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Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative success in academic disciplines such as STEM is more accurately understood through a materialist, as opposed to structuralist, orientation to competence. According to this orientation, communication is not contingent on autonomous competence in standardized English but instead on transcultural dispositions along with the strategic use of semiotic resources and spatial repertoires. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis of one university's Test of Oral English Proficiency (TOEP), which was recently redesigned in alignment with a materialist orientation to competence (e.g. through greater consideration for materiality, embodiment, and performativity). Through an analysis of audio and video recordings from the TOEP, this article demonstrates that a materialist orientation to competence can be actualized through a paradigm of assessment that accounts for the mutual negotiation of proficiency between speaking and listening subjects, or what we refer to as materializing assessment.

Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative success in academic disciplines such as STEM is more accurately understood through a materialist, as opposed to structuralist, orientation to competence. According to this orientation, communication is not contingent on autonomous competence in standardized English but instead on transcultural dispositions along with the strategic use of semiotic resources and spatial repertoires. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis of one university's Test of Oral English Proficiency (TOEP), which was recently redesigned in alignment with a materialist orientation to competence (e.g. through greater consideration for materiality, embodiment, and performativity). Through an analysis of audio and video recordings from the TOEP, this article demonstrates that a materialist orientation to competence can be actualized through a paradigm of assessment that accounts for the mutual negotiation of proficiency between speaking and listening subjects, or what we refer to as materializing assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the uses of English in the multilingual cityscape of Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Drawing from photographic data of 400 publicly visible signs in Tehran, this study aims to understand the various ways in which English, as both a linguistic and cultural resource, operates in tandem with emergent Iranian cultural practices in the context of globalization, especially in relation to the centrality of Persianness to contemporary Iranian national identity. The article, in addition to offering a sociolinguistic history and contemporary portrait of English in Iran, demonstrates how English is used not only to index Western cultural influences and ideals but also how English is relocalized in accordance with the local communicative needs of contemporary Iranians in Tehran. We refer to this phenomenon as the Persianization of English, in which English operates in a discursive field delinked from its indexes to Western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing attention to motivation, less is known about international students' motivational beliefs and attitudes about academic writing. In this study, we aimed to explore the motivational factors influencing international students' performance in academic English classes at a large public research university in the western United States. Specifically, we examined students' self-efficacy, goal orientation, beliefs, and affect for writing, along with their malleability, and their contributions to academic achievement in academic English writing classes. The sample comprised 97 students, predominantly from China, enrolled in online academic English courses. Exploratory factor analysis tended to extract more complex models of the motivational constructs than principal component analysis. Students' self-efficacy and enjoyment of writing significantly increased from the beginning to the end of the 10-week term, suggesting motivational factors' malleability. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that students' self-efficacy at the beginning of the term positively predicted their final grades. However, logistic mixed modeling revealed that students who held stronger beliefs about writing as a means of exploring and expressing ideas had lower odds of passing. Our findings contribute to the understanding of international students' motivation in academic English settings in higher education and offers potential pedagogical interventions to enhance their academic success., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Collins, Leo, Eslami, Hebert, Levine and Lee.)