this study is an attempt to investigate the nature of authenticity in two interviews: the interview section of the toefl (tse) and the speaking module of the ielts. after defining the term authenticity based on bachman (1990), and bachman and palmer (1996) it is argued that the h:lts interview is a more authentic test than the tse. this is done in two ways. first, by using bachman and palmer&ap...

The main objective of this study is to determine the knowledge, education and attitudes of Chinese, Indian and Arab speaking students in Australia towards the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test. A questionnaire was administered to 200 students at six university language centers to investigate their overall response towards the four components of the IELTS test i.e. liste...

Reading comprehension has won much effort on the part of teachers, testers, and researchers in Iran due to the fact that the immediate need of Iranian students at different university levels is the ability to read in order to get new information on the topic they are studying. The question raised is how much reading practice can move learners along the horizontal axis of development predetermin...

This paper presents findings of a study of recognition vocabulary knowledge as a predictor of written Academic English Proficiency (AEP) and overall Academic Achievement in an English medium higher education program in an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Vocabulary knowledge was measured using a Timed YES/NO (TYN) test. AEP was assessed using an academic writing test based on IELTS....

This study examined the mediating roles of gender and academic field in relationship between vocabulary knowledge reading comprehension. A size test, a depth test IELTS were administered to 319 university-level students (54 males; 265 females) from three disciplines: medicine, science, arts. The findings revealed that had 2000 3000 word families, low (45.3%), poor comprehension (52.4%). Besides...

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...

Reading is recognized as being the most important skill needed by ESP learners in their field of study, and vocabulary knowledge is the most widely discussed component of effective ESP reading per se. However, research on how much the different types of words exert substantial influences over ESP reading comprehension remains scanty. To address this lacuna, the present study aimed to examine th...

Task-based listening tests such as IELTS require testees to listen to some information on a CD and simultaneously answer the related items. To answer such items, testees are expected to comprehend, analyze, compare and infer pieces of information while listening to the incoming audio material. The present research attempted to investigate whether the two major characteristics of question type a...