In the light of previous research into the correlation between the acquisition of formulaic sequences and language learners' fluency gains, this study aims to investigate the extent to which an intensive course of direct instruction in preselected targeted formulaic sequences can improve IELTS students' oral fluency. In achieving this purpose, the…

Given the vast research on the existence of distinctive student-teacher expectations about their roles in the classroom and their significance in shaping prospective actions, there is a scarcity of studies that examine Arab student expectations and contrast them with their teachers' expectancies. Realizing this research gap, this study aims to…

The current study investigated the extent to which L2 learners' productive vocabulary knowledge could predict multiple dimensions of spontaneous speech production. A total of 39 English as a foreign language (EFL) participants with varying L2 proficiency levels first completed a productive vocabulary knowledge task (Lex30). Their spontaneous…

Perhaps it is inevitable that non-native speakers' English articulations are displayed with their local accents, which are usually based on their mother tongues or dominant languages. However, fluency in English pronunciation and communication is still achievable by these groups of speakers in outer and expanding circles. In these two circles,…

This study investigated second language fluency development over a nearly 2-year period which included an academic year abroad and the year immediately following the participants' return to their home university. Data from 24 L1 English learners of Spanish were collected 6 times: once before, 3 times during, and 2 times after a 9-month stay…

Elementary-level foreign language education is currently receiving a lot of attention in the literature on second language learning, and has emerged as an important educational policy issue. The present study aims to contribute to this discussion by focusing on the fluency benefits gained from early foreign language teaching. The participants were…

Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age-peers has been estimated to be 4-6…

In vocabulary research there has been a shift from focusing on single words to considering multiword sequences, such as collocations. Despite the general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication, particularly oral communication, language-testing researchers have made…

The paper discusses sequential language acquisition of the researcher's daughter Safa who transformed from a monolingual Bengali speaker to an almost monolingual English speaker in a few months after moving to the UK. Safa was born in Bangladesh and was a monolingual Bengali speaker until she was three years and nine months when the family moved…

As task-based language teaching focuses on real word tasks and the learners need to complete these tasks in the process of learning a foreign or second language, it helps target language fluency and student confidence. That is why second and foreign language teachers and researchers have shown interest in TBLT. This study attempts to investigate…

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of learning lexical chunks on the speaking fluency of EFL Iranian learners (between the ages of 13 and 17) and at the same time taking into consideration the examining participants' use of lexical chunks and their knowledge of them. To this end, after administrating the Quick Placement Test…

This study examines the relationship between different types of language learning aptitude (measured via the LLAMA test) and adult second language (L2) learners' attainment in speech production in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. Picture descriptions elicited from 50 Japanese EFL learners from varied proficiency levels were analyzed…

Where native speakers supposedly are fluent by default, nonnative speakers often have to strive hard to achieve a nativelike fluency level. However, disfluencies (such as pauses, fillers, repairs, etc.) occur in both native and nonnative speech and it is as yet unclear how fluency raters weigh the fluency characteristics of native and nonnative…

The aim of this article is to explore the attainment of Eastern European children in primary schools in England. The research draws on detailed National Pupil Database and school census data for 586,181 pupils who completed Key Stage 2 in England in 2016. Two methodological approaches were used to analyse the data. First, the performance of all…

The article gives a brief review on how to improve students' speaking skills via modeling dialogues in FL class. This study can be considered the continuation of the research undertaken by the authors in 2018, in which the authors put forward the hypothesis that students' speaking skills improve provided their ability to match speech patterns to…