In order to make assessments as widely accessible as possible, including to young learners from diverse backgrounds with a wide range of individual needs and characteristics, some developers of standardized tests have resorted to offering accessibility tools (e.g., magnifying/zoom) and accommodations (e.g., extended response time) to test takers.…

This investigation aimed to explore the correlation between undergraduate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' academic self-concept and their formal English vocabulary knowledge. The quantitative method with a correlational analysis design was applied. The participants completed a written vocabulary test in English and filled in an…

Self-assessment is an alternative assessment that can assess one's language ability, and it has been widely used, especially in classroom contexts. However, recent research has suggested different results regarding the correlation between student self-assessment and language performance. The accuracy of student assessment depends on various…

The present study investigates the efficacy of preparation time in four speaking tasks of TOEFL iBT. As the current pre-task planning time offered by ETS is very short, 15 to 30 seconds, we intended to explore how the test-takers' speaking quality would change if the preparation time was added to the response time, giving the respondents a…

The study aimed to elicit information from Vietnamese EFL university instructors about their knowledge and skills regarding the principles, theory, and practices of language assessment by means of revision and validation of the Language Assessment Literacy--Revised Vietnam (LAL-RV), which was previously developed by Kremmel and Harding (2020). A…

Understanding the IELTS washback on learning in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in higher education contexts remains limited. To fill in this research gap, this study investigated washback effects of the International English Language Testing System (hereafter called IELTS) as an English language proficiency exit test for final-year English…

Anticipatory completions can be a potential place in which the second speaker expresses disagreement with the first speaker. 'Doing disagreement' is a significant feature of group work interaction, and resolving such disagreements can pose an interactional challenge for students in classroom contexts (Sharma 2012). Examining disagreement episodes…

Estimating the difficulty of reading tests is critical in second language education and assessment. This study was aimed at examining various text features that might influence the difficulty level of a high-stakes reading comprehension test and predict test takers' scores. To this end, the responses provided by 17,900 test takers on the reading…

The third edition of the IPA Manual, "The Integrated Performance Assessment: Twenty Years and Counting," builds upon the original framework presented to guide instructors in designing and implementing this cutting-edge assessment in their world language classrooms. Informed by the findings of research conducted on the IPA since 2013,…

This study examines how the genre of input text influences Chinese young EFL learners' performance on continuation tasks. Participants were 30 students in Grade 9 and repeated-measures design was adopted to compare their performance on narrative and argumentative continuation tasks, in terms of writing quality, CAF indicators as well as alignment.…

This study examined the effects of bottom-up instruction (BI) on a high-stakes listening test for second language (L2) listeners and compared these effects with those of strategy instruction (SI) in relation to their proficiency levels. Two intact classes (48 L2 listeners) of different L2 listening proficiency levels received five weeks of BI and…

The present study examined the relative effects of discourse-based and sentence-level grammar instruction on the learning of English present perfect in academic writing, using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. Participants were 37 multilingual graduate students enrolled in different sections of an ESL-writing course at a U.S.…

The all-encompassing term "Medical Spanish" references the Spanish used by healthcare professionals. Medical Spanish courses have gained traction as the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. continues to grow. Consequently, demand for courses in Medical Spanish and other areas of Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP), a subfield of…

A total of 169 Chinese college students were divided into high proficiency and low proficiency learners according to a College English Test, and watched one of three short fully captioned English videos, thus producing six groups: (1) High proficiency + L2 (n = 25), (2) High proficiency + L1 + L2 (n = 24), (3) High proficiency + L1 (n = 33), (4)…

aaaPlural marking differs across languages. Some must mark plurality using an overt morpheme (e.g. English, Russian), while others mark it optionally (e.g. Korean) or lack an explicit plural morpheme (e.g. Chinese). This crosslinguistic difference in plural marking has received much attention in research exploring language transfer in the context…