Many candidates undertaking high-stakes English language proficiency tests for academic enrolment do not achieve the results they need for reasons including linguistic unreadiness, test unpreparedness, illness, an unfavourable configuration of tasks, or administrative and marking errors. Owing to the importance of meeting goals or out of a belief…

Research suggests that English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students in English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) contexts have difficulties understanding the passages in technical English textbooks of various fields of study including computer software engineering. Few experimental studies to date have investigated the effect of an online hybrid reading…

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…

As English continues to spread as an international lingua franca, there is a growing diversity in its use around the world. As a result, there are calls for embracing the diversity in the teaching, learning and assessment of the language. At the same time, there is a growing criticism against the widely taken language tests such as the Test of…

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…

English language proficiency has long been recognised as important to the academic success of non-native English-speaking international students through the setting of minimum English language requirements as a condition of entry to Anglophone universities. The present study provides a historical account of the evolution in language entry standard…

While there are a variety of reasons for implementing English medium instruction (EMI) at higher-education institutions (HEIs) worldwide, this decision is often made without consideration of its potential impact on student learning. Federal HEIs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are no exception. With English language admission standards at…

In many U. S. universities, international students whose second language is English follow one of two admission paths: 1) the traditional admission path, where students apply directly to the university for full admission; or 2) the conditional admission path, where they can apply to the university's intensive English program (IEP) and be granted…

Background: Research in the field of writing pedagogy within higher education has extensively examined the significant roles that feedback plays in the development of students' writing skills. However, comparative studies that investigate the efficacy of teacher-provided written and oral feedback, both with and without the aid of technology,…

The premise of this research is that analytical and extensive reading in a digital environment might be used to facilitate second language acquisition at the tertiary education level. Despite the general orientation toward communicative methods in modern second language acquisition, reading methods and techniques have seen an unexpected yet very…

College and university admissions officers are the gatekeepers who decide which individuals may join the "country club" of higher education. As such, the decisions they make have a significant impact on the lives of individuals, especially those who are willing to travel across the globe and risk living in an unfamiliar country in order…

The development of English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) at the tertiary level has been accelerated by the ever-increasing degree of higher education internationalisation. The study, based on a survey with 112 students and semi-structured interviews with 16 instructors collected at a Sino-foreign cooperative education institution in China,…

English is increasingly common as a medium of instruction in higher education internationally, and evidence of English language proficiency (ELP) forms a vital aspect of many post-secondary admission applications. Scores from different ELP measures (e.g. standardized assessments; institution-specific English programmes) are often used as…

This viewpoint article provides a critical reflection on the gatekeeping and academic language practices of Anglophone universities, evaluating these in light of the promotional claims universities make about internationalization and global reach. I then consider the arguments put forward in each of the main articles in this special issue from…

The study anchors on the Linguistic research tradition of Error Analysis (EA), focused on the grammatical errors, specifically on "verb tenses" manifested in the sentences of Japanese ESL learners. The entire respondent population was drawn from the pool of registered learners in 2017 at the Clark Institute of the Philippines Foundation,…