Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system and has several subtypes. The disease pathophysiology includes damage to the myelin in the brain and spinal cord, manifesting in a wide range of neurological symptoms and impacting patients' physical, psychological, social, and communication…

Second language (L2) utterance fluency is crucial for speaking proficiency assessment. The measurement of L2 utterance fluency relies heavily on silent pause identification. However, empirical studies establishing specific silent pause thresholds for L2 monologic speaking are scarce, and even fewer exist for L2 dialogic speaking. This study thus…

Background: Assessing spoken discourse during aphasia clinical examination is crucial for diagnostic and rehabilitation purposes. Recent approaches have been developed to quantify content word fluency (CWF) and informativeness of spoken discourse without the need to perform time-consuming transcription and coding. However, the accuracy of these…

This cross-sectional study examines the sociopragmatic use of pitch and fluency features in requests among second language (L2) Chinese learners at two proficiency levels alongside native Chinese speakers. Twenty-eight L2 learners completed a 40-item oral discourse task with two types of request-making situations: (a) a high-imposition request to…

The relationship between foreign language anxiety (FLA) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) experienced during a creative collaborative oral English-as-a-foreign-language task, and the relationships between FLE/FLA and task speech fluency were investigated. The task was performed by mid-intermediate/high-intermediate English learners (N = 43) in…

Current L2 utterance fluency literature tends to operationalize disfluency as isolated, individual features. However, disfluency features often co-occur at one location or across multiple locations in one utterance. This study explores the co-occurrence of L2 disfluency features in a speech corpus from 71 L1 and L2 speakers of English across…

This study investigates the speech rate of Cypriot Greek-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) as well as the effect of age and gender. The participants were 16 children with DLD ages 4 years 11 months to 8 years 1 month and 22 children with typical language development (TLD) ages 4 years 5 months to 8 years 7 months. Both…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the impacts of two instructional conditions on the fluency of learners' performance. In the first condition (strategy training), learners were provided with explicit fluency strategy training for a portion of each lesson before rehearsing versions of the speaking task for the remainder of the lesson. In…

This study adopted an action research design to analyze the contribution of the Elevator Pitch technique on English as foreign language learners' oral fluency. Six 11th graders in a rural at-risk context in a vocational public high school in Hualqui, Chile participated in this study. The Elevator Pitch technique was implemented during seven…

This article reports a qualitative action research study regarding the influence of strategies that may be used in oral conversation to avoid communication breakdowns. After analyzing college students' performance in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes, the problem was that many adult learners exhibited poor oral English communication…

This systematic review aims to explore how task complexity and task sequencing affect the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of second language performance. Through an analysis of studies conducted between 2012 and 2021, this review investigates the characteristics of the studies, operationalisation of task complexity, measurements of CAF,…

This research was conducted to investigate AI integration in the development and evaluation of English oral communication skills, within both academic and professional practices. This study used a mixed-methods design, combining data from a quasi-experiment with qualitative data collected through interviews with students and instructors. Results…

Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) technology has revolutionized the landscape of oral English education, offering new possibilities for improving learning efficiency and experiences. This paper presents an innovative teaching system that integrates real-time speech recognition and feedback capabilities with advanced natural language processing (NLP)…

This study compared the effects of task repetition only (TR), task repetition with grammatizing (TR+GR), and grammatization with no task repetition (GR) on 94 EFL learners' oral task performances. Participants' productions were measured both in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency as well as receptive knowledge (measured by an error…

This study explores the application of the task-based teaching method in English education, particularly from the perspective of big data. Traditional English teaching models often fail to meet the diverse needs of students, with the task-based approach, despite being student-centered, encountering challenges such as task difficulty control and…