“Be a Machine”: International Graduate Students’ Narratives around High-Stakes English Tests

Perceptions and Experiences of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning for IELTS Preparation: A Case Study of Indonesian Learners

“…MALL's adoption ranges -from language drill and practice to authentic communication‖ such as listening to audio and watching videos to learning grammar, vocabulary and reading [8, p.301]. Likewise, researches on mobile learning and English has involved an English proficiency test [19]- [21]. The literature points out that the most prominent tests are the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and the Test of English as Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the study were mostly explored within institutional settings instead of informal settings.…”

International Graduate Students’ Perspectives on High-Stakes English Tests and the Language Demands of Higher Education

“…Our findings revealed that the experiences, needs, and challenges faced by the five students varied according to their learning styles, previous educational experiences, and availability of peer and external support. In another paper based on this study (Sinclair, Larson & Rajendram, 2019), we discuss how their educational background, early language learning experiences, cultural and linguistic background, career trajectory, social networks, and lived experiences played a role in their negotiation of the tests, and navigation of the challenges in their graduate programs of study. Although all our participants were successful in their graduate programs, university admissions policies must not assume that all students who meet the minimum language requirements, for example by achieving a band 6.5 on the IELTS test, are equally prepared to overcome their challenges and achieve success on their own because not all of them have the same personal resilience or access to the same types of support.…”

“…In the first paper from this study (Sinclair, Larson & Rajendram, 2019), we present each participant's life story through narrative portraits, and discuss how their early language learning and educational experiences, and their academic and career aspirations intersect with their test-preparation and test-taking experiences. For this present study, we were interested in examining themes related to participants' perceptions of the tests, and the challenges and successes they faced post-admission into their graduate programs.…”

The Toledo Teacher Trainees corpus (TTT): Bridging the gap between students’ narratives and corpus linguistics

“…As regards L2 learning the most common areas of research using learners' narratives include motivational issues (cf. Thompson and Vásquez 2015;Farahani et al 2019), identity (Early and Norton 2012;Benson et al 2013) and also more specific perceptions on given topics, like the native speaker myth, related to the lack of confidence perceived by non-native language teachers (Reis 2011), test-takers' perspectives (Rajendram et al 2019;Sinclair et al 2019) or assessment (Franco 2020). Although most narratives deal with general issues regarding L2 previous experiences, research can also include more specific or tailored narratives, such as studyabroad experiences (Benson et al 2013) or learners' perceptions of teachers (Oxford 2001).…”