This report features components of California's plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act that impact the 1.3 million English learners in the state regarding testing, accountability, and stakeholder engagement. Advocates can use this information to engage administrators and policymakers around improving outcomes for English learners and ensuring…

Advancements in technology have greatly influenced how students write, the ways they interact with readers, and the genres they create. In order to reflect real-world writing behaviors in the assessment setting and to be able to generalize test-takers' performance from the assessment to their true writing ability, the current study investigated…

Texas state law requires that specialized linguistic programs be provided for students who are English language learners (EL). These programs are intended to facilitate ELs' integration into the regular school curriculum and ensure access to equal educational opportunities. This evaluation report summarizing the performance of students who…

The instructional strategies implemented by the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in an international technical college in Saudi Arabia did not prepare students at an intermediate level of proficiency on the Common European Framework of Reference. As a result, more than 77% of the first-year students were not progressing to the…

This annual report provides information for the 2016-17 school year on grade-level retention in the Texas public school system. Data on retention are provided by student characteristics, including grade level; race/ethnicity; gender; degree of English proficiency; and economic, at-risk, foster care, homeless, immigrant, migrant,…

In the literature of second language teaching and learning, the use of students' first language (L1) has been an issue of debate for many years. Despite the changing state of teaching and learning aspects over the years, the belief that L1 should not be used in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms has stood the test of time.…

Foreign language educators have developed measures to assess the proficiency of U.S. high school learners. Most have compared language learners to clearly defined criteria for proficiency in the language (criterion-referenced assessment) or to the performance of other monolingual English speakers (norm-referenced assessment). In this study, the…

When China liberalised its economy and opened up to the (Western) world, it actively promoted the English language at schools and universities on a massive scale. This learn-English movement, riding on the back of English as the dominant international language, has powered English into China's education reforms. We outline the movement and discuss…

The integration of popular culture into English language learning has recently been formalised in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary curriculum, with the development of critical reading indicated as one of the key objectives. Whether and how students respond to popular culture texts is, however, under-researched. The present paper reports findings…

Taking a psycholinguistic orientation within task-based language teaching scholarship, this study investigated the effects of mode (oral vs. written) and task complexity on second language (L2) performance. The participants were 78 Catalan/Spanish learners of English as a foreign language. Half of the participants performed the simple and complex…

Idiomatic expressions are among the most difficult and challenging aspects in the realm of lexicon. The focus of the present study was on investigating the effect of short stories and pictures on learning idiomatic expressions by beginner EFL learners. For this aim, 52 Iranian EFL learners were chosen and assigned to three groups randomly: two…

The use of humour in teaching and learning can be contentious, with some authors suggesting that the efficacy of humorous materials is mediated by the culture of the student. Nevertheless, humour represents a potential vehicle for the introduction of active learning in a classroom setting, as judicious use of humour may lead to a more relaxed…

Standards of coherence are one of the major factors that influence reading comprehension. This study investigated the standards of coherence that second language (L2) learners employ when reading. In a pair of experiments, Japanese learners of English read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness between sentences and then…

The International High School at Langley Park (IHSLP) opened during the 2015-2016 school year. By the fourth year of operation, the school will be home to 400 English language learners (ELLs) new to the United States. Working in partnership with the Internationals Network for Public Schools, the school is designed around the "HELLO…

Dynamic assessment (DA), having its theoretical base in Vygotskyan Sociocultural theory of mind, is a newly developed classroom assessment through which learners are helped to perform beyond their current ability. Drawing upon the theoretical aspect of DA, the present study explored the impact of DA on the development of speaking skills. To this…