The undeniable importance of reading in higher education prompted this investigation into the reading skills of a group often overlooked in previous research: Master’s level students studying in English-medium instruction (EMI) environments. Participants (148 master's-level students of engineering) completed the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (Form G), a test of reading speed and reading comprehension. The results indicate that, at group level, these students attained levels of comprehension and rates of (silent) reading which are broadly comparable to those found for second-language users of English in better researched settings. However, a great deal of individual variation was observed, suggesting that some students may find it challenging to read for study purposes. The implications of these findings for various stakeholder groups in EMI are discussed.

Despite the central role of vocabulary in language learning, and the increasing interest in academic vocabulary, materials for testing academic vocabulary are not common. This paper reports on the development of a new test of academic vocabulary. Test items were based on a relatively recently developed list of academic vocabulary. They were then piloted, refined, and two comparable forms of the test were produced. The paper describes the approaches used to assess the validity and equivalence of the two forms of the test. Research and pedagogical implications and uses of the test are discussed. 

Communities and individuals often differ not so much in their values as in the priorities they set among values. In most writing which is neither creative nor academic, plagiarism is scarcely an issue at all. Broadly, this is because any unfairness in the advantage to be gained by text reuse is agreed by the community to be outweighed by improved speed, precision and efficiency of communication. This chapter investigates the factors that make plagiarism an important issue or otherwise in different circumstances and to provide evidence that we are currently concerned about student plagiarism because of the forms of assessment and associated educational ideologies we currently use. Educational systems in which plagiarism is irrelevant, and mimicry of research conventions in educational genres is unnecessary, can exist, although they are probably less than optimal. Less intensive grading within continuous assessment would allow plagiaristic practices where students found them useful or necessary, and hand responsibility for learning from writing back to students.

This chapter speaks to university teachers who are concerned about plagiarism and want to address it constructively, but feel that they may not have all the tools or information they need to do so. It approaches the issue from a variety of theoretical angles in order to provide a framework for discussion and research. Jordan Canzonetta addresses the issue of trust between teachers and students, and the role which plagiarism, and tools for detecting plagiarism, play in that important relationship. Deceptive intertextuality exists, as Anton's student exemplifies, but non-deceptive unconventional intertextuality can arise by accident even when one knows the conventions, as Ezra's error shows. Regardless of the perspective adopted, some plagiarism at least needs to be situated in the context of other breaches of academic ethics, a broad category which includes acts perpetrated by both students and teachers. Plagiarism, then, is an outlier, a misfit, a square peg in the landscape of good and bad writing behaviours.

In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e. how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments.