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…

Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing…

Effective writing is essential for academic and professional success, especially for students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). This study aimed to investigate the correlation between different writing strategies, EFL students' self-efficacy in writing, and their actual writing performance. A descriptive-correlational research design…

Incremental intelligence plays an important role in self-regulating and enhancing writing performance among language learners. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship among variables of the incremental theory of intelligence, self-regulatory writing strategies, implicit theory of writing, and writing performance in EFL learners. To…

This study considers language proficiency test scores achieved by ESL students who subsequently entered a New Zealand university at the undergraduate level. Scores from IELTS and the university's in-house English Proficiency Test are analysed to determine the predictive ability of overall scores on these two tests and scores for each of the four…

This paper explores what the measures of utterance fluency typically employed in Automatic Speech Evaluation (ASE), i.e. automated speaking assessments, tell us about oral proficiency. 60 Chinese learners of English completed the second part of the speaking section of IELTS and six tasks designed to measure the linguistic knowledge and processing…

The present study adopted a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach to explore the impact of e-tandem on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' speaking skills (i.e. speaking fluency and coherence, lexicon, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation) and willingness to communicate (WTC). To this end, two classes at a language…

Digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) integrates key game elements such as Challenges, Rewards, Human-Computer Interactions (HCI), Multimedia, and Fantasy. Although the overall effectiveness of digital games in enhancing English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) vocabulary knowledge development is well-established, the specific roles of…

This study examines the relationship between academic performance (GPA), Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA), and English proficiency (IELTS scores) among Saudi international students in the United States while considering demographic factors such as gender, age, college major, and length of U.S. residency. Data from 551 students, collected…

Although the IELTS speaking test assesses English verbal-communication competence accurately and reliably, its traditional, retroactive scoring framework stops short of providing detailed diagnostic information about individual test-takers' specific domains of proficiency or deficiency. This study employed a cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA)…

The current study explored and compared the employment of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers (MDMs) by the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) speaking test takers at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. To conduct this discourse analysis research, a mixed-methods approach with concurrent transformative…

Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as "key…

The present study explored the effects of interactionist Dynamic Assessment (DA) and age on the writing accuracy of IELTS candidates. This research investigated the existence of an interactional effect between the age of learners and the type of treatment they received. First, 140 IELTS candidates were split into two age groups, adult and young.…

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…

A growing body of research has examined the incorporation of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) into Second Language (L2) instruction in various settings. Despite pedagogical innovations in L2 classrooms, little research has embodied retrospective explorations of the impact of ELF interventions with concrete instruments to measure the exact change…