Nowadays, professors of different universities around the world with different majors need to learn English for their academic advancement and research promotion. This requires that they have positive attitudes towards English language learning. In this regard, the role of social factors can be useful. Hence, this study was an endeavor to examine the social factors influencing non-English major...

In teaching and learning of English as a foreign language, the Internet serves as a source of authentic listening material, enabling learners to practice English in real contexts. An adaptive computer-assisted language learning and teaching system can pick up news clips as authentic materials from the Internet according to learner listening proficiency if it is equipped with a listenability mea...

Previous studies have found quantity of exposure, i.e., frequency of exposure (Horst et al., 1998; Webb, 2008; Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt, 2010), is important for second language (L2) contextual word learning. Besides this factor, context constraint and L2 proficiency level have also been found to affect contextual word learning (Pulido, 2003; Tekmen and Daloglu, 2006; Elgort et al., 2015; Ma...

This pilot study investigated whether there is a correlation between English reading proficiency of Japanese EFL learners and their ability to read aloud properly. The former was measured through a reading comprehension test under the format of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), whereas the latter was evaluated in terms of (1) the use of correct breath/sense groups, (2) rate of ...

In this paper we discuss our approach toward establishing a model of the acquisition of English grammatical structures by users of our English language tutoring system, which has been designed for deaf users of American Sign Language. We explore the correlation between a corpus of error-tagged texts and their holistic proficiency scores assigned by experts in order to draw initial conclusions a...

OBJECTIVES We assessed the impact of interpreter services on the cost and the utilization of health care services among patients with limited English proficiency. METHODS We measured the change in delivery and cost of care provided to patients enrolled in a health maintenance organization before and after interpreter services were implemented. RESULTS Compared with English-speaking patients...

For objective evaluation of the second language learner’s translation proficiency, we tested two measures commonly used in statistical machine translation. One is word n-gram probability of a target language to measure likelihood of translated sentences as a target language. The other one is translation probabilities from source language sentences to target language sentences to measure transla...

The present study intended to propose a causal model of factors that would predict Oral Communication Apprehension (OCA) of Iranian learners of English as a foreign language. To conduct the study, 135 male and female University students majoring in English were selected. Five variables including: learners’self-esteem and introversion/extroversion(as independent variables), their gender and prof...

Drawing on a qualitative case study, this article questions two prevailing assumptions: that English is a universal lingua franca and that English proficiency is indispensable for transcultural work. The study involved Japanese manufacturing companies with subsidiaries in China and investigated the language use of Japanese expatriates and Chinese office workers as well as the views of participa...

originating from vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, dynamic assessment (da) proposes a novel approach to second language acquisition (sla) research according to which a dialectical relationship is envisaged between instruction and assessment. although da has been applied to some areas of sla, there are areas, such as interlanguage pragmatics (ilp), that have been neglected.  to address the issue,...