Possessing strong communication skills is essential in contributing to effective teaching. This paper investigates graduating student teachers' English language proficiency, as measured by IELTS tests scores, of graduating EL student teachers. The paper considers what teachers need to know about the English language given that English has been the…

Academic listening skill is an indispensable necessity for English for academic purposes (EAP) students in English-medium universities and also critical for their future success in comprehending conference lectures. But due to the specific nature of such academic lectures, nonnative students all too often face challenges in getting a full command…

This article describes a transcription task cycle that was designed to facilitate the development of skills for the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) speaking test at a language school in Japan. The cycle involved practice test, transcription, student correction, teacher correction, and retrial of the original test and…

The current study attempted to establish baseline quantitative data on the impacts of pushed output on two components of speaking (i.e., accuracy and fluency). To achieve this purpose, 30 female EFL learners were selected from a whole population pool of 50 based on the standard test of IELTS interview and were randomly assigned into an…

In formal assessments of second-language speakers' fluency, the criteria used frequently fail to differentiate between real disfluency and interactionally effective practices, while superficially disfluent, that help with communication and are used by first language speakers. In this study, we focused on pausing, silences and self-repairs in the…

This article presents a small qualitative study which aimed to gain an understanding of how lecturers and international students perceive the English language policies and practices at their institutions. The findings show that most participants perceive current policies and practices as unfair. However, there were discrepancies in lecturers' and…

This study sought to explore the perspectives of learners involved in the IELTS Academic Writing Module courses. In particular, the study explored learner perspectives of motivation, test-taking anxiety, test-taking strategies, and the expectations students bring to their courses. This study adopted a mixed methodology and collected data through…

Although English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs for matriculated students have been a presence in U.S. higher education since the 1940s, little has been documented in the literature concerning ESL courses, ESL placement tests, and the procedures in which incoming students are placed into appropriate classes.The present study takes three…

The significance of errors in explicating Second Language Acquisition (SLA) processes led to the growth of error analysis in the 1970s which has since maintained its prominence in English as a second/foreign language (L2) research. However, one problem with this research is errors are often taken for granted, without problematising them and their…

This study investigated the impact of metacognitive instruction on the listening skill, and metacognitive knowledge of a group of male students (N = 30) who were learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Iran. The study participants spoke Persian as a first language and were high-intermediate EFL learners. The participants received a guided…

In this article, the author expresses her thoughts and experiences on studying abroad. Yang Huang explains that studying overseas for international students means a lot--not only being away from home but also experiencing quite a few unexpected difficulties. Studying abroad is full of challenges for every student due to the language barrier,…

Australia is one of the world's largest beef exporters. However, meat processing jobs are widely considered undesirable and are increasingly filled with employer-sponsored migrant workers on temporary long-stay visas. Against this background, our paper explores the role of language in the employment and migration trajectories of a group of meat…

This study investigates the effect of activating metacognitive strategies on the listening performance of English as a foreign language (EFL) university students and explores the impact of such strategies on their metacognitive awareness of the listening task. The participants were N = 50 students of English literature at the state university of…

This paper explores student perceptions of the effects of pairing discipline-specific language instruction with the traditional method of course delivery in economics. Our research involved teaching content-based English as an additional language (EAL) tutorials to a small group of ten international students taking first-year introductory…

A much under-researched issue in higher education is the extent to which English-medium university courses help students improve their English proficiency in an ESL context. Adopting a longitudinal, mixed methods design in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed, the current study tracked English language improvement,…