Teacher and Student Attitudes to IELTS Writing Tasks: Positive or Negative Washback?

Rhetoric of Teacher Comments on Student Writing

The role of rhetoric in establishing an educational mood or environment has become a topic of interest for many contemporary educators. In teacher education, there is a focus on how a teacher’s attitudes, behaviors, and persona can affect—positively or negatively—the ambiance of the classroom. Julie Peterson Nelson et al. of Brigham Young University have analyzed the effect of implementing prai...

Task Type and Prompt Effect on Test Performance: A Focus on IELTS Academic Writing Tasks

Recent versions of international high-stakes tests like TOEFL and IELTS have made use of integrated tasks in addition to the traditional independent tasks in a claim to provide a more realistic estimation of the test takers’ language abilities. The present study aimed to investigate how test takers’ performance may differ on such tasks. As such, the test takers’ performance was compared on IELT...

Investigating washback to the learner from the IELTS test in the Japanese tertiary context

Results: Test results revealed a significant increase in speaking ability, with more significant increases in speaking and listening for participants who reported preparing more intensely for the test. Survey results showed that students focused significantly more on speaking and writing, and significantly less on reading, when preparing for the second test, and those who prepared most intensel...

Pre-Service Teachers’ Attitudes about Writing and Learning To Teach Writing: Implications for Teacher Educators

Washback to Classroom Climate: The Case of an IELTS Speaking Preparation Course

In applied linguistics, washback, or backwash, refers to the influence of tests on teaching and learning. Though there is now a large body of research investigating the impact of tests on educational processes and outcomes, the possible effect of language tests on the psychological environment of language classrooms remains underexplored. This study examined the effect of IELTS on the classroom...