The issue of English being the lingua franca in transnational higher education remains a debate, especially regarding fairness in doctoral examinations. The current study builds upon a recent publication that proposes examining doctoral students of an Anglophone doctoral program offered on an offshore campus in China to be held in the Chinese…

This study investigates the impact of integrating the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) with mobile learning on learning outcomes, motivation, and satisfaction in the EFL context. The rationale is to improve learning effectiveness by integrating the POA's focus on real-world language use with the flexibility of mobile learning, addressing the…

Factors which impact bilingual language development can often interact with different language features. The current study teases apart the impact of internal and external factors (chronological age, length of exposure, L2 richness, L2 use at home, maternal education and maternal L2 proficiency) across linguistic domains and features (vocabulary,…

The promotion of English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has been a widely adopted institutional response to the forces of globalization in the 21st century. However, while EMI has received much enthusiasm in policy discourse, little research has been conducted to explore whether it effectively addresses the new demands of an…

The present study, based on data concerning 2328 immigrant children attending a representative sample of 561 schools, investigates the impact of various group, family and individual characteristics as well as proficiency in the national language on acceptance and friendship among classmates, while controlling for measurement errors by means of a…

We introduce a short answer scoring engine made up of an ensemble of deep neural networks and a Latent Semantic Analysis-based model to score short constructed responses for a large suite of questions from a national assessment program. We evaluate the performance of the engine and show that the engine achieves above-human-level performance on a…

This study examines the learning experience of Chinese international undergraduate students taking a large core first-year anthropological science course (ANT101) by distance learning during the Winter of 2021 at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). We review the general learning experiences of Chinese international students (n=30)…

The main aim of this study was to investigate how oral fluency is assessed across different levels of proficiency in the Test of English for Educational Purposes (TEEP). Working with data from 56 test-takers performing a monologic task at a range of proficiency levels (equivalent to approximately levels 5.0, 5.5, 6.5, and 7.5 in the IELTS scoring…

The present study aimed to explore the potential moderating effect of foreign language anxiety (FLA) on the relationship between second language (L2) competence and willingness to communicate (WTC) in 129 Chinese study-abroad English learners in Belgium. Descriptive analyses revealed fairly low levels of FLA and high levels of WTC of the…

Proficiency with sentence-level features of language is essential for reading comprehension of academic texts, especially for early adolescents who face increasingly complex, discipline-specific texts as they enter upper elementary and middle school. However, little research has been done to explore instruction in sentence-level features. This…

Language difficulties can be a problem for foreign students studying in Hungary: they see as Hungarians do not speak foreign languages, which hinders the well-being of foreigners. At the same time, students studying at Hungarian universities also have different cultural expectations: it is important for them to gain cultural experiences, expand…

Attaining Advanced proficiency and beyond has been a principal goal for second language learners, practitioners, and researchers. Achieving this level in writing requires producing connected discourse of paragraph-level length and nurturing the ability to arrange various linguistic units to form a unified and cohesive whole. This ability, known as…

There is an interdependent relationship between academic proficiency and English language proficiency. This quantitative, correlational study examined the threshold hypothesis in relation to two required summative assessments for third--eighth-grade multilingual learners in South Carolina. Third-grade multilingual learners from a large school…

This paper presents a critical evaluation of the English Test for International Communication (ETIC), a large-scale, computer-based, and criterion-referenced English language proficiency test developed by the China Language Assessment in 2016. The ETIC test battery comprises five categories: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior, and…

English is the main "lingua franca" among the various ethnolinguistic groups in Fiji. This results in a sociocultural problem when students enter universities from different high school backgrounds. To this end, this study analysed the level of difference in writing abilities at the beginning of the first year of study and at the end of…