Our global society and our current communication needs have put a strain on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching, since common resources such as textbooks may fail to adapt to the needs and interests of our students. The present action research study aims at identifying EFL students' communicative needs and developing their oral skills…

The study explores the psychological reality of chunks for EFL Chinese students. Speech samples from three various proficiency groups are examined with the help of the computer program Cool Edit 2.0, and speaking fluency is thus determined. It is found out that speaking fluency is not linear, and fluent subjects can use, store and retrieve chunks…

This study investigated changes in the production of temporal terms over the preschool years. Ninety-three parents of 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children completed a questionnaire in which they indicated their child's production, and accurate use, of a list of temporal words. The results suggest that use and command emerge at different ages for…

The concept of focus on form has been influential in second language (L2) acquisition and pedagogy. One example of the implementation of focus on form is a post-task activity (e.g., anticipation of a public performance) that can selectively orient learners toward increased levels of accuracy. The present research proposes a new operationalization…

The authors evaluated principles of macroeconomics textbooks for readability using Coh-Metrix, a computational linguistics tool. Additionally, they conducted an experiment on Amazon's Mechanical Turk Web site in which participants ranked the readability of text samples. There was a wide range of scores on readability indexes both among…

This dissertation examines recent claims that post-secondary student writers underperform because they fail to transfer the skills and knowledge taught in first-year composition courses. My analysis of the scholarship on writing transfer and investigation of the conditions of student writing at one private liberal arts college suggest that there…

Clinical Question: Would an adolescent who stutters (P) exhibit long-term improvement in stuttering management from fluency shaping approaches (I) or speech modification techniques (C), as shown by increases in controlled and spontaneous fluency, reduced severity of moments of stuttering, and decreased negative impact of stuttering (O)? Method:…

The current study investigated first language (L1) effects on listener judgment of comprehensibility and accentedness in second language (L2) speech. The participants were 45 university-level adult speakers of English from three L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Hindi, Farsi), performing a picture narrative task. Ten native English listeners used…

This article presents the results of a research project on the teaching and learning of English through the use of Skype™ conference calls. The research was carried out with a group of 12 English as a foreign language adult learners in the language institute of Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Bogotá, Colombia. The findings of this…

We present findings of a project that investigated the potential of an online tandem program to enhance the foreign language learning of two groups of school-aged beginner learners, one learning English in Colombia and the other learning Spanish in New Zealand. We assessed the impact of the project on students' learning with a free writing…

This article reports on the outcomes of a longitudinal case study to gauge the impact of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) on two of the least researched language skills: oral comprehension and production. It worked with 24 students in the fourth grade of Compulsory Secondary Education in a public school in Andalusia (southern Spain)…

We investigated general vocabulary and academic vocabulary growth trajectories of adolescent language minority students using an individual growth modeling approach. Our analytical sample included 3161 sixth- to eighth-grade students from an urban school district in California. The language minority students in our sample were classified as…

This dissertation investigates L2 student language production, task-based instruction, and teachers' scaffolding strategies in two special EFL classes in a Vietnamese university. Two English teachers and 73 students were studied as they participated in a nationwide educational project known as the Advanced Curriculum (AC), an initiative launched…

There is a growing interest in the quandary of literacy and proficiency amongst K-12 students in the United States. Similarly, because of uncharted research about biliteracy amongst African-American students in urban schools and benefits of Spanish fluency, communicative gaps are increased and fluency is breached. If advantages are properly…

This research was conducted to find out whether or not using short stories significantly improve the speaking and writing achievements. A quasi-experimental study of non-equivalent pretest-posttest control group design or comparison group design was used in this research. The population of this research was the all first semester undergraduate…