English proficiency difference among students is a challenging pedagogical issue in EFL classrooms worldwide. Collaborative digital storytelling has been adopted in language learning settings to increase motivation and engagement, especially for young learners. However, it remains unknown whether students of different proficiency levels can equally benefit from this collaborative approach. Thus...

Limited English proficiency immigrant students have a high risk of dropping out of high school, resulting in significantly restricted employment opportunities. At the same time, the nursing profession is desperately in need of increased ethnic diversity in the workforce to better serve its diverse patient population. Recognizing both of these situations, a group of nursing students from Emory U...

Automaticity and real-time aspects of performance are directly relevant to L2 spoken language proficiency. This paper analyzes data from L2 speakers of English and Spanish spread over a range of proficiency levels as identified by traditional holistic, rubric-based human ratings. In spontaneous speech samples from these L2 populations, we studied timed measures of spoken fluency (linguistic uni...

This study investigated how speech recognition in noise is affected by language proficiency for individual non-native speakers. The recognition of English and Chinese sentences was measured as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in sixty native Chinese speakers who never lived in an English-speaking environment. The recognition score for speech in quiet (which varied from 15%-92%) was...

In this paper, the falling-rising tone in the English of very proficient non-native speakers is discussed. The speech data was collected in connection with MA thesis seminar sessions where the speakers, Finnish university students of English, discussed research methodology. Of the non-native speakers of English, only those who performed at high level of accuracy in a separate proficiency test w...

The impact of ethnicity on the stress process in old age was examined using two surveys of Australians aged 60 years and older. Four different "ethnic strata" were defined: namely, mainstream Australians, British migrants, and non-British migrants--who were split on the basis of whether their English proficiency was good or poor. The ethnic stratum most different from mainstream Australian, non...

We propose a reading time model for learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) that is based on a learner’s reading proficiency and the linguistic properties of sentences. Reading proficiency here refers to a learner’s reading score on the Test of English for International Communications (TOEIC), and the linguistic properties are the lexical, syntactic and discourse complexities of a sente...

background hispanics comprise 17% of the total u.s. population, surpassing african-americans as the largest minority group. linguistically, almost 60 million people speak a language other than english. this language diversity can create barriers and additional burden and risk when seeking health services. patients with limited english proficiency (lep) for example, have been shown to experience...