Placement Test as an Attempt to Better Help Students in Learning a Second/foreign Language: an Interview Report

Assessment is an essential part in teaching and learning process as it usually provides opportunities both for teachers and students to learn. In the context of second or foreign language teaching, assessment is usually conducted to elicit information regarding students\u27 second language ability. This paper reports and analyzes the results of an interview with a university lecturer in Central Sulawesi who was once involved in the construction of a test to place students in different classroom levels. Although it is apparent from the analysis that there are several weaknesses found in the placement test viewed from the six qualities proposed by Bachman and Palmer (1996), there are other essential aspects that need to be learned from the results of the interview by second or foreign language teachers in other teaching contexts

Argumentative writing behavior of graduate EFL learners

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.This study analyzed the argumentative writing behavior of Iranian graduate learners of English as Foreign Language in their English essays. Further, the correlations between the use of argument elements and overall writing quality as well as soundness of produced arguments were investigated. To this end, 150 essays were analyzed. The sample essays were found to be predominantly deductive in terms of rhetorical pattern. Moreover, they mainly utilized ‘data’ and ‘claim’ most frequently with secondary elements of argument (i.e., counterargument claim, counterargument data, rebuttal claim, and rebuttal data) as the least produced elements. Overall writing quality co-varied significantly positively with the uses of claims, data, counterargument claims, counterargument data, rebuttal claims, and rebuttal data. Essays rated high in terms of overall writing quality were further rated for soundness and relevance of the arguments. The results demonstrate that even for advanced language learners good surface structure cannot necessarily guarantee well thought-out logical structure. The pedagogical implications for writing instruction and research are discussed