This study intended to develop a model describing speaking strategies for EFL learners by taking into account the effects of learners’ gender and proficiency on the application of strategies. Accordingly, this study was planned to have two main analyses, namely qualitative and quantitative. In this respect, 30 EFL learners' viewpoints were sought, and then, based on the elicited responses, a 21...

While learners’ ability to speak academic language develops over time in content-based programs, the development of their nonacademic language appears to lag behind. Students’ speaking in content-based (CB) classrooms is confined to an academic discourse style. In the researchers’ point of view, the gap of less amount of nonacademic speaking can be bridged by the application of the conceptual f...

The impetus for conducting the present study came from Thornbury's (2005) approach to teach speaking in which he claimed that awareness-raising techniques, along with appropriation strategies, facilitate the process of teaching and learning speaking. Therefore, the present study attempted to explore the impact of the appropriation-based syllabus to teach speaking by using chunks-on-card...

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...

We present SocialSense, a collaborative smartphone based speaker and mood identification and reporting system that uses a user's voice to detect and log his/her speaking and mood episodes. SocialSense collaboratively works with other phones that are running the app present in the vicinity to periodically send/receive speaking and mood vectors to/from other users present in a social interaction ...

It is difficult to recognize speech distorted by various factors, especially when an ASR system contains only a single acoustic model. One solution is to use multiple acoustic models, one model for each different condition. In this paper, we discuss a parallel decoding-based ASR system that is robust to the noise type, SNR, speaker gender and speaking style. Our system consists of two recogniti...

Working within a task-based approach to the teaching of speaking, two interactive whiteboard-based pre-task activities focusing on different phases of the speech production process (Levelt, 1989) were developed and compared with an activity based on the speaking activities currently offered in English as a foreign language course books. The first activity, Dialogue Expansion, was based on expan...

The application of zone of proximal development (ZPD), as a major tenet of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (SCT, 1978), has recently been invited in the L2 learning/teaching profession. This study mainly examined whether Iranian EFL learners’ interactions in diverse ZPD-activated proximal contexts through the use of storytelling instruction could improve their oral (speaking) proficiency and at...