The Student Oral Language Observation Matrix (SOLOM) is an assessment of oral language skills. The aim of this study was to examine psychometric properties of the SOLOM for preschoolers through (a) use of internal consistency methods to assess the reliability of the scores from the SOLOM and (b) examination of criterion-related validity by…

This study focuses on adult responses to children's verb uses, the information they provide, and how they change over time. We analyzed longitudinal samples from four children acquiring Hebrew (age-range: 1;4-2;5; child verb-forms = 8,337). All child verbs were coded for inflectional category, and for whether and how adults responded to them. Our…

The importance of phonological awareness for the future learning of written language has been widely recognized, but there is still some debate as to whether syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic awareness are independent skills or manifestations of the same general skill. Consequently, the objective of this study was to test the independence of…

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on…

The rating of proficiency tests that use the Inter-agency Roundtable (ILR) and American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines claims that each major level is based on hierarchal linguistic functions that require mastery of multidimensional traits in such a way that each level subsumes the levels beneath it. These…

International students, particularly international English as a Second Language (ESL) students who come to the United States with relatively lower levels of English oral language proficiency, are often reluctant to participate in academic discussions. In a graduate-level TESOL program with a majority of international ESL students, a video…

Many learners of English as a foreign language often feel that learning spoken English is frustrating and quite difficult, especially when they have to talk to English-speaking foreigners. In general, because they are unfamiliar with the spoken mode of English and are worried about making grammatical errors, they often feel very scared to speak…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptual ratings and performance evaluations of students who do and do not stutter by professors who require oral presentations. Additionally, this study sought to investigate the influence of behaviors related to communication competence on perceptual and evaluative ratings. Method: One…

Target language speaking competence is a skill both students and world language teachers desire to develop, yet it is often one of the weakest areas observed in secondary classrooms (Thompson & Mutton, 2022). To help improve student willingness to speak, educators should understand what intrinsically and extrinsically motivates learners. The…

This study investigates the immediate and sustained effects of a pre-departure study abroad training on the oral production of L2 Chinese formulaic language across a range of social and transactional interactions. Eighteen upper-intermediate learners of Chinese were assigned to either an instructed or non-instructed group to determine the efficacy…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of switching from in-person assessment to virtual assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic on the growth trajectories of children with hearing loss who are learning spoken language. Method: Sixty-eight children with typical hearing, 44 children with cochlear implants, and 47 children…

This article presents the design and evaluation processes of a new inclusive and technology-and-autonomous mediated tool named the Communicative English Language Skills Improvement Programme (CELSIP). This project was originally designed to help all kinds of learners to achieve better communicative competencies in English. An empirical mixedmethod…

Recently, alternative assessment (AA) has gained huge attention in oral ?communication studies. An area that has progressively received momentous concerns in ?the EFL/ESL literature is the employment of the self-assessment method. Despite this concern, ?the empirical data on the college of engineering students' willingness to implement…

Task-based language teaching research has investigated the impact of planning on task performance, but little has been reported on the processes that take place while planning is undertaken. This study builds on previous planning research by providing a detailed analysis of four Japanese university learners' collaborative pre-task planning (two…

Purpose: This study focused on factors that contributed to writing quality in adults who were pursuing a General Educational Development (GED) diploma through an adult basic education program and university students who were pursuing a college degree. We explored the role of transcription (handwriting and spelling), working memory, oral language,…