Although there is a growing body of research indicating that anxiety relates to foreign language learning, the correlation between anxiety and learners’ performance on a high-stakes testing context has not been fully explored. To date, studies investigating the relationship between test-taking anxiety and test-takers’ performance are not only limited in number, but also partial in nature as most of them only looked at one aspect of test-takers performance, i.e. listening, speaking, or writing performance only. This study is aimed at investigating the relationship between test-taking anxiety and test-takers’ performance with a holistic view, taking into account the test-takers’ performance on the listening, reading, speaking, and writing modules of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS™) test. The participants in this study were 15 government officials taking an IELTS test preparation program. Two instruments were utilized in this study: (1) a set of test-taking anxiety questionnaire items to measure the level of anxiety and, (2) the official IELTS™ test to measure test-takers’ performance. The results indicated that there was a weak to moderate correlation between test-taking anxiety and the test-takers’ performance across different modules of the IELTS test. These results corroborate the findings from previous studies.

While the literature has shown that vocabulary mastery affects reading comprehension, only a few Indonesian researchers investigated this. To narrow this gap, this study aims to: 1) measure Indonesian university students' knowledge of receptive vocabulary, 2) measure their reading comprehension level, and 3) investigate the association between the two variables. The participants in this study were 168 first-year university students from a private university implementing English-medium instruction (EMI). We utilized the updated vocabulary level test to measure their receptive vocabulary size and the IELTS academic reading test to measure their reading comprehension level. The participants mean scores on the updated VLT were 28.73, 26.63, 22.27, 22.42 and 23.12 at the 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, and 5,000-word level respectively. Only 34 out of 168 participants could be considered to have a sufficient vocabulary size. On average they scored 16.08 (SD = 7.96) on the IELTS academic reading test, which was roughly equivalent to 5 in IELTS band score. We also found strong and significant correlations between the participants’ scores on the IELTS academic reading test and the updated VLT at all levels, with the largest effect size on the 4,000-word level (r = .71, p .001, BCa 95% CI [0.64, 0.78], r2 = .50). These findings indicated that the participants did not have sufficient vocabulary knowledge and had a low reading proficiency, potentially inhibiting progress in their academic pursuits. We discussed the findings in relation to the teaching of English in EFL, ESL, and EMI contexts. Practical implications of the findings are also discussed.

IELTS merupakan tes yang sering digunakan untuk beragam kepentingan, seperti seleksi beasiswa, admisi ke program pascasarjana, prasyarat imigrasi, dsb. Hal ini membuat IELTS menjadi salah satu tes yang populer di dunia. Sayangnya, banyak peserta tes IELTS dari Indonesia masih sering mengalami kesulitan untuk memperoleh nilai tes IELTS yang memuaskan, sehingga berpotensi mengalami kesulitan untuk memenuhi keperluannya (studi lanjut, migrasi, dll). Selain itu, program kursus yang tersedia dipasaran sangat variatif dari segi harga, kualitas, hingga aksesibilitasnya. Untuk merespon permasalahan ini, diadakanlah kegiatan pengabdian dalam bentuk pelatihan IELTS writing bagi 40 orang peserta selama 10 sesi, atau setara dengan 20 jam pelatihan. Perbandingan hasil pre-test dan post-test memperlihatkan adanya rata-rata peningkatan performa peserta sebesar 0.88 band. Respon peserta pada kuesioner evaluasi program juga memperlihatkan bahwa mayoritas peserta merasa puas dan merasakan manfaat dari pelatihan dan feedback yang diberikan. Diharapkan dari pelatihan ini peserta dapat menjadi lebih siap untuk mengikuti tes IELTS dan dapat memperoleh nilai yang diharapkan.

This study investigates how a multinational cosmetic company uses its advertising to promote green cosmetics in Indonesia. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), the study analyzes how Garnier utilized linguistics features and discourse strategies and positioned their customers in the Garnier Green Beauty advertisement. The analysis revealed that Garnier employed some linguistic features (e.g., positive adjectives, pronouns, repetitions, etc.) and scientific-sounding words as a discourse strategy in the advertisement. It was also found that Garnier made a deliberate marketing decision to employ advertising, positioning their customer as empowered actors to create socio-environmental change. The findings also discuss the features distinguishing green cosmetics advertisements from typical ones.

When dealing with guests’ complaints using English language, hospitality frontliners at hotels in Indonesia will also rely on their pragmatic competence to satisfy the guests. This research is aimed at analyzing the strategies used by hospitality students in handling guests’ complaints especially in terms of apologizing and whether there is a significant difference between those with part-time job experience and those without the experience. The study utilized quantitative method by collecting responses (n =22) using Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT). Using the categorization of apology strategies (Cohen, 1986), the results show that the most frequently used strategies are expressing apology and offering repairs. Other strategies such as admitting responsibility and explaining are used much less frequently, while promise of forbearance was never used. Furthermore, after performing t-test, the 13 participants who took part-time jobs (M = 1.76, SD = 0.25) compared to the nine participants in the control group (M = 1.38, SD = 0.33) demonstrated significantly better at using strategies in apology for handling complaints, t(14) = 2.87, p = .01.