This study addresses the issue of educational inadequacy and inequity for disadvantaged minority students. It estimates desired national standards and examines interrelated gaps in key school–teacher resources and mathematics achievement by linking national education data sets (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], Common Core of Data, and Schools and Staffing Survey). Although po...

Virtually all of the extensive previous research investigating the effect of information systems proficiency on performance has been conducted at the individual level. Little research has investigated the relationship between IS proficiency and performance at the group level. In this paper, we argue that IS proficiency at the group level may be more than the simple sum or average of the IS prof...

ACTFL generic proficiency guidelines describe what learners are able to perform at various proficiency levels. These guidelines, in particular the oral proficiency guidelines (OPG), have been widely used to assess learners’ proficiency across institutions – via the oral proficiency interview (OPI) technique – irrespective of curriculum, teaching methods, and materials. Many institutions and org...

This study examined the effect of language proficiency on repeated mention reduction in L2 English spontaneous speech by Korean native speakers. We found a significant effect of L2 proficiency on word duration in repeated mentions. Specifically, as with native English speakers (EN), Korean learners of English with high English proficiency (KH) reduced the duration of repeated words, while those...

Second language (L2) learners tend to speak slower at every level of linguistic analysis, often in an uneven tempo, with longer pauses at the start and before some words and constructions, than is typical of native speech. As noted by Zhang & Elder [1], native listeners focus on phonological fluency in making judgments about L2 proficiency. Improved understanding of how fluency grows with progr...

Characterization of states, the essential components of the underlying energy landscapes, is one of the most intriguing subjects in single-molecule (SM) experiments due to the existence of noise inherent to the measurements. Here we present a method to extract the underlying state sequences from experimental SM time-series. Taking into account empirical error and the finite sampling of the time...

This study investigated the effects of two perceptually-based training paradigms in both the perception and production of English /e/ and /æ/ by Cantonese ESL learners with high and low listening and oral proficiency levels. Sixty-four subjects participated in the study, in which 22 (9 with high proficiency, H-HV; 13 with low proficiency, L-HV) were trained under High Variability Phonetic Train...