ACTFL generic proficiency guidelines describe what learners are able to perform at various proficiency levels. These guidelines, in particular the oral proficiency guidelines (OPG), have been widely used to assess learners’ proficiency across institutions – via the oral proficiency interview (OPI) technique – irrespective of curriculum, teaching methods, and materials. Many institutions and org...

Errors are one of the enigmatic parts in the process of foreign language (L2) learning as they are extremely versatile at each and every stage of the language learning proficiency. The present study, therefore, was an attempt to reveal Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical errors in writing at two levels of proficiency, namely lower intermediate and advanced, and then to investigate whether there w...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between arts students’ English proficiency level and their self-efficacy. Many studies have proved that self-efficacy is a significant predictor of learning and achievement (Multon, Brown, & Lent, 1991; Pajares, 1996, 1997; Schunk & Pajares, 2005). Does this apply to arts students? Arts students spend most of their time practicing sk...

This paper addresses the effect of English proficiency on economic growth empirically with Barro-type cross-sectional growth regression. The empirical results provide evidence of positive correlation between initial English proficiency and economic growth only for the countries in the Asia and Europe. Therefore, countries with higher levels of English proficiency among the fraction of its popul...

Introduction Clinical Competency Committees (CCC) require reliable, objective data to inform decisions regarding assignment of milestone proficiency levels, which must be reported to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. After the development of two new assessment methods, the end-of-shift (EOS) assessment and the end-of-rotation (EOR) assessment, we sought to evaluate their...

The aim of the current study was twofold: (1) to validate the internal structure of the general English (GE) section of the university entrance examination for Ph.D applicants into the English programs at state universities in Iran (Ph.D. UEE), and (2) to examine the factor structure invariance of the Ph.D. UEE across two proficiency levels. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyz...

This study investigates the lexical dimension of EFL writing by exploring the relationship between lexical diversity and EFL writing proficiency. The relationship is explored through an analysis of forty-five email texts written by Chinese high school students that were taken from a Chinese National Matriculation English Test (NMET) practice writing test. Type-token ratio (TTR) and D (a measure...

This study investigated the effects of two perceptually-based training paradigms in both the perception and production of English /e/ and /æ/ by Cantonese ESL learners with high and low listening and oral proficiency levels. Sixty-four subjects participated in the study, in which 22 (9 with high proficiency, H-HV; 13 with low proficiency, L-HV) were trained under High Variability Phonetic Train...

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Po...