In this digital age, the way of language learning has been undergoing profound changes. When students have easy access to the many learning options outside classrooms, the choice of materials for classroom teaching and the role of teachers have become a question worth re-considering. To explore the possible incorporation of informal learning into classroom teaching, this paper revisited narrow reading with online news articles. Both running and concurrent news articles were selected, and their vocabulary recycling rates were inspected and checked with major corpora. The results showed that concurrent news articles are better at yielding a vocabulary recycling rate that meets the lexical learning threshold within an article-length suitable for classrooms. The finding suggests that concurrent news articles serve as effective feeding materials for vocabulary learning. Also provided are proposed class activities that aim to increase students’ ownership of the learning process and to ensure their learning is effective and systematical.

With the coronavirus pandemic that began in early 2020, there has come a heightened need for remote, “at-home” assessment of L2 ability. Yet for the use of online L2 test methods to succeed in terms of validity (Messick, 1989; Kane, 2006; Chapelle, 2012), it is necessary to review and modify theoretical constructs undergirding emergent assessments. Aiming to offer workable test-development guidelines during a pandemic that has challenged the well-being of L2 learners and TESOL professionals worldwide, this paper will analyze a number of models and frameworks of L2 ability (e.g., Canale and Swain, 1980; Bachman and Palmer, 1996; Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell, 1995; Hall et al., 2011; Pekarek Doehler, 2018), offering critical appraisals of their usefulness vis-à-vis both validation principles and practical constraints of online assessment. Analyses will be complemented by a qualitative examination of interactive data from an online version of a test of L2 oral pragmatics undergoing development.