Understanding the sources of variance in speaking assessment is important in Japan where society's high demand for English speaking skills is growing. Three challenges threaten fair assessment of speaking. First, in Japanese university speaking courses, teachers are typically the only raters, but teachers' knowledge of their students may unfairly…

The dissertation investigates the effect of a concept-based approach to teaching the Chinese temporal system to English-speaking university learners at the elementary level. The pedagogical framework, Systematic-Theoretical Instruction (STI), adopted in this study was proposed by Piotr Gal'perin and originated from Vygotsky's…