Despite the educational advancements as the world becomes more integrated, the problem of disparity in assessment of academic value still lingers with the criteria for validating foreign students' credentials. This can leave these students unable to further their education at different universities or even different departments within the same…

How long does it typically take English learner students to develop English language proficiency? And how does this time vary by student characteristics such as English proficiency at entry to kindergarten, gender, and home language? The answers to these questions can provide valuable information to districts and schools. Regional Educational…

In the context of a Language Massive Open Online Course (LMOOC), teacher interventions have to be designed into the course, since personalized teacher feedback actions are impossible due to the large number of participants. Learner autonomy, peer-feedback and task design are crucial in this course design. This paper presents a study on the task…

The immediate area of interest in this study is the primary building block of all foreign languages: vocabulary acquisition. Due to recent updates and innovations in educational software, foreign language educators now have a huge supply of ever improving tools to help enhance, transform and completely modify learning. Despite this surge in…

This study examines English and Arabic binomials, identifies the similarities and differences in their semantic features, semantic structure, and semantic relations between the members of binomials. It also investigates translation students' ability to comprehend and translate binomials from English to Arabic and vice versa. It was found that…

This investigation was motivated by frustration that language teachers report over some students' failure to participate in class. Research (Delaney, 2012) suggests that students' level of involvement often does not reach teachers' expectations. Grounded in previous work that emphasizes the importance of understanding the student voice, this study…

This article describes a graphic, designed by Clementi and Terrill, the authors of "Keys to Planning for Learning" (2013), visually representing the components that contribute to meaningful and purposeful practice in learning a world language, practice that leads to greater proficiency. The entire graphic is centered around the letter…

Because listening has received little attention and the validation of ability scales describing multidimensional skills is always challenging, this study applied a multistage, criterion-referenced approach that used a framework of aligned audio passages and listening tasks to explore the validity of the ACTFL and related listening proficiency…

The present study examines the acquisition of double object constructions (DOCs) ("Susan gave Peter an apple") by 90 Basque/Spanish learners of English as a third language (L3). The aim of this study was to explore whether (i) learners established a distinction when accepting DOCs vs. prepositional phrase constructions (PPCs)…

Vocabulary development is an essential goal in any language teaching program, and considering the multidimensional nature of this construct, achieving this goal needs effective assessment of all dimensions of word knowledge, i.e. breadth, depth and accessibility of word knowledge. Most of the current vocabulary assessment tools measure the breadth…

In this essay, the author argues that English language learners (ELLs) can meet and exceed the Common Core State Standards, and that more complex materials are in fact precisely what they need. Lack of access to such materials is what prevents ELLs from attaining full proficiency in English.

This paper explores the ideologies of English in China through a meta-discursive analysis of Chinese netizens' comments on the performance of English by Huang Xiaoming, a famous Chinese actor. By applying Park and Wee's framework for analysing ideological evaluations of appropriation (i.e. ideologies of allegiance, competence, and authenticity) to…

This article discusses a three-course sequence which has been designed to aid students' attainment of Advanced Low proficiency according to ACTFL guidelines. A cycle of iterative tasks (with increasing learner autonomy) within and between the courses in the sequence are highlighted and their implementation discussed. Additionally,…

This paper reports on a mixed-methods approach to evaluate rater performance on a local oral English proficiency test. Three types of reliability estimates were reported to examine rater performance from different perspectives. Quantitative results were also triangulated with qualitative rater comments to arrive at a more representative picture of…

This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. "John looks like he is sick") encode direct evidentiality. We then…