Inference-making is integral to reading comprehension, defined as information 'retrieved or generated during reading to fill in information left implicit in a text'. However, there are few studies regarding the inferencing of young emergent multilinguals that account for multilingualism and culture, attend to the learning processes influenced by…

The aim of this study was to develop, for the benefit of both test takers and test score users, enhanced "TOEFL ITP"® test score reports that go beyond the simple numerical scores that are currently reported. To do so, we applied traditional scale anchoring (proficiency scaling) to item difficulty data in order to develop performance…

In this article, we discuss the approach adopted within the Vanderbilt University Learning Disabilities Innovation Hub, which focuses on students with higher-order comorbidity: students with concurrent difficulty with reading comprehension and word-problem solving. The aim of the Hub's Research Project is to test what we refer to as the…

In Turkey, first-year preservice English teachers learn L2 writing in at least two compulsory courses throughout their undergraduate ELT [English Language Teaching] programs. This study, conducted in this context, intends to investigate preservice English teachers' perceptions about L2 undergraduate writing difficulty and their causal attributions…

In this study, we examined how much change in "TOEFL® Primary™" listening and reading scores can be expected in relation to the time interval between test administrations. The test records of 5213 young learners of English (aged 8-13 years) in Japan and Turkey who repeated the tests were analyzed to examine test scores as a function of…

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes, students learn content knowledge and a second/foreign language (L2) simultaneously. It follows that both content and language are assessed, although research on how to do so remains scarce. This study explores the interplay between cognitive and linguistic demands of CLIL assessments.…

Classroom practices, materials and teaching methods in language classes have changed a lot in the last decades and continue to evolve; however, the commonly used techniques to test students' foreign language skills have not changed much regardless of the recent awareness in Bloom's taxonomy. Testing units at schools rely mostly on multiple choice…

The notion of "textuality" encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether "cohesion" was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text.…

Investigating the L2 temporality, most previous studies within the Aspect Hypothesis framework focused on the basic meanings or prototypical uses of past morphology. The present study, however, including other less prototypical uses of past morphology, addresses 2 questions: (i) how the uses of simple past and past progressive morphology change as…

Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non-native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and…

Mid-20th-century scholars argued that second language (L2) instruction should be rooted in a comparison of the structural characteristics of the first language (L1) and L2. Their enthusiasm for a "scientific" approach to errors reflected the view, based on the contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH), that learners' difficulties could be…

This paper briefly investigates the vowel sounds of English and Bangla language. Keeping the supra-segmental features aside, it mainly focuses on the major segmental similarities and differences of the vowel sound system of these two languages. The paper explores the articulatory system in brief and reviews the vowels sounds of English. An effort…

This paper investigates the dynamics of willingness to communicate (WTC) in written communication between a native and non-native speaker of English. Although research into WTC has identified topic as an interacting variable affecting L2 learners' WTC during task performances (MacIntyre & Legatto, 2011) and classroom interactions (Cao, 2013),…

Researchers have investigated that different dimensions of word knowledge (breadth versus depth) may play distinct roles in second language (L2) reading comprehension. Yet, little research has addressed how learners' efficiency of accessing those dimensions of knowledge functions in their comprehension (i.e., the issue of knowledge availability…

Syntactic (i.e., grammatical) complexity refers to the range and the degree of sophistication of the forms that appear in language production (Ortega, 2003). This concept has long been regarded as an important construct of language proficiency and has been actively investigated in the field of second language (L2) writing. Syntactic complexity is…