Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing…

This paper explores what the measures of utterance fluency typically employed in Automatic Speech Evaluation (ASE), i.e. automated speaking assessments, tell us about oral proficiency. 60 Chinese learners of English completed the second part of the speaking section of IELTS and six tasks designed to measure the linguistic knowledge and processing…

The construct of reading is presented in language assessment. Previous studies have focused on reading issues encountered by English learners, most of which are manifested by certain linguistic features: lexical bundles (LBs). Addressing this, the study aims to analyze LBs in reading comprehension passages in the Chinese National Matriculation…

There now exists an established body of work outlining the challenges international students can face as part of the acculturation process, including a range of academic and non-academic pressures to overcome. For many students, writing essays in academic English for the first time is problematic. This article considers pedagogical approaches for…

This paper investigates the comparability between the video-conferencing and face-to-face modes of the IELTS Speaking Test in terms of scores and language functions generated by test-takers. Data were collected from 10 trained IELTS examiners and 99 test-takers who took two speaking tests under face-to-face and video-conferencing conditions.…

This study examines four learner engagement dimensions (behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social) in pedagogical task performance and provides insights into the effects of two task types (information-seeking and direction-giving) and topic familiarity on learner engagement in a semester-long English course. A total of 28 foreign language…

This study designed and pilot-tested a learning path in Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) to facilitate learners' Self-regulated Learning. 122 postgraduates who joined an International English Language Testing System (IELTS) course at a comprehensive university in China were evenly divided into two groups. The experimental group used PLEs with…

Mobile-assisted Language Learning (MALL) has been widely adopted in teaching and learning, yet there has been scant research concerning speaking test adaptation. An emerging type of mobile application is designed to facilitate test takers' performance in a high-stakes speaking test (e.g., the International English Language Testing System (IELTS)).…

Personal Learning Environment (PLE) represents a shift of learning paradigm towards learner-centered pedagogy, where users become masters of their own learning. PLEs are best used by learners with Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) abilities. Previous research showed that learners felt lost or socially isolated in PLEs due to their limited SRL…

Over the decades, extensive research efforts have been directed towards classifying and evaluating motivational teaching behaviours. Recent calls in motivational research, however, have emphasised the need to investigate teachers' perspectives on how they develop effective motivational strategies so that implications for motivational teaching are…

This study investigates washback effects of IELTS test on university teachers' adoption of teaching materials in the classroom in China and see how a high-stake language exam affects their teaching practices and how they and their students perceive the effectiveness of the pedagogic adjustments. To this end, individual interview to five teacher…

This paper first discusses the Common European Framework of Reference Languages: Learning, teaching and assessment CEFR 2001 and the revisions to this framework in CEFR 2018. It then looks at the Frameworks of Reference for English Language Education in Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia and China which are based on CEFR. The main purpose of this…

High-stakes language tests are used around the world as a gatekeeping tool under the internationalization of higher education. However, the predictable aspect of the high-stakes language tests is seldom discussed, especially from students' perspectives. This study aims to address this gap by aiming to better understand how certain factors and…

Based on 312 samples, this study investigated the relationship between two dimensions of L2 vocabulary knowledge (VK) and listening comprehension (LC) by comparing written and oral vocabulary measurements and further examined the mediating effect of L2 vocabulary fluency (VF) by using Bootstrapping and Monte Carlo Method. Results show that: (1)…

This study, taking into consideration of teachers' as well as students' judgments, explored the generalizability and consistency of the results of linking speaking test of IELTS to China's Standards of English Language Ability (CSE). Nine college English teachers and 81 undergraduate students judged the degree of congruence between the IELTS…