Given the difficulty of teaching Cambodian learners the English speaking skills due to large, mixed-ability classes, and inappropriate applications of existing resources, the approach of Task-Based Instruction (TBI) was tested with ninth-grade students. This article, therefore, investigates the effect of TBI on ninth-graders' English-speaking…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of prelistening activities, particularly interactive brainstorming advance organizers that used a "Think-Pair-Share" structure, on the listening comprehension performance of L2 junior high school students. The term advance organizer is defined as a teaching activity that helps build or…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a state-led consortium working to develop next-generation assessments that more accurately, compared to previous assessments, measure student progress toward college and career readiness. The PARCC assessments include both English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA/L) and…

The present study aims to investigate the role of extensive reading in the acquisition of implicit phonological knowledge. Through extensive exposure to print, L2 learners can improve their phonological processing skills, and this could contribute to their word recognition fluency. On the basis of the Oxford Placement Test, 30 9th graders and 30…

Because there has been little research on focus on form during the post-task phase in task-based language teaching, this experimental study investigates the effects of task repetition after having directed learners' attention to form during the main task. The study comprises two interventions, where each consisted of a task with a focus on a…

Relationships between attention/executive functions and language learning were investigated in students in Grades 4 to 9 (N = 88) with and without specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in multiword syntax in oral and written language (OWL LD), word reading and spelling (dyslexia), and subword letter writing (dysgraphia). Prior…

This inquiry had 2 components: (1) the first was substantive and focused on the comparability of paper-based and computer-based test forms and (2) the second was a within-study comparison wherein a quasi-experimental method, propensity score matching, was compared with a credible benchmark method, a within-subjects design. The tests used in the…

The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether students who enter high school in ninth grade and score proficient or advanced on their CST in English Language Arts remain proficient or advanced 2 years later in 11th grade. The effects of NCLB will be considered as a contributing factor to the difference in student scores. This study was…

Six item bias detection techniques (distractor analysis, the Mantel-Haenszel procedure, Angoff's delta plot, Angoff's modified delta plot, Stricker's partial correlation index, and direct comparison of item difficulties) were compared for their ability to identify biased items at three stages of test development. The techniques were applied to…

The e-rater® system has been used by ETS for automated essay scoring since 1999. This paper describes a new version of e-rater (v.2.0) that differs from the previous one (v.1.3) with regard to the feature set and model building approach. The paper describes the new version, compares the new and previous versions in terms of performance, and…

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…