The aim of conducting this study was to investigate the foreign language learning needs of undergraduate medical sciences students studying in faculties of nursing and midwifery in Iran. A total of 681 undergraduate students as well as 168 subject-specific instructors and 6 EFL instructors participated in the study, which was designed on a…

This article reports recent research investigating the use of retrospective miscue analysis (RMA) as an instructional strategy with proficient second-language (L2) readers. RMA aims to heighten a reader's awareness of the reading process by involving readers in detailed analysis of their oral reading behavior. Using a cross-case analysis of three…

This article studies accessible assessment design to large-scale English language proficiency assessments that are now mandatory for elementary and secondary English language learners in public schools. Using a modified Delphi approach, a panel of 33 experts from the areas of assessment, English as a second language or bilingual education, and…

Toastmasters is a widely recognized international club that aims to develop and enhance the art of public speaking by offering participants educational programmes and chances to speak before groups. This article reports on the integration of the Toastmasters approach to an EFL oral-communication class in Taiwan. As both the author of this study…

Tests of English Language Proficiency are often designed such that each section of the test measures a single latent ability. For instance an English Proficiency Assessment might consist of sections measuring Speaking, Listening, and Reading ability. However, Overall English Proficiency and composite abilities are naturally multidimensional. This…

Children's listening habits and skills are a good predictor of oral language proficiency, reading and writing skills, and later school success. Good listening skills do not simply develop naturally--they must be taught and practiced--yet many teachers do not get training on how to teach children to listen. Using clear language and real-life…

Introduction: English-language proficiency of medical practitioners is an issue attracting increasing attention in medical education. To best provide language education support, it is essential that learning needs are assessed and that useful feedback and advice are provided. We report the outcomes of a language assessment that was embedded within…

Gestures are often used while speaking to aid in the speaker's packaging of the verbal message and/or to aid the listener in decoding the message. The ways in which bilinguals use gestures are reviewed in this article. Researchers have predicted that bilinguals' gesture use is related to bilinguals' language proficiency. However, no clear pattern…

The Leiter International Performance Scale-Revised (Leiter-R) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III) scores of 47 English- and 47 Spanish-speaking students were analyzed, and the effects of English language ability on these scores were examined. Leiter-R validity was supported for both language groups. WISC-III…

This study investigates whether or not abstract-level linguistic features, not successfully acquired abroad, will be acquired once the advanced language learner returns from a study abroad program and is exposed to linguistic instruction. The goal of the study was to measure the development of the Spanish subjunctive in adverbial clauses collected…

Firth and Wagner (1997) questioned the dichotomies nonnative versus native speaker, learner versus user, and interlanguage versus target language, which reflect a bias toward innateness, cognition, and form in language acquisition. Research on lingua franca English (LFE) not only affirms this questioning, but reveals what multilingual communities…

In Japanese, self-qualification, or a qualifying segment of talk that reduces the force of the speaker's own utterances, is frequently introduced with contrastive markers, such as "demo," "kedo," and "ga." This study explores the relationship between the grammatical and pragmatic competence of Japanese L2 learners by examining their use of such…

The authors' business communication perspective is not in fact that of ESL but rather English as a foreign language (EFL) or, even more so, English as a lingua franca (ELF). To be more specific, they would like to add one more acronym to the list: They teach BELF, by which they refer to ELF for business communication purposes. The authors work as…

In the teaching and learning of foreign languages, the native speaker has traditionally been the model to aspire to. However, more recent approaches to the discipline have been moving away from this notion. Foreign language education finds itself at present at a crossroads with multiple models of language and culture competence. So far no…

This study of deaf college students examined specific relationships between their mathematics performance and their assessed skills in reading, language, and English morphology. Simple regression analyses showed that deaf college students' language proficiency scores, reading grade level, and morphological knowledge regarding word segmentation and…