The ongoing question of whether negative transfer speech acts increases or decreases with gains in L2 proficiency has brought mixed results, some arguing that (Bu, 2012; Morkus, 2018) and others the opposite (Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper, & Ross, 2006). In response, this study measured frequency content refusals among 33 beginning 49 intermediate Japanese students English. Twenty-three Engli...

Studies in a variety of U.S. clinical laboratories have demonstrated difficulty in detecting intermediate and low-level vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). The misclassification of "at least intermediate resistant isolates" as vancomycin susceptible may have both clinical implications and a negative impact on measures to control the spread of VRE. No published study has assessed the ability...

Since the late 70s, investigations into the language learning strategies used by successful learners in the field of second and foreign language learning attracted attention with the studies of Rubin (1975), Stern (1975), and Naiman et al. (1978), which aimed to figure out what good language learning strategies might be and to share those strategies with unsuccessful language learners. Previous...

English teachers, especially those who teach summary writing to students with relatively lower proficiency in face difficulty teaching and while assessing their students’ performances. In the classroom context, an analytic rubric is pedagogically more helpful than a holistic because teacher can confirm strengths weaknesses of performance receive constructive feedback (Yamanishi et al....

Task difficulty is a critical issue affecting test developers. Controlling or balancing the item difficulty of an assessment improves its validity and discrimination. Test developers construct tests from the cognitive perspective, by making the test constructing process more scientific and efficient; thus, the scores obtained more precisely represent the proficiency level. In this paper, a fram...

this study investigated the impact of using the technique of self-monitoring on non-academic efl learners’ composition writing. fifty female students studying english at navid english institute in shiraz, iran were chosen based on the results of a proficiency test. they were all 16-20 years old and were intermediate learners of english who were divided into two control and experimental groups a...

in recent years, a number of large-scale writing assessments (e.g., toefl ibt) have employed integrated writing tests to measure test takers’ academic writing ability. using a quantitative method, the current study examined how written textual features and use of source material(s) varied across two types of text-based integrated writing tasks (i.e., listening-to-write vs. reading-to-write) and...