This study examines the effects of English Learner (EL) status on subsequent Special Education (SPED) placement. Through a research-practice partnership, we link student demographic data and initial English proficiency assessment data across seven cohorts of test takers and observe EL and SPED programmatic participation for these students over…

The rapid growth of Mandarin Chinese and English dual-language (DL) programs and the differences between these two languages have fostered the need to investigate the early literacy performance of young students in a Mandarin/English DL program. This study used the interactive transfer framework (Chung et al., 2019) to understand the Mandarin and…

As validity pertains to test use rather than the test itself, using a test for unintended purposes requires a new validation program using additional evidence from relevant sources. This small-scale study contributes to the validation of the use of originally academic language tests--the International English Language Testing System and the Test…

Semiotics has been investigated in the literature to enhance second language vocabulary acquisition. The previous studies have examined how semiotics could aid second language (L2) learner to learn concrete words. This study aims at investigating the effect of semiotics on learning abstract words. Fifty-five Arab learners of English as a foreign…

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) oral proficiency interview -- computer (OPIc) testing system represents an ambitious effort in language assessment: Assessing oral proficiency in over a dozen languages, on the same scale, from virtually anywhere at any time. Especially for users in contexts where multiple foreign…

English proficiency is valued in Japan for its facilitation of participation in the international community. However, average proficiency remains low despite strategic efforts of Japan's Ministry of Education. Based on research indicating that culture may impact learning, this quantitative study investigated the impact of culture on English…

Over the past decades, much of the discussion regarding grammar teaching has evolved around the identification of the best language teaching approach to facilitate effective learning of English language among second language (L2) learners. Despite the various approaches introduced and implemented in the realm of L2 teaching, the language…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

Evaluation on the foreign student's competence of Indonesian language is required to assess their achievement. This research aimed to identify the difficulty level of test instrument, analyze the difference of foreign students' competence for Indonesian language and to analyze the correlation of students' competence over various objective test…

This study investigated students' perceptions of collaborative writing in a teacher-centred class and their change in beliefs about English writing through collaborative writing experiences. The analysis of multiple data sources (i.e., video recordings of collaborative writing activities, two in-depth, semi-structured interviews, one stimulated…

Collocations are one of the areas that create problems for EFL learners. Iranian EFL learners like other EFL learners encounter serious problems in producing collocations. The current study is an attempt to examine the Iranian EFL learners' ability to produce English collocations. It also attempts to identify the strategies that they usually adopt…

One of the most critical steps in the test development process is defining the construct, or the knowledge, skills, or abilities, to be assessed. This foundational step provides the basis for initial assumptions about the meaning of test scores and serves as a reference for subsequent validity research. In this paper, we describe the purpose of…

Language tests are widely used in education as the primary mode of assessing students' learning. These, however, more often than not, generate high levels of anxiety in students, which, in turn, obscures the observed learning behaviours. The present study aimed to determine whether or not 6th graders' levels of test anxiety could be reduced…

This study had the purpose of testing two methods for teaching grammar in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class: the deductive and inductive approaches in terms of effectiveness and rapport. This research was conducted in a public high school in Ecuador. Seventy students enrolled in the second year of senior high school participated. One…

We report 2 self-paced reading experiments investigating the longevity of structural priming effects in comprehending reduced relative clauses among adult Chinese-speaking learners of English. Experiment 1 showed that structural priming occurred both when prime and target sentences were immediately adjacent and when they were separated by 1 or 2…