This study examines the impact of teacher metapathy, or teachers' capacity to comprehend and sympathize with students' emotional and cognitive requirements, on the academic outcomes of IELTS applicants, such as total band scores, motivation, and language learning orientation. Ten IELTS teachers from five language training centers and 100 IELTS…

This evaluation report examines extensive reading (ER) speed and words read by students at a Japanese university using a digital ER platform called Xreading and compares them to standardized test reading performance using the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). The study focuses on first- and second-year students who…

Thousands of education institutions worldwide rely on IELTS scores as criteria for accepting international students whose first language is not English. Individual studies have found varying degrees of strength of correlations and conflicting results between IELTS entry scores and subsequent academic success. These conflicting results were…

This study conducts a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of OpenAI's language model, ChatGPT 4, for grading Task 2 writing of the IELTS exam. The objective is to assess the alignment between ChatGPT's grading and that of official human raters. The analysis encompassed a multifaceted approach, including a comparison of means and reliability…

Social media is a communication tool that facilitates EFL students to improve their speaking proficiency as it enables them to fully engage in oral communication, exchange information, and form long-term bonds in this modern era. This study intended to investigate EFL students' social media as speaking strategies used vis-a-vis their speaking…

The purpose of this correlational study was to investigate the relationship between academic performance self-reported GPA, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety FLCA, and The International English Language Testing System IELTS scores among Saudi international students attending college in the United States, and to discover how this relationship…

Self-Directed Informal Digital Learning of English (SD-IDLE) plays a crucial role in informal language learning. This study aims to examine the SD-IDLE nature of English learning among Indonesian university students and its impact on language learning and personal development. The research used a sequential explanatory mixed methods design,…

This study investigates the relationships among working memory (WM), syntactic parsing ability (SP), and L2 reading performance across varying proficiency levels. A cohort of 120 L1-Persian EFL learners was categorized into beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency groups based on their IELTS scores. Participants completed a reading span…

For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

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 article investigates the central role of topic in the IELTS Speaking Test (IST). Topic has developed a dual personality in this interactional setting: topic-as-script is the scripted statement of topic on the examiner's cards prior to the interaction, whereas topic-as-action is how topic is developed by the candidate during the course of the…

There has been much debate in assessment research about the inclusion of Global English accents in high-stakes listening tests. This study explored test-takers' attitudes toward the inclusion of different English accents in the Duolingo English Test (DET) 2021 test version and their associations with listening test scores. One hundred sixty…

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…

Many overseas students in Higher Education in the UK struggle to understand the compulsory texts for their course, and obtain lower scores for their modules than their monolingual peers. While the existence of this achievement gap is well established in the literature, little is known about the ways in which overseas students in HE with limited…

This study investigated how English learners complete multimodal formative quizzes. Participants included 17,950 students enrolled in a mandatory English for Academic Purposes course at a university in Hong Kong. We retrieved data from Blackboard, a learning management system, and conducted a two-step cluster analysis to examine student…