in recent years a great number of books have appeared in various fields of esp, and the number is increasing every year. these books are specially prepared and adapted for foreign students possessing varying degrees of language skills. experts believe that the production of esp books is a vital task that requires several stages and procedures. to produce these materials, special attention shou...

Assisting in foreign language learning is one of the major areas in which natural language processing technology can contribute. This paper proposes a computerized method of measuring communicative skill in English as a foreign language. The proposed method consists of two parts. The first part involves a test sentence selection part to achieve precise measurement with a small test set. The sec...

1. In the methods section, the authors state that they have measured English proficiency in the sample. However, not much is done with this data in the manuscript. Therefore, I suggest to delete this from the text or include results of this measurement. Otherwise, the sample may have been exposed to unnecessary measurements, which is not ethically sound. We appreciate Reviewer #1’s comments. We...

this study was an attempt to find out to what extent efl learners at different levels of language proficiency experience inner speech as mental rehearsal and to identify some of the characteristics and functions of their inner speech. for this purpose, one hundred seventy-four iranian female students majoring in english translation at islamic azad university, tehran central branch, took part in...

Bilingual experience is dynamic and poses a challenge for researchers to develop instruments that capture its relevant dimensions. The present study examined responses from a questionnaire administered to 110 heterogeneous bilingual young adults. These questions concern participants' language use, acquisition history and self-reported proficiency. The questionnaire responses and performances on...

The United States has always been and will continue to be a nation of many cultures and languages. In the healthcare arena, this means safety will depend on clear, linguistically appropriate communication between the patient and family and the healthcare provider. Three obstacles exist to this type of essential communication: limited English proficiency, low health literacy, and cultural barriers.

PURPOSE To assess the influence of second language (L2) proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in the L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2 proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and spatial aspects of prosody. A second goal was to a...

This study examined the role of adolescents' and mothers' self-reports of English and heritage language proficiency in youth's academic and emotional adjustment among 444 Chinese American families. Adolescents who were proficient in English tended to exhibit higher reading achievement scores, math achievement scores, and overall GPA. Mothers who were English proficient tended to have children w...

This paper describes techniques of scoring prosodic proficiency of English sentences spoken by Japanese. The multiple regression model predicts the prosodic proficiency using new prosodic measures based on the characteristics of Japanese novice learners of English. Prosodic measures are calculated by comparing prosodic parameters, such as F0, power and duration, of learner’s and native speaker’...