Several English and Spanish language tests currently used in bilingual education and some less known tests are reviewed, looking at both historic and psychometric factors. It is suggested that practitioners have commonly assumed that all language tests are basically valid, which contributed to the commercial success of some tests of questionable validity, ill-suited to the purpose of educationa...

the purpose of this study was to see the role of english language proficiency level and sex on iranian students’ beliefs about language learning. this study also investigated the usefulness of the balli questionnaire (horwits, 1988), which checks learners’ beliefs, for the context of iranian english language learners through conducting an interview. a total of 171 iranian learners from safir in...

Groups are used widely in the language classroom and, particularly in classes where there is a wide range of English proficiency among students, teachers may want to construct balanced groups based on the language proficiency of individual students. In order to construct such groups, teachers need a reliable measure that effectively differentiates between different levels of proficiency, and ye...

Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (L2) acquisition after the critical period. In this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from Persian speaking learners of English as an L2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (RPs) as uniterpretable features. Unlike English which does not allow RPs, Persian shows various b...

The present study aims to investigated Iranian L2 speaker`s knowledge of the overt pronounconstraint (OPC) in English. It also aims to examine L2 learners understanding of UniversalGrammar (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 2000, 2001) and if it is common to all languages. Specifically,this study takes a new look at the L2 acquisition of knowledge of the overt pronoun constraint(Montalbetti 1984) by Persian ...

This article analyzes the role that individual differences in children's cognitive, Spanish competence, and socio-emotional and behavioral skills play in predicting the concurrent and longitudinal acquisition of English among a large sample of ethnically diverse, low-income, Hispanic preschool children. Participants assessed at age 4 for language, cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral skil...

The present study intended to propose a causal model of factors that would predict Oral Communication Apprehension (OCA) of Iranian learners of English as a foreign language. To conduct the study, 135 male and female University students majoring in English were selected. Five variables including: learners’self-esteem and introversion/extroversion(as independent variables), their gender and prof...

This paper examines the reading strategies that four Chinese adult readers use in reading both Chinese and English texts. Their strategies they used are analyzed into two broad categories: the text-initiated strategies and the reader-initiated strategies. All participants demonstrated more strategy use in reading the English texts than in reading the Chinese text. In general, participants were ...