The school closures owing to the 2020 COVID-19 crisis resulted in a significant disruption of education provision, leading to fears of learning losses and of an increase in educational inequality. This article evaluates the effects of school closures based on standardised tests in the last year of primary school in the Dutch-speaking Flemish…

This study explored possible reasons why IELTS candidates usually score low in writing by investigating the effects of two different test designs and scoring criteria on Iranian IELTS candidates' obtained grades in IELTS and World Englishes (WEs) essay writing tests. To this end, first, a WEs essay writing test was preliminarily designed. Then, 17…

Poor college readiness is a persistent challenge today in the United States that may be overcome in part with the help of a learning model from the past. The purpose and of this quantitative comparative study focused on determining if a statistically significant difference existed in the 2018 SAT Total, Mathematics and Evidenced-Based Reading and…

This discourse analysis explored the affordances and constraints of Generous Reading (GR), an alternative writing assessment used in teacher professional development. First, GR is traced through its development in empirical studies. Next, a critical discourse analysis of a GR professional development conversation between three European-American…

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational…

Based on the theoretical approaches to interlanguage and discourse cohesiveness, this study examines international students' growth in discourse awareness and discourse competence in the teaching of elementary Chinese reading and writing, and explores a set of assessment methods for teaching discourse. The learners' knowledge and production of…

Much of the research that has examined the writing knowledge of school-age students has relied on interviews to ascertain this information, which is problematic because interviews may underestimate breadth and depth of writing knowledge, require lengthy interactions with participants, and do not permit a direct evaluation of a prescribed array of…

Identifying effective means of ameliorating achievement gaps and addressing literacy deficits is essential. Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) is one avenue for providing this effective instruction to the students that can most benefit from it. In the current study, kindergarten students in a public school district in Illinois received…

The aims of the current project were to: (a) describe lexical diversity, morphologically complex word use (MCW), and writing quality ratings of 5th-grade students with diverse language backgrounds and (b) to examine the relationship between analytical components and writing quality ratings with performance on measures of language and literacy…

There is significant overlap between reading and writing, but no known standardized measure assesses these jointly. The goal of the present study is to evaluate the properties of a novel measure, the Assessment of Writing, Self-Monitoring, and Reading (AWSM Reader), that simultaneously evaluates both reading comprehension and writing. In doing so,…

Researchers frequently evaluate rater judgments in performance assessments for evidence of differential rater functioning (DRF), which occurs when rater severity is systematically related to construct-irrelevant student characteristics after controlling for student achievement levels. However, researchers have observed that methods for detecting…

The study examined the relationship between children's explicit knowledge and awareness of diglossia (EKAD) and learning Arabic in school. Additionally, this study addresses the interrelationships between EKAD and oral comprehension, lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic awareness upon the transition to reading to learn. Thirty typicaly…

This study examined the effects of integrating writing strategy training into EFL writing instruction on learners' strategy use and writing performance. Two classes of EFL adult learners participated in this study. The experimental group were instructed with the writing strategy training in their EFL writing class for 14 weeks, whereas the control…

This study investigated the extent to which an extended time limit in an argumentative writing test affects the quality of argumentation in L2 writing. Thirty-two adult ESL learners each wrote two essays on different prompts, one in 30 minutes and one in 45 minutes in a counter-balanced design. The 64 essays were analytically rated by four trained…

This study sought to identify the challenges and needs of TOEFL iBT candidates in achieving C1 level scores in the speaking and writing sections of the exam. To this end, the researcher employed a mixed-method approach to collect data from a population of 46 students, both male and female, between the ages of 22 and 30. The participants were…