Eirene Katsarou

Acknowledging the central role language teachers play in the assessment process, viewed as both consumers of testing information and independent assessors, the newly-emergent field of Language Assessment Literacy (LAL) has generally been viewed ‘as a useful knowledge base that incorporates unique aspects inherent in theorizing and assessing language-related performance’ (Inbar-Lourie, 2017, p. 259). This edited volume seeks to further unfold the multifarious concept of LAL in both theoretical and pedagogical terms in an effort to elucidate key issues in the area, enrich current knowledge related to the use of proper assessment practices and procedures in the foreign language (FL) classroom and highlight useful avenues for future research. To this end, the book is organized into four parts with Part 1 addressing predominantly theoretical aspects of language assessment literacy in four separate chapters while subsequent Parts 2, 3 and 4 with three chapters each are strictly devoted to...

Contemporary school leadership has always been considered to be one of the most pivotal factors conducive to school effectiveness as well as a driver of change and strategic innovation involving the development of a strong vision, attendant goals and a relevant plan for implementation, monitoring and review. However, the disruption in the provision of educational services caused by the recent COVID-19 pandemic global outbreak revealed deficits in school leadership theory that were largely associated with the adoption of proper crisis management skills by the vast majority of schools’ principals to readily adapt to a new reality and effectively confront upcoming challenges, at both instructional and organizational levels. Interestingly, although crisis management as a notion has been substantially elaborated on a theoretical level and successfully applied in different types of crises, it still has not gained a sustained focus within the field of educational leadership, as evidenced b...

Interactivity, a fundamental aspect of traditional face-to-face teaching, is a central concern in the design planning and organization of technology mediated instructional settings and online learning, because it is crucial in knowledge acquisition and the development of cognitive skills, and is intrinsic to effective instructional practice and individual discovery. The present paper aims to critically review a set of recent representative empirical studies during the period 2010-2019 focusing on the pedagogical expediency of learner-centered interaction in online learning contexts, to identify which aspects of collaborative learning could successfully be integrated within a structured learning management system environment to safeguard high-quality online learning. Searches for the identification of relevant empirical studies were conducted via Science Direct, EdITLib, IRRODL, SpringerLink, IEEE Xplore Digital Library and Scopus using keywords such as learner interactions, online l...

This study investigates the extent of identification and comprehension success achieved by
Greek EFL high school students when encountering phrasal idioms during reading English as
a foreign language. The study also examines the relationship of the above with five idiom
type features, i.e. (i) contextual guessability, (ii) frequency of words in the idiom, (iii)
interlingual similarity, (iv) transparency and (v) existence of an idiom in Greek and four
learner factors: (i) L2 language proficiency, (ii) gender, (iii) motivation and (iv) fieldindependence/-
dependence. The results indicate that overall scores for L2 idiom
identification and comprehension were remarkably low. Successful L2 idiom
identification was found to correlate strongly but negatively both with frequency of
occurrence of the component words of the idioms and with interlingual similarity while
L2 idiom comprehension was found to correlate significantly positively with interlingual
similarity only. No significant correlations were obtained between any of the four learnerrelated
variables and the two main variables of L2 idiom identification and
comprehension. Some pedagogical implications are also offered that mainly consist the
practical implications of the study in terms of instructional practices and methodology
employed in the teaching of English idioms in predominantly EFL contexts.