This study investigated factors that could affect inter-examiner reliability in the pronunciation assessment component of speaking tests. We hypothesized that the rating of pronunciation is susceptible to variation in assessment due to the amount of exposure examiners have to nonnative English accents. An inter-rater variability analysis was…

English-learning 7.5-month-olds are heavily biased to perceive stressed syllables as word onsets. By 11 months, however, infants begin segmenting non-initially stressed words from speech. Using the same artificial language methodology as Johnson and Jusczyk (2001), we explored the possibility that the emergence of this ability is linked to a…

Cultural integration can be used as an effective learning practice in contexts of English as Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. The present study aimed at investigating the effect of cultural integration on the development of Iranian EFL upper-intermediate learners' listening comprehension. To this end, fifty-two upper-intermediate EFL learners…

In the fall of 2011, an undergraduate student who is also a military spouse and mother of school-aged children, shared with the College of Education (COE) at Kansas State University faculty her concerns about the necessity of intentional preparation of teachers and counselors regarding the unique needs of military-connected children. From that…

With 73 students at an Iranian university, the present study investigated teacher's effect in topic familiarization in L2 reading context. The participants--Group B with and Group A without the presence of a teacher--experienced four pre-reading treatments and read four passages of unfamiliar topics, after which they were tested on comprehension…

Principals, as one of the professional leaders in a school, are accountable for the quality of education in the school. This is a part of the normal job description and expectations for the person in such a post. In the South African context with a large number of underperforming schools, there is an intention to have an additional performance…

Prompted by the need for leaders able to turn around chronically low-performing schools, states, universities, education groups, and school districts in the US have initiated a variety of principal development programs. Some programs focus on enhancing the skills of experienced administrators, while others target talented teachers and even…

Many students arrive at university accustomed to adopting the internet as their primary source of information, but with no prior experience of referencing. This raises issues of the reliability and validity of digital sources, as well as bringing new opportunities for cheating. The internet has made plagiarism quicker and easier; a student simply…

Academic libraries need reliable information on researcher data needs, data curation practices, and attitudes to identify and craft appropriate services that support outreach and teaching. This paper describes information gathered from a survey distributed to the College of Science and Mathematics faculty at California Polytechnic State…

The ability to comprehend expository text is vital for academic and professional success; however, many students struggle with this genre. While it has been found that text structure-based graphic organizers (GOs) may assist older students in comprehending expository text, it is uncertain whether this type of scaffold is effective for…

Although the role of motivation has been emphasised in knowledge-sharing literature, traditional motivation theories, such as self-determination theory (SDT), have not been actively used as a research framework in knowledge-sharing research. The purposes of this study are twofold. The first objective is to propose a model, based on SDT, to test…

This article explores the processes of racialization imposed on Sa'moan youth through policy and practice in one urban, US school district and at one high school in particular. Specifically, I use the methodological practices of defamiliarization and counter-storytelling to examine the contradictory practices of racialization and the…

In this article a study is presented of selective affiliation of two- and three-year-old children in the natural situation of Dutch daycare centers. Data of (behavioral) characteristics of 674 pairs of children (dyads) were collected. Multi-level analyses of these dyadic data were conducted and showed that the chance of friendship between two…

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of morphological variability in the production of Italian determiners, descriptive adjectives, and direct object pronouns by adult English learners of Italian to determine whether morphological errors are the result of computational or representational difficulties. Second language acquisitionists do…

The ubiquity and familiarity of the world wide web means that students regularly turn to it as a source of information. In doing so, they "are said to rely heavily on simple search engines, such as Google to find what they want." Researchers have also investigated how students use search engines, concluding that "the young web users tended to…