BACKGROUND International medical graduates working in the UK are more likely to be censured in relation to fitness to practise compared to home graduates. Performance on the General Medical Council's (GMC's) Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) tests and English fluency have previously been shown to predict later educational performance in this group of doctors. It is unknown wh...

This study aimed to measure the correlations between reading strategies, learning styles and reading comprehension of the Saudi EFL college learners' English reading comprehension. This study used a survey and two IELTS reading passages that vary in difficulty levels. The purpose was to show how two different reading strategies affect EFL students' reading comprehension. The study further exami...

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the authenticity of IELTS academic tests. Bachman and Palmer (1996, p. 23) define authenticity as “the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language task”. Authenticity is then an important aspect of testing since it describes the relationship between the test and the real world. Th...

Washback refers to the influence of a test on teaching and learning. This study was an attempt to compare the influence of IELTS and TOEFL iBT on the expectations the students brought to their courses and to investigate how these expectations were fulfilled. To this end, 100 IELTS and 120 TOEFL iBT students attending preparation courses took a questionnaire survey, and a sample of their ten cla...

In this study it was hypothesized that field dependence or independence would introduce systematic variance into Iranian EFL learners’ overall and task-specific performance on task-based reading comprehension tests. One thousand, seven hundred, forty-three freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior students, all majoring in English at various Iranian universities and colleges, took the Group Embed...

PURPOSE To evaluate expansion of image-guided interventional cryoablation techniques usually employed for pain management to address the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of treatment for a urologic condition with otherwise limited treatment options, premature ejaculation (PE). MATERIALS AND METHODS Prospective institutional review board approval was obtained, and 24 subjects with PE were enr...

The purpose of this paper was to see whether any significant relationship exists among EFL learners’ autonomy, left/right brain dominance, and reading comprehension of the Academic Reading and General Reading Modules of IELTS examination. To this end, 100 female EFL learners were randomly selected from those who were attending IELTS preparatory courses at a language school in Tehran. All partic...