Applicants must often demonstrate adequate English proficiency when applying to postsecondary institutions by taking an English language proficiency test, such as the TOEFL iBT, IELTS Academic, or Duolingo English Test (DET). Concordance tables aim to provide equivalent scores across multiple assessments, helping admissions officers to make fair…

Reading ability in English is decisive in determining the academic achievement of university students who study the English language, or any other subject in English. Extensive research has been conducted to explore whether ESL/EFL reading problems are language-specific or general reading problems. In this regard, previous research on the…

Many candidates undertaking high-stakes English language proficiency tests for academic enrolment do not achieve the results they need for reasons including linguistic unreadiness, test unpreparedness, illness, an unfavourable configuration of tasks, or administrative and marking errors. Owing to the importance of meeting goals or out of a belief…

The significance of producing socially appropriate utterances, not just linguistically correct ones, has given rise to a plethora of studies on speech acts. In this regard, the performance of second and foreign language learners against the norms of the target language and the factors affecting them have yet to be thoroughly investigated. To…

The present study examines the effect of feedback (FB) and feedforward (FF) in prosody instruction for developing listening comprehension skills in the nonnative language by interpreter trainees, using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Three groups of 25 interpreter trainees at Bu-Ali Sina University in Iran took part in the study, all…

Studies have documented the significance of scaffolding as a sociocultural theory driven type of assistance for the development of English as foreign language (EFL) learners' language skills in general; however, the comparative efficacy of various cognitive and/or metacognitive scaffolding procedures for EFL learners' listening comprehension…

This paper reports partial results from a larger study of how three different groups of stakeholders--university admissions officers, faculty in graduate programs involved in admissions decisions, and Intensive English Program (IEP) faculty--interpret and use TOEFL iBT® scores in making admissions decisions or preparing students to meet minimum…

This research was conducted to find the urgency of implementing the mandatory TOEFL test policy. This policy requires students who will take the final examination to have a TOEFL certificate with a minimum score of 450. This research used a qualitative research method with 114 students as the sample. Furthermore, triangulation was utilized by…

In response to the calls for making key stakeholders' perspectives relevant in the test validation process, the study discussed in this report sought test-taker feedback as part of collecting validity evidence and supporting the ongoing field testing efforts of the new "TOEFL ITP"® Speaking section. Specifically, I aimed to investigate…

International students have comprised a steadily growing demographic in America's colleges and universities for the past seventy-five years. Over the many years and decades, the proportion of international students whose first language is not English has also increased. Subsequently, American higher education has come to rely on an important…

Many universities in non-English speaking countries have been adopting English as a medium of instruction to internationalize their education. We set out to compare the language policies of a Finnish and a Japanese university using the lens of language ideology -- a set of normative beliefs about the social dimension of language. Data were…

The present study aims to examine how listening comprehension processes (top-down and bottom-up) differ by second language proficiency. To investigate such differences, experiments (listening tasks) followed by questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Participants included 18 lower intermediate learners, 19 upper intermediate…

The purpose of this research is to reveal and compare the language proficiency profiles of Purdue's Chinese and Indian graduate applicants in various disciplines to take a step towards the development of Language Proficiency Literacy (LPL) of graduate admissions decision makers. The study argues that before being able to offer LPL development…

This paper first discusses the Common European Framework of Reference Languages: Learning, teaching and assessment CEFR 2001 and the revisions to this framework in CEFR 2018. It then looks at the Frameworks of Reference for English Language Education in Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia and China which are based on CEFR. The main purpose of this…

English language proficiency has long been recognised as important to the academic success of non-native English-speaking international students through the setting of minimum English language requirements as a condition of entry to Anglophone universities. The present study provides a historical account of the evolution in language entry standard…