The "indigenous assessment practices" (Jacoby & McNamara, 1999) in selected health professions were investigated to inform a review of the scope of assessment in the speaking sub-test of a specific-purpose English language test for health professionals, the Occupational English Test (OET). The assessment criteria in current use on…

Research Findings: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of linguistic training based on the use of the Drežancic method in educational settings. It is hypothesized that characteristics of this method, based on the typical stages of linguistic and cognitive development, could influence both language competence and executive function (EF). A…

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of learners' L1s and proficiency levels on their written production. This study also examined the influence of speech upon their writing. The following research questions were explored: (a) How do L1 and proficiency levels of learners affect their degrees of register awareness? (b)…

A subcommittee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Executive Committee wrote the "NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing" in 2004. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of writing in people's lives has expanded dramatically. Increasingly, handheld devices are important instruments for people's writing,…

Given the relatively short history of computerized corpora of spoken language, it is not surprising that few diachronic studies have been done on the grammatical features recently highlighted by the analysis of such corpora. This article, however, does take a diachronic perspective on one such feature: the syntactic feature of "tails"…

This study investigated the English phonological processes and speech articulation of adult Cantonese-English speakers residing in Hong Kong. The "Phonology Test for Cantonese Speakers of English (PTCSE)" was developed to assess English articulation and phonological processes of native speakers of Cantonese. Data from 37 adult…

This dissertation studies the realization of the rhythm of Taiwan Mandarin and focuses on the quality of its unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables. Taiwan Mandarin (TM) is often described as more syllable-timed than Standard Mandarin (SM). In TM, the unstressed syllables occur less frequently. The quality of the unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables…

What if you could barely understand what your teacher was saying? Imagine working mostly independently and silently, with limited opportunities to interact with others. ELL shadowing helps teachers better understand the classroom experience from an English language learner's point of view. The author describes how to implement this easily…

Few prior studies have examined degree of fidelity between raters' assessments of oral performances and objectively observable prosodic indices of accentedness. Prosodic indices of accentedness quantify trait-relevant variance, whereas rater background variables represent trait-irrelevant variance. The present study, therefore, investigated the…

International studies, such as the "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA), have shown that, in most participating countries, students who do not typically speak the test language at home reach lower levels of reading comprehension than students using the test language at home (Stanat & Christensen, "2006").…

This functional MRI study investigated the involvement of the left inferior parietal cortex (IPC) in spoken language production (Speech). Its role has been apparent in some studies but not others, and is not convincingly supported by clinical studies as they rarely include cases with lesions confined to the parietal lobe. We compared Speech with…

Two experiments explored the consolidation of spoken words, and assessed whether post-sleep novel competitor effects truly reflect engagement of these novel words in competition for lexical segmentation. Two types of competitor relationships were contrasted: the onset-aligned case (such as "frenzylk"), where the novel word is a close variant of…

Using the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, language comprehension and production were compared in a sample of 101,250 children aged 2 ; 00 to 9 ; 11 and a focus subsample of 38,845 children aged 2 ; 00 to 4 ; 11 from sixteen under-researched developing nations. In the whole sample, comprehension slightly exceeded production; correlations between…

Purpose: In this study, the authors used cued shadowing to examine children's phonological word-form representations by studying the effects of onset and rhyme primes on lexical access. Method: Twenty-five preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI; hereafter known as the SLI group), 24 age- and gender-matched children (AM group), and 20…

This study investigated the developmental variability of lip and tongue movement in 48 children and adults. Motion of the tongue-tip, tongue-body and lower lip was recorded using electromagnetic articulography during productions of sentences containing /t/, /s/, /l/, /k/ and /p/. Four groups of speakers participated in the study: (1) aged 6-7…