Shifting focus of asocial language tests toward social considerations recalls their ideological basis (Mirhosseini, De Costa, 2020). The recurrent exposure to and involvement in discursive constructions of high stakes' contents, may bring along certain sociocultural conceptualizations and values by test audiences (van Dijk, 1998). Thus, unless a…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

Background/Context: Adding global competency to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) suite heralds the world's first large-scale attempt at gauging education systems' development of students' global competency. Given the contested definitions and more than 150 extant…

Integrated speaking tasks requiring test takers to read and/or listen to stimulus texts and to incorporate their content into oral performances are now used in large-scale, high-stakes tests, including the TOEFL iBT. These tasks require test takers to identify, select, and combine relevant source text information to recognize key relationships…

This paper explores, through the use of the observation checklist and Conversation Analysis (CA), the discourse functions elicited by the dialogic task of the Free University of Bolzano (IT) speaking test. It aims to contribute to content validation, which has been claimed to be especially relevant in paired speaking tests, where interaction is…

This paper addresses the ideal of "citizenship" in the US and how particular meanings of history, culture, and language are encoded in government policy and practice. The US government (Citizenship and Immigration Services) presents citizenship as a commitment to shared knowledge and values, and it requires applicants to possess…

A challenge for many EAP teachers working on pre-sessional programs is to find ways to reconcile the dual aims of preparing students for university study and for the IELTS test. The study described here seeks to provide some guidance on this issue through an analysis of the type of writing required in the two domains. We compared the standard…