comedian's dialect stylization in a stand-up comedy show performed for the diasporic Nepali community in Bochum, Germany. The analysis shows that through creative deployment of diverse linguistic practices of Nepali speakers, the comedian, Manoj Gajurel, engages in important identity work both in the…

The Locus-of-Hope Scale (LHS) was developed as a measure of the locus-of-hope dimensions (Bernardo, 2010). The present study adds to the emerging literature on locus-of-hope by assessing the psychometric properties of the LHS using Rasch analysis. The results from the Rasch analyses of the four subscales of LHS provided evidence on the…

Purpose: This study aimed to describe change in dual language learners' (DLLs) morphosyntactic skills from kindergarten to first grade based on a sentence repetition task in English and Spanish. Methods: The sample included Spanish-English speaking children (n = 25). Investigators employed a repeated measures analysis of variance with one…

The article gives a brief review on how to improve students' speaking skills via modeling dialogues in FL class. This study can be considered the continuation of the research undertaken by the authors in 2018, in which the authors put forward the hypothesis that students' speaking skills improve provided their ability to match speech patterns to…

The present experimental study examined whether a different focus during a pre-task planning observation task affects learners' subsequent oral task performance. Forty-eight ninth-grade students learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to two different planning conditions: video observations with a focus on language (FonL) and…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

Cognitive complexity is traditionally used for describing human cognition along a simplicity-complexity axis in tests like TOFEL IBT and GRE where text creation and rhetorical organization are quintessentially important. Accordingly, this study sought to investigate the impact of mentor text modelling on cognitive complexity of academic writing…

In our last critical thinking column we introduced the idea of intellectual standards and pointed out that all natural languages are repositories for such standards, which, when appropriately applied, serve as guides for assessing human reasoning. We argued that intellectual standards are necessary for cultivating the intellect and living a…

Despite being widely used and frequently studied, the Angoff standard setting procedure has received little attention with respect to an integral part of the process: how judges incorporate examinee performance data in the decision-making process. Without performance data, subject matter experts have considerable difficulty accurately making the…

Due to recent research in equating methodologies indicating that some methods may be more susceptible to the accumulation of equating error over multiple administrations, the sustainability of several item response theory methods of equating over time was investigated. In particular, the paper is focused on two equating methodologies: fixed common…

The target articles make significant advances in our understanding of students' judgments of their cognitive processes and products. In general, the advances are relative to a subset of common themes, which we call the four cornerstones of research on metacognitive judgments. We discuss how the target articles build on these cornerstones (judgment…

One of the key feedback questions is "where to next?" and this article provides some directions as to where to next for research based on a review of the five articles in this special issue. The directions relate to the critical importance of calibration, the multidimensionality of calibration, the relation of calibration to self-regulation…

Purpose: This investigation was designed to examine the effects of a modification of response elaboration training (RET; Kearns, 1985) with speakers with mild to mild-moderate aphasia. The modification entailed application of RET to procedural discourse and personal recounts rather than to narrative discourse. Method: Three participants with…

Whittaker, Chang, and Dodd compared the performance of model selection criteria when selecting among mixed-format IRT models and found that the criteria did not perform adequately when selecting the more parameterized models. It was suggested by M. S. Johnson that the problems when selecting the more parameterized models may be because of the low…

Minimum sample sizes of about 200 to 250 per group are often recommended for differential item functioning (DIF) analyses. However, there are times when sample sizes for one or both groups of interest are smaller than 200 due to practical constraints. This study attempts to examine the performance of Simultaneous Item Bias Test (SIBTEST),…