BACKGROUND National Institutes of Health asthma guidelines recommend questionnaires to assess asthma control, but these questionnaires are not useable across the entire pediatric age spectrum and have not been validated among significant numbers of minority or Spanish-speaking children. OBJECTIVE We sought to evaluate a questionnaire designed to assess asthma control across a broad age range ...

Speech recognition technology holds great potential for such users with motor impairments due to the hands-free interaction it affords without significant investment in specialized hardware. Its accuracy and performance have been steadily improving, leading to accurate recognition engines such as Dragon Naturally Speaking from Nuance as well as the Windows Speech Recognizer in the Vista operati...

Writing and speaking are the productive skills of a language and share similar components. However, there has been little attempt to investigate the impact of writing practice on the speaking proficiency of the learners. The present study using a pretest-posttest controlled group design in a quasi-experimental approach investigated the effect of guided writing practice on the speaking proficien...

This research was designed to compare the impact of culturally laden Task-based language Teaching (TBLT) and Content-based language Teaching (CBLT) on Iranian intermediate learners' Speaking improvement. Two groups of participants, i. e. the experimental and control groups, were used in this study. In the experimental group, task-based instruction for 20 intermediate students and in the control...

Over the recent years, the study of language learning strategies has received much attention worldwide in general, and in Iran in particular. Many scholars have tried to investigate the function of language learning strategies in EFL learning and teaching. Not enough attention, however, has been paid to language skills, especially speaking skill, in Iran. Therefore, the present study aimed at s...

Phonemic accuracy of children with cochlear implants (CI) is often reported to be lower in comparison with normally hearing (NH) age-matched children. In this study, we compare phonemic accuracy development in the spontaneous speech of Dutch-speaking children with CI and NH age-matched peers. A dynamic cost model of Levenshtein distance is used to compute the accuracy of each word token. We set...