This article is a validation study of two national large-scale tests that measure the language proficiency of 11/12 year-old English learners in Norway and Slovenia. Following the example of Alderson and Banerjee (2008), the authors of the article have employed the EALTA guidelines for good practice to validate the tests, and to formulate major…

This paper analyzes the relationship between communication apprehension and language anxiety from the perspective of gender. As virtually no empirical studies have addressed the explicit influence of gender on language anxiety in communication apprehensives, this paper proposes that females are generally more sensitive to anxiety, as reflected in…

Via a variety of measurements, 64 Hungarian native speakers in the 12th grade learning English as a foreign language in Slovakia were tested in a cross-sectional correlational study in order to determine the relationship between the ability to process complex syntax and foreign language reading comprehension. The test instruments involved a…

The main objective of the study was to examine the English language learning strategies (LLS) used by Lower Six students in secondary schools who are sitting for their MUET test. It analyzed the language learning strategies that students use in order to prepare for the MUET test. Data were collected using a survey questionnaire with 300 students.…

The present paper reports the findings of a study that investigated the physical and technical characteristics of the English language teaching courseware in Malaysia. A randomly selected group of English language teachers in Malaysia (n = 200) were surveyed to evaluate the courseware. SPSS (18.0) was applied to analyze the data. The results…

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners' proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese…

The study compared the performance of pupils at grade 12 level in Zambian languages, French and English during a period of ten years (1998-2008). Grade 12 is the final year of Secondary School Education in Zambia. This exercise was aimed at establishing the language with the best performance during the aforementioned period. The study, which was…

This study surveys the opinions of both teachers and students involved in the Year 1 course "University English" in the Language Centre at City University of Hong Kong. The survey involved 265 students and 37 teachers. The issues studied were: 1.) How useful is peer and teacher feedback? 2.) How effective are direct vs. indirect…

This study examines the effectiveness of traditional admissions criteria, including prior GPA, SAT, GRE, and TOEFL in predicting undergraduate and graduate academic success for American and international students at a large public university in the southwestern United States. Included are the admissions and enrollment data for 25,017 undergraduate…

This nonexperimental study explored the predictive strength of English proficiency levels on academic achievement of middle school students in a sample of 17,470 native English-speaking (NES) students, 558 English language learners (current ELLs), and 500 redesignated fluent English proficient students (former ELLs). Results of multilevel analyses…

Vocabulary is an essential component of language. It is central to reading ability, writing ability and listening ability, and the most important aspect of second-language (L2) knowledge for academic achievement. The aim of this paper is to investigate quantitatively some of the factors that make some L2 words more difficult to learn and retain…

This study investigated the effects of using two types of written advance organizers, key sentences and key vocabulary, on the improvement of EFL learners' listening comprehension. 108 second year university students at the higher and lower listening proficiency levels were randomly assigned to one control group and two experimental groups. Prior…

The present study investigates the link between personality traits (OCEAN Personality test), emotional intelligence (EI) (Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire) and the notion of "feeling different" while using a foreign language among 102 Polish-English bilinguals and Polish L2 users of English who were immersed in a foreign language and…

Although quantitative studies of educational research usually suggest some links between conditions of learning and student learning outcome, behavior and performance, the idea of engaging students in discussions on teaching and learning has not had as much attention in the United Arab Emirates as in some other countries. This paper presents…

This study uses word information scores from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Psycholinguistic Database to analyse word development in the spontaneous speech data of six adult learners of English as a second language (L2) in a one-year longitudinal study. In contrast to broad measures of lexical development, such as word frequency and lexical…