Background: Children who stutter have the right to express their views and be heard. However, in research on stuttering, attention tends to focus mainly on parental and adult perspectives. By actively engaging with children's viewpoints, we can enhance our understanding of their distinct needs and capabilities. This, in turn, enables the…

Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system and has several subtypes. The disease pathophysiology includes damage to the myelin in the brain and spinal cord, manifesting in a wide range of neurological symptoms and impacting patients' physical, psychological, social, and communication…

The importance of vocabulary when speaking is not only demonstrated in models of second language speech production and speaking proficiency but also reflected in rating criteria and assessment scales. The present study examined and compared micro-level lexical information in a speaking task from two complementary stakeholders' perspectives…

Disfluencies such as pauses, "um"s, and "uh"s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different…

The study examined how learners' motivational dispositions predict the complexity, accuracy, fluency of their oral task performance and their overall second language proficiency. Eighty-one speakers of English as a second language in the United States completed a regulatory focus and a regulatory mode questionnaire, an oral interview task, and a…

Second language (L2) utterance fluency is crucial for speaking proficiency assessment. The measurement of L2 utterance fluency relies heavily on silent pause identification. However, empirical studies establishing specific silent pause thresholds for L2 monologic speaking are scarce, and even fewer exist for L2 dialogic speaking. This study thus…

Foreign language (L2) learners' speaking proficiency is often quantified using two dimensions: intuitive human ratings and analytical, linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) indices. While previous research and assessment practices have predominantly focused on either the subjective approach to L2 speaking or the objective one, it is…

This paper reports on the impact of an English as a Second Language (ESL) speaking activity--"the poster carousel"--on English learners' second language (L2) fluency. Two versions of the poster carousel were developed to observe the effect of talking about (a) the same poster three times (same-task repetition) or (b) three different…

In our action research projects as teacher educators, we focus on broadening preservice teachers' understandings about language diversity in mathematics classrooms, away from just improving students' fluency in the language of instruction. To undertake these projects, we developed a flexible analytical tool, for identifying those pedagogical…

The efficacy of the "integrated approach," which calls for the simultaneous integration of two varieties in teaching Arabic as a second language (L2), has not yet been rigorously examined, and the very few available studies suffer from many methodological limitations. The current study sought to bridge this gap in the literature by…

Background: Assessing spoken discourse during aphasia clinical examination is crucial for diagnostic and rehabilitation purposes. Recent approaches have been developed to quantify content word fluency (CWF) and informativeness of spoken discourse without the need to perform time-consuming transcription and coding. However, the accuracy of these…

In the present study, the researcher aims to investigate the impact of school adjustment and study habits on English language achievement among senior secondary students. This study is contrary to expectations; neither school adjustment nor study habits individually demonstrated a significant correlation with English language achievement. However,…

Letter names are some of the many preschool accomplishments that are of particular relevance to later academic challenges. However, many children enter school without having fluent letter name knowledge. The current study evaluated the effects of a taped-letter (TL) intervention delivered through PowerPoint on the accuracy of letter identification…

Purpose: Bilingual children's speech often contains high percentages of disfluencies in both their languages; however, the distribution of disfluency types and the difference across bilinguals' two languages have received insufficient and inconsistent empirical support. The present research aims to profile "typical" bilingual disfluency…

This study aimed to explore the literacy interactions of deaf and hearing parents with their preschool children in Saudi Arabia. The participants were three sets of parents (six individuals) of preschoolers. Data were collected through home literacy observation, experience sampling method, and interviews. All participants endorsed learning through…