This book innovatively connects the two fields of oracy and practice-oriented empirical research in English language education. It creates synergies and proposes innovative approaches to the study of oracy in the context of learning and teaching English as a second, additional or foreign language. The book also develops a contemporary and holistic…

Background: Various quantitative systems have been proposed to examine aphasic oral narratives in English. A clinical tool for assessing discourse produced by Cantonese-speaking persons with aphasia (PWA), namely Main Concept Analysis (MCA), was developed recently for quantifying the presence, accuracy and completeness of a narrative. Similar…

Within the Australian education system, Aboriginal students' use of non-standard English features is often viewed simplistically as evidence of non-attainment of literacy and oral-English milestones. One reason for this is the widespread use of assessment tools which fail to differentiate between native-English speakers and students who are…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the asynchronous voice-conferencing technology, "Voice Thread"®, on the anxiety and oral proficiency of high school students in their third year of studying Spanish as a foreign language. In this quasi-experimental study students' foreign language anxiety levels and oral proficiency…

We describe an exploratory study carried out within the University of Milan, Department of English the aim of which was to analyse features of the spoken English of first-year Modern Languages undergraduates. We compiled a learner corpus, the "Role Play" corpus, which consisted of 69 role-play interactions in English carried out by…

This article presents a detailed case study analysis of oral and written language expressed by Jacqueline Meyer, a teacher of elementary English Language Learners (ELL),as she struggled to navigate the current political terrain with her students. Ms. Meyer's district adopted commercial materials and increased the amount and substance of testing…

Discusses prominent base units of discourse analysis designed for dealing with structural characteristics of second-language discourse, and offers arguments in favor of selecting the utterance as a valuable base unit. (95 references) (GLR)

Background/Context: The theoretical framework of the paper comes from research on problem solving, considered by many to be the essence of mathematics; research on the importance of oral language in learning mathematics; and on the importance of the teacher as the primary instrument of learning mathematics for most students. As a nation, we are…

A study examined the characteristics of the oral and written production of French-speaking and minority-language students in elementary and secondary multiethnic schools in Montreal (Quebec), with the purpose of assessing the relevance of student evaluation methods. Subjects were 248 elementary and 231 secondary students, categorized in 9 ethnic…

Current approaches to oral assessment of English in English secondary schools tend to concentrate more on "confidence" and "participation" than on the quality of children's thinking. This undermines the rich possibilities in classroom talk for cognitive development. Behavioural assessment approaches deny the essentially…