Currently, the most acknowledged test to qualify for overseas universities is the IELTS test which is referred to as the International English Language Testing System. It is implemented as an accreditation tool and is believed to be a reputable and trustworthy tool of language competence by tertiary institutions which employ its use. Regardless of…

The German classroom should prepare students for the linguistic diversity of the target culture, including regional varieties and German spoken outside of the D-A-CH region. Because textbooks do not often include materials on regional varieties, this article presents a model to incorporate Pennsylvania German (PG) into the curriculum. The model…

Social networking has compelled the area of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) to expand its research palette and account for new virtual ecologies that afford language learning and socialization. This study focuses on Busuu, a social networking site for language learning (SNSLL), and analyzes the views of language that are enacted through…

Studies have shown that learners' task performance improves when they have the opportunity to repeat the task. Conditions for task repetition vary, however. In the 4/3/2 activity, learners repeat a monologue under increasing time pressure. The purpose is to foster fluency, but it has been suggested in the literature that it also benefits other…

This paper identifies various challenges that a 1.5 generation immigrant faced in a mainstream college composition class and reports on how he constructed his social presence and became a successful multilingual writer. The findings of this study would help higher education institutions more effectively serve the growing population of ESL students…

Ever since Karen Price's ground-breaking work in 1983, we have known that same-language subtitles (captions) primarily intended for the deaf and hearing-impaired can provide access to foreign language films and TV programmes which would otherwise be virtually incomprehensible to non-native-speaker viewers. Since then, researchers have steadily…

Employability is increasingly becoming a central aspect of higher education in the United Kingdom and it is becoming imperative that modern foreign languages teachers engage directly and sincerely with the employability agenda. This article proposes the use of feature films as a successful method for developing and promoting employability skills…

Research Paper Writing (RPW) plays a key role in completing all research work. Poor writing could lead to the postponement of publications. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a program of (RPW) to improve RPW ability for EFL/ESL writers, especially for undergraduate students in Higher Education (HE) institutions, which has caught less attention…

The present study investigated the effectiveness of listening strategy instruction on the metacognitive listening strategies awareness of different EFL learner types (LTs). To achieve this goal, 150 EFL students took part in the study and were taught based on a guided lesson plan regarding listening strategies and a pre-test/post-test design was…

This article reports on a study which aimed to determine the effect of strength of accent on listening comprehension of interactive lectures. Test takers (N = 21,726) listened to an interactive lecture given by one of nine speakers and responded to six comprehension items. The test taker responses were analyzed with the Rasch computer program…

Reading research has shown that variable relationships exist between measures of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, depending on whether the language of the text is the reader's first language or an additional language. This paper explores this phenomenon, using reading assessment data for 2,000 Kenyan children in two or three…

Education policy has historically been viewed as having an influential part in crafting the roles of immigrants in American society. However, while policy makers continue to push their own agendas on English language learners (ELLs), ELLs continue to push back to create their own sense of what it means be an American. This article analyzes how…

The Language Teachers' Target Language project (LTTL) aims to describe language teachers' target language use domain (Bachman & Palmer 2010) and to develop a language test for future teachers of English. The team comprises four researchers from Moscow State University (MSU) and Southampton Solent University.

Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge have been studied from many different perspectives, but the related literature lacks serious studies dealing with their effects on vocabulary profiles of EFL learners. In this paper, with an aim to fill this gap, the relative effects of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge on L2 vocabulary profiles…

Compensation Strategies (CpSs) are strategies which a language user employs in order to achieve his intended meaning when precise linguistic forms are for some reasons not available at that point of communication. Different factors may influence the use of CpSs, among which the level of language proficiency is one of the most important ones. The…