COMMUNICATIVE TASKS FOR IMPROVING FOREIGN LANGUAGE SPEAKING COMPETENCE OF PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS

1 On Knowing a Language : Communicative Competence , Proficiency , and the Standards for Foreign Language Learning

Automated scoring of speaking items in an assessment for teachers of English as a Foreign Language

This paper describes an end-to-end prototype system for automated scoring of spoken responses in a novel assessment for teachers of English as a Foreign Language who are not native speakers of English. The 21 speaking items contained in the assessment elicit both restricted and moderately restricted responses, and their aim is to assess the essential speaking skills that English teachers need i...

Exploring Teachers’ Perception of Intercultural Communicative Competence and their Practices for Teaching Culture in EFL Classrooms

This study aimed to examine the effect of EFL teachers’ level of instruction, education, and experience on their perceptions of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) on the one hand and the effect of teachers’ ICC perceptions on their practices of teaching culture on the other. The participants of this study were 111 EFL teachers (59 males, 52 females), selected through purposive samplin...

Using a 3D Online Game to Assess Students' Foreign Language Acquisition and Communicative Competence

Over the past decade there has been an increasing attempt to explore the potential of computer games in order to engage students’ towards foreign language learning. However, literature review has shown that there are still few attempts to provide empiric evidence of the educational potential of computer games, whereas the present study aims to address this lack. The purpose of our paper is to e...

Communicative Tasks and the Language Curriculum

Over the last 25 years the communicative task has emerged as a significant building block in the development of language curricula and also as an element for motivating process-oriented second language acquisition research. This paper reviews the influence of the communicative task on curriculum development and summarizes the research base for task-based language teaching. In the final part of ...