This study intended to explore the different types of phraseological units in IELTS academic writing task 2 and probe into the IELTS candidates' perceptions of phraseological competence. To this end, a corpus entailing 100 essays (26,423 words) written for IELTS writing task 2 was scrutinized, through which phraseological units were extracted and…

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…

Many English language proficiency (ELP) tests used for university admissions and placement now include integrated writing tasks that require examinees to use external sources when writing. Integrated writing tasks improve test authenticity and impact, but they raise several validity questions, such as what academic language skills they engage and…

The current study focused mainly on the role of the linguistic complexity of IELTS writing Task 2. In other words, it investigated the differential effects of two interrelated linguistic complexities of writing Task 2 on the three levels of discourse representation and what IELTS candidates perceived through analyzing IELTS writing topics both at…

Achieving sufficient proficiency in academic writing is critical in university level setting. It is not surprising hence, that the admission to English speaking universities is usually conditioned not only by a particular total score from Standardized tests of English proficiency, e.g., TOEFL or IELTs but also a specific band score in writing. To…

This report describes the development of efficient second language (L2) writing assessment tasks designed specifically for low-proficiency learners of English to be included in the "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test. Based on the can-do descriptors of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages for the A1 through B1 levels of…

One of the most interesting studies on the role of L1 and contrastive analysis in vocabulary teaching is by Laufer and Girsai (2008). However, due to some methodological issues, their research findings are open to criticism and controversy. The current study aimed to replicate the research with a more rigorous design to re-investigate the…

This quasi-experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest design, investigated the effects of two comprehensive corrective feedback strategies: direct corrective feedback (DCF), and metalinguistic explanation (ME) on L2 learners' written syntactic accuracy. The participants were 90 Turkish EFL learners. After ensuring…

This study investigated the effects of strategic planning and task structure (personal, narrative, and decision-making tasks) on L2 writing outcomes. One hundred and twenty intermediate English as a foreign language learners were randomly divided into strategic-planning and no-planning-time groups. The strategic-planning group performed the three…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

The present study investigates integrated writing assessment performances with regard to the linguistic features of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Given the increasing presence of integrated tasks in large-scale and classroom assessments, validity evidence is needed for the claim that their scores reflect targeted language abilities.…

The current study investigated the distinction of L2 (second language) English article choice sensitivity in fifty-three L1-Korean L2-English learners in semantic contexts. In the context of English as a foreign language, the participants were divided into two groups based on grammatical ability as determined by their performance on a cloze test.…

Background: While numerous articles on Criterion® have been published and its validity evidence has accumulated, test users need to obtain relevant validity evidence for their local context and develop their own validity argument. This paper aims to provide validity evidence for the interpretation and use of Criterion® for assessing second…

Despite the high frequency of occurrences of "wh"-interrogatives in daily use, there are repeated negative comments about the poor mastery of the wh-interrogative structure among Hong Kong students. However, so far little attention has been paid to their difficulties in the acquisition of the structure. There is a strong need to…

The purpose of this study was to determine if first language interference does play a significant role in the use of articles in English by native speakers of Arabic as compared to other ESL learners. An error analysis was conducted on the use of English articles in essays taken from two groups of advanced ESL learners. The essays were composed by…