Several high-stakes English proficiency tests including but not limited to IELTS, PTE Academic, and TOEFL iBT recommend a 2-year time limit on validity for score usage. Although this timeframe provides a useful rule-of-thumb for the recency of testing, it can have far-reaching consequences. In response to stakeholder queries around IELTS validity…

Many English-medium universities employ a compensatory model to establish cutscores on English language proficiency tests for student admissions. In this model, students can have different scores on different sections of the test provided their overall score meets the admission cutscore. This practice raises questions regarding potential variation…

Language proficiency testing has long played a role as both facilitator and barrier in global migration. This paper outlines how Canada and other traditional migrant destination countries use English-language proficiency testing for immigration, asylum and resettlement, and citizenship. It identifies commonalities between these three related areas…

This replication study sought to compare the academic achievement of undergraduate students with different score profiles on the TOEFL iBT. Two-step cluster analysis of TOEFL iBT section scores identified six clusters among 2,347 undergraduate students who met the required cutscore on the TOEFL iBT for admission to a Canadian English-medium…

The following study focuses on learners of French in an English-dominant context and contributes to a better understanding of language hierarchization by investigating attitudes toward different varieties of French. It aims to identify a possible correlation between the evaluation of different varieties of French and the participants'…

In this research report, we describe a study to map the scores of the "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test to the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). The TOEFL Essentials test is a four-skills assessment of foundational English language skills and communication abilities in academic and general (daily life) contexts. At the time of writing this…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

The present study investigated the effects of different types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of French grammatical gender attribution. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 140 participants in six intact French as a second language (L2) classes. The classes received six 80-minute instructional sessions consisting of…

Given their significance in daily life and frequent inclusion in clinical and educational assessments, children's narrative abilities merit investigation. The present study examines the narratives of children acquiring an additional language, adding to the more abundant studies of monolingual children. Sixty kindergartners (mean age 68 months)…

Integrated writing tasks have increased in popularity in second language writing classrooms. Extensive research on these tasks has examined the challenges that students face when completing such tasks. One significant challenge is the transformation of source language use when students integrate source information into their own essays. However,…

The Canadian Academic English Language (CAEL) assessment is a proficiency test for university admission. Most research has focused on the paper edition, not the recent computer edition (CE). Validity research on other proficiency tests found that relationships between proficiency scores and academic achievement measures can be tenuous because…

This study examined the use of a popular Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Google Voice Typing (GVT), to automatically assess English as second language pronunciation. It aimed to answer the following question: What is the relationship between GVT-rated scores and human-rated scores? To answer this question, we compared audio recordings of 56…

While previous research on student success has focused on disciplinary academic classes and programs with varying results regarding the predictive validity of English proficiency tests, namely the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), none have studied student success within the non-program-specific context of an English for…

It has been widely asserted that general English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in postsecondary education has a limited future, given both the benefits of discipline-specific EAP, and the widespread use by universities of international standardized assessments for proof of English language proficiency (such as IELTS, PTE, TOEFL, etc.). The extra…

Recent research that explored how input exposure and learner characteristics influence novel L2 morphosyntactic pattern learning has exposed participants to either text or static images rather than dynamic visual events. Furthermore, it is not known whether incorporating eye gaze cues into dynamic visual events enhances dual pattern learning.…