The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how complexity, accuracy and fluency interact in early L2 development, when learners' linguistic means are underdeveloped. Learners then resort to rote-learned formulaic sequences to complement their current grammar when it is unable to meet their communicative needs. The interplay between their…

This study investigates the relationship of language proficiency to language production and negotiation of meaning that non-native speakers (NNSs) produced in an online task-based language learning (TBLL) environment. Fourteen NNS-NNS dyads collaboratively completed four communicative tasks, using an online TBLL environment specifically designed…

The research findings reported on here confirm the facilitative role of pre-task planning on fluency and of online task planning on accuracy of speech. This quasi-experimental research was conducted to examine whether learners could be trained to attend to the fluency of their speech while planning online and whether such training might compensate…

This study had a three-fold purpose: first, to assess the attitudes of student affairs administrators working in the Florida College System (FCS) about globalization, internationalization, and their strategies for effecting internationalization efforts at their community/state colleges. This study also investigated the relationship between student…

This paper assesses the efficiency of the "Language Immersion e-Course" developed at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Language Centre. The new self-study revision e-course, promoting students' proficiency in spoken and aural Russian through autonomous learning, is based on the Michel Thomas method, and is…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the progress of 14 Spanish-speaking learners of English during a period abroad from a longitudinal perspective. Oral and written data were collected three times during an academic year at a British university. These samples were analyzed in terms of fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical richness, and…

Although all bilinguals encounter cross-language interference (CLI), some bilinguals are more susceptible to interference than others. Here, we report on language performance of late bilinguals (Russian/German) on two bilingual tasks (interview, verbal fluency), their language use and switching habits. The only between-group difference was CLI:…

We report on a small-scale exploratory study of Japanese students' reactions to the use of a bilingual language assistant on an EFL study-abroad course in the UK and we give an insight into the possible effect of using bilingual assistants on speaking production. First-year university students were divided into three groups all taught by a…

In today's world, a good command of more than two foreign languages is a commonplace necessity. However, this is not the case for the majority of language learners in Iran. The foreign languages which could be of any avail to them are neither close to Persian nor have any daily social usage. The present research aims at promoting this linguistic…

This study examines the predictive validity of literacy measures from the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) for Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELs). Third grade EL students were screened three times during the year with DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF) and Daze. Predictive validity of the scores was examined…

The research project reported in this chapter consists of three studies in which syntactic complexity, lexical variation and fluency appear as dependent variables. The independent variables are task complexity and proficiency level, as the three studies investigate the effect of task complexity on the written and oral performance of L2 learners of…

This study investigates the differential effects of two learning contexts, formal instruction (FI) at home and a study abroad period (SA), on the oral production skills of advanced-level Catalan-Spanish undergraduate learners of English. Speech samples elicited through an interview at three data collection times over a 2-year period were…

There are many reasons to believe that oral participation in the target language (TL) is beneficial for classroom language learners. In addition to the prominence current second language acquisition (SLA) theory gives to processes that assume learner production of the TL (e.g. negotiation of meaning), teachers often view oral participation as a…

This paper compares two alternative scoring methods--multiple regression and classification trees--for an automated speech scoring system used in a practice environment. The two methods were evaluated on two criteria: construct representation and empirical performance in predicting human scores. The empirical performance of the two scoring models…

A questionnaire study was conducted to examine how 120 highly experienced EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers in Japan adjust their pronunciation in order to facilitate and refine their students' learning skills to approach mutual intelligibility in second language (L2) classrooms (i.e. "pronunciation-specific teacher talk").…