Thirty-three students of fourth semester German at the University of Kansas participated in the study which sought to investigate whether focused written corrective feedback (WCF) promoted the acquisition of the German case morphology over the course of a semester. Participants received teacher WCF on five two-draft essay assignments under three…

Research on the effectiveness of short-term study-abroad (SA) programs for improving oral skills has shown mixed results. In this study, 24 L2 German learners (L1 English) provided pre- and post-SA speech samples addressing a hypothetical situation and completed surveys on cross-cultural interest and adaptability; L2 communication affect,…

Want a quick way to get your students happily conversing more in the target language? This practical book shows you how to use formative assessments to gain immediate and lasting improvement in your students' fluency. You'll learn how to: (1) Imbed the 3-minute formative assessment into every lesson with ease; (2) Engage students in peer formative…

Students who are deaf and use sign language frequently have language delays that affect their literacy skills. Students who use American Sign Language (ASL) often lack fluent language models in both the home and school settings, delaying both the development of a first language and the development of literacy in printed English. Mediated and…

As an initial step toward understanding which features of academic language make science-based expository text difficult for students with different English language proficiency (ELP) designations, this study investigated fifth-grade students' thoughts on text difficulty, their knowledge of the features of academic language, and the…

This is a research study conducted on 17 teachers who teach English in Saudi international schools. It mainly aims at exploring teaching practices in these schools in terms of the principles of communicative language teaching (CLT). It also investigates the appropriateness of CLT in this context from the point of view of teachers. Two research…

This study aimed to investigate the characteristics and developmental phenomena apparent in Japanese learners of English with their raters' perspectives in terms of fluency which has been recognized as a major factor in judging non-native speakers' proficiency. The following temporal indices demonstrated strong relationships with the raters'…

Purpose: This research investigated the expository language skills of young school-age children with the ultimate aim of obtaining normative data for clinical practice. Specifically, this study examined (a) the level of expository language performance of 6- and 7-year-old children with typical development and (b) age-related differences between…

Tasks can vary in terms of difficulty and implementation conditions, and these in turn may affect the nature of the language produced by the learner. There have been a large number of studies which have investigated the effects of these task properties and implementation conditions on the language the learner produces. To date, results have been…

It is a good practice to try to understand matters at hand by first stepping back and adopting an historical perspective, which I will begin this review by doing. Next, I will take up the challenges that each of the authors in the articles in this volume has presented for the study of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in second language…

This article critically scrutinizes a number of issues involved in the definition and operationalization of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) constructs. It argues for maintaining clearer distinctions between CAF, on the one hand, and notions such as linguistic development and communicative adequacy, on the other. Adequacy, in particular,…

The present longitudinal case study investigated the development of fluency, complexity and accuracy--and the possible relationships between them--in the written production of L2 French. We assessed fluency and complexity in five intermediate learners by means of conventional indicators for written L2 (cf. Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998), while…

Comprehensibility, a major concept in second language (L2) pronunciation research that denotes listeners' perceptions of how easily they understand L2 speech, is central to interlocutors' communicative success in real-world contexts. Although comprehensibility has been modeled in several L2 oral proficiency scales--for example, the Test of English…

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of…

Drawing on current theories in personality, second-language (L2) oral ability, and psychometrics, this study investigates the extent to which self-consciousness and assertiveness are explanatory variables of L2 oral ability. Three hundred sixty first-year Japanese university students who were studying English as a foreign language participated in…