We examined the effect of two methods of assessment--multiple-choice sentence-picture matching and an animated sentence-verification task--on typically developing children's understanding of relative clauses. A sample of children between the ages of 3 years 6 months and 4 years 11 months took part in the study (N = 103). Results indicated that (a)…

This study sets out to investigate possible effects of previously learned languages on the acquisition of English as a third language by examining six prepositions (in, on, at, behind, over, to) when they denote spatial relations. Two picture description tasks were employed to find out which of the two known languages (L1 and/or L2) is the major…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

This study aims to investigate patterns of variation in the interplay of L2 language ability and general reading comprehension skills in L2 reading, by comparing item-level effects of test-takers' results on L1 and L2 reading comprehension tests. The material comes from more than 500,000 people tested on L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) in the…

This study compares the effect of different kinds of distractors on the level of difficulty of multiple-choice (MC) vocabulary tests in sentential contexts. This type of test is widely used in practical testing but it has received little attention so far. Furthermore, although distractors, which represent the unique characteristics of MC tests,…

The article summarizes the results of the comparative study of Reading comprehension texts used in B2 level tests: Unified (Russia) State Exam in English (EGE) and Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE). The research conducted was mainly focused on six parameters measured with the Coh-Metrix, a computational tool producing indices of the…

This study investigated the effect of dynamic assessment on learners' syntactic knowledge. The main concern of this study was significant difference between dynamic and static assessment and the possible role of these two forms of assessment on the syntactic development of Iranian EFL college preparatory learners. To fulfill the purpose of the…