Appropriate placement of language learners continues to be challenging for postsecondary world language programs. The Seal of Biliteracy is now available in all of the states for high school students. While the Seal is an admirable program, using it in higher education can be problematic because the proficiency levels needed to attain the Seal…

With the increased popularity of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education, many East Asian universities are using international English proficiency tests to make admissions and placement decisions. Since these tests were not originally designed for the EMI contexts, validity evidence is needed to support the use of these tests in this…

Purpose: Self-initiated international placements by students have been largely ignored in the literature on outward mobility in higher education. The support given to self-initiated international placement students, if any, has received even less attention. This study aims to address this lacuna. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on insights…

When a student enrolls in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) for the first time, the student's parents/guardians complete a Home Language Survey. This survey inquires whether a student's first language is a language other than English, whether a student's primary language is one other than English, and whether a language other than English…

Placement tests are used to support a particular need in a local context--to determine the best starting place for a student entering a specific programme of language study. This brief report will focus on the development of an innovative placement test with self-directed elements for our local needs at a university in Canada for students studying…

Adultism within English learner (EL) policy in the United States relegates youth to the status of objects whose English proficiency and academic achievement is assessed, monitored, and developed. This study challenges this institutionalized adultism by centering youths' interpretations of their own schooling experiences. It uses an intersectional…

This study examines the effects of English Learner (EL) status on subsequent Special Education (SPED) placement. Through a research-practice partnership, we link student demographic data and initial English proficiency assessment data across seven cohorts of test takers and observe EL and SPED programmatic participation for these students over 7…

In 2024, British Columbia's (BC's) English as an Additional Language articulation committee revised the alignments of the provincial EAP (English for Academic Purposes) learning outcomes with the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLBs). The CLBs and the EAP outcomes both assess English proficiency for the purposes of post-secondary admission, program…

The category of "English as a Second Language" or "ESL" student is no longer a label of someone in the process of learning English. Rather, linguistic categorization is a complex social processes of ascribed identity formation that positions students as deficits and others, circumscribing them out of belonging to both academic…

This exploratory study examines the correlations between teachers' attitudes and the disproportionate representation of African American males in special educational services in the United States education system. Using a sample of teachers from two elementary schools with special education student representation proportional to the student body…

At the end of every school year, particularly as students move on to middle or high school, educators throughout the nation face the same question: To reclassify or not to reclassify English Language Learners (ELLs)? The reclassification decision is tricky because it sometimes feels as if there is an inevitable tradeoff between specialized…

The aim of this experiment was to investigate how glossing influences second language (L2) reading comprehension in relation to text difficulty and the two local and global meaning representations. Fifty-eight undergraduate students were asked to read three easy, moderate, and difficult texts and, following each passage, answer twenty…

Finding out which teaching strategies best support students learning is a key objective of educational research. Knowing this, this study investigated the comparative effects of consciousness-raising (CR) tasks and dynamic assessment (DA) on morphological awareness in an Afghani EFL context. To achieve this, 90 EFL grade 11 learners from three…

There has been an ongoing debate on the effectiveness of spaced and massed distribution instruction in second/foreign language learning. A number of studies in the literature have investigated the impacts of spacing effect on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' vocabulary acquisition. This study aims to expand the body of existing…

The present study uses data from 1147 university language students from lower-division and upper-division courses from eight different languages. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of course placement, first course enrollment, and personal/professional relationships had on university learners' intentions to minor or major…