We examined the naturalistic pronunciation development of two groups of L2 speakers over 10 years. Initially, 50 beginner ESL students participated in production tasks; despite attrition, the tasks were administered eight more times. Here we report listener judgements of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency for the remaining six Mandarin…

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…

Background/purpose: Despite its informal setting, it is astonishing that the members of online English-speaking club (ESC) are adept at speaking. Employing a mixed-methods approach, more specifically a descriptive case study, this study aimed to evaluate the ESC contribution to its members' speaking competence development, to examine their…

The era of globalization and information and knowledge in which we find ourselves requires Higher Education to develop English-speaking proficiency in its students to adequately respond to academic and occupational challenges, taking advantage of the virtues of the variety of resources offered by technology. YouGlish is an online oral dictionary…

Dynamic assessment has been proven to effectively promote EFL learners' speaking proficiency, but its implementation in teaching speaking skills has been limited. One of the main reasons is that, thus far, very few studies have scrutinized the impacts of its two main models, interactionist and interventionist, on the speaking sub-skills of EFL…

Background: The utilisation of video-dubbing tasks, wherein learners record their voices over video clips to practise pronunciation, fluency, grammatical accuracy, and vocabulary use, is relatively novel in the English language learning context. Exploring the effectiveness of video-dubbing tasks can lead to more innovative and effective speaking…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of the listener's education and occupation on intelligibility, comprehensibility (ease of understanding), and accentedness in speakers of Russian-accented American English (RA), Southern-accented American English (SA), and General American English (GAE). Native English listeners (N=126) rated…

This study aimed at investigating the impact of story-based extracurricular tasks on enhancing the speaking skills of EFL learners. The parameters of grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and fluency were examined. A pre-test/post-test one shot case study design was adopted. A sample of 20 students, enrolled in the common first year program at Jouf…

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)…

Automatic Speech Scoring (ASS) has increasingly become a useful tool in oral proficiency testing for Second Language (L2) learners. However, limited studies investigate the alignment of ASS indices with the Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF)--the three dimensions in evaluating L2 speakers' oral proficiency, and the subsequent impact indices…

The purpose of the present study was to examine: (1) the effects of audio-visual information; and (2) the role of temporal measurements associated with the perceptual ratings of fluency, accentedness, comprehensibility, pronunciation, and oral proficiency in second language (L2) speech samples of International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). American…

This qualitative study investigates the impact of simulation-based instruction (SBI) on the emerging English-speaking skills of kindergarten students in a government school in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This study explores how real-life scenarios simulated through games and role plays affect vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar and fluency in…

English proficiency assessments have become a necessary metric for filtering and selecting prospective candidates for both academia and industry. With the rise in demand for such assessments, it has become increasingly necessary to have the automated human-interpretable results to prevent inconsistencies and ensure meaningful feedback to the…

Educational speaking technology is a digital expertise used to enhance speaking performance. This research examined the effects of using educational speaking technology tools: FORVO, YouGlish, and OALD 8th ed. to enhance students' speaking performance. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest two groups design was used. Test, questionnaire,…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of an AR application (Civilisations AR) on EFL learners' oral proficiency in the dimensions of content, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, as well as their attitudes and perceptions toward AR technology. Design: Utilizing a quasi-experiment, twenty-four EFL learners engaged in a…