The past two decades have witnessed growing interest in Higher Education (HE) achievement standards. Globally, the English Language Teaching (ELT) sector provides students with Direct Entry (DE) English language program (ELP) pathways to university study. It has typically relied on commercially available English language tests to ensure…

Chinese universities are actively pursuing cross-border collaborations in the form of transnational higher education programmes. Our study captures the experiences of Chinese students to illuminate how they navigate their learning journeys in a China-Australia articulation programme. To communicate the complexity of learning in modern…

This chapter examines the responses of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to assessment-related challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden move to online teaching and assessments required institutions to re-think their approaches to current practices and provide alternative solutions almost overnight. Our survey aimed to gather…

Australian universities, through their graduate attributes, claim that graduates have the ability to communicate, an attribute encompassing, at the least, written and oral literacies. Despite this claim, Australian universities have been criticised over the past decade for their lack of rigour in assessing this attribute; a criticism generally…

Data collection methods constitute a major area of concern in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) research, since there is no easy way to collect the type of data that is relatively 'naturalistic' while at the same time allowing for researcher control. Further, current ILP research also suffers from the shortage of studies making use of self-report…

The widening participation agenda has important implications for those in English-medium higher education institutions responsible for the provision of English language support. Importantly, given the diverse nature of the "non-traditional" student cohort that is the focus of this agenda, that section of the student population…

As the university student body becomes ever more diverse, the place and nature of English language provision is coming under unprecedented scrutiny and is the object of greater regulation. Today, more than ever before, institutions of higher education are being called to account for the way in which they support this diverse population in respect…

This paper argues for the re-integration of academic development (AD) and a academic language and learning (ALL) practitioners in Australian higher education. This argument is made as universities aim to develop internationally recognised, inter-disciplinary and standards-based curricula against the backdrop of international comparative education…

This article describes the results from a national project that investigated institutional approaches to the development of student English language capabilities in Australian higher education. The project aimed to identify the various approaches and strategies that higher education providers have established and to gauge whether they have been…

This paper explores the perceptions of Iraqi students of three different English Programs (a general English for academic purposes program, a pre-enrolment English program and the English component of a disciplinary bridging program) at an Australian University as reflected in their language learning narratives. It focuses specifically on the…

This report presents the "English Language Proficiency" (ELP) and Employability Framework", which has been designed to inform and support higher education institutions' (HEIs) policies and practices on ELP and graduate employability. The "Framework" was developed through a review of the national and international…

The current concern about low levels of English proficiency among international students who graduate from degree courses--that students' English language skills are not being developed during their higher education experience--reflects negatively on the quality of Australian higher education and its graduates. More careful selection of students…

The issues confronting Australian tertiary institutions in the assessment of non-English-speaking-background students are discussed. A survey of tertiary institutions that identified test instruments currently being used is described and some of these test instruments (SST and CULT tests) are discussed. (Author/MLW)

Explores theoretical and practical issues surrounding authenticity in course-based assessment, drawing on data from a university-level Japanese language course in Australia. Examines a teaching and assessment activity based around interviewing native speakers outside the classroom, which was designed to optimize authenticity. (Author/VWL)

This study examines the role of task-based conversation in second language (L2) grammatical development, focusing on the short-term effects of both negative feedback and positive evidence on the acquisition of two Japanese structures. The data are drawn from 55 L2 learners of Japanese at a beginning level of proficiency in an Australian tertiary…