Inspired by the 'teaching as inquiry' model, we initiated a focusing inquiry on 2,811 English diagnostic tests that were taken in 2014-2015 by first-year students entering the Health Sciences programme at the University of Otago, a programme for aspiring health professionals. That inquiry aimed to improve the first-year paper taken by students who…

This essay reports on a study of first-year student writing. Based on a stratified national sample, the study attempts to replicate research conducted twenty-two years ago and to chart the changes that have taken place in student writing since then. The findings suggest that papers are longer, employ different genres, and contain new error…

Thirty six EFL freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were given a dictation, a listening comprehension test and a decoding test. The purpose of the study was to find out whether EFL freshmen students' spelling ability correlates with their listening comprehension and decoding…

Two samples of college student writing, paragraphs from freshman compositions, are analyzed for presence or absence of two characteristics of literate prose, decontextualization and autonomy. Writing is decontextualized and autonomous when whatever is needed for its comprehension is included in the words of the text, and comprehension is not…

Uses item analysis techniques to compare two multiple-choice test formats for assessing second language students' competence in English structure in terms of mean scores, item difficulty, and item discrimination. Findings reveal that difficulty and discrimination aspects are item-specific rather than format-dependent and items with moderate…