This study was set out to shed light on the efficacy of pushed output directed by scaffolding on 41 (24 female and 17 male) upper-intermediate EFL learners’ speaking fluency and accuracy. A public version of IELTS speaking test was held to measure learners’ entrance behavior. Then, they were randomly assigned into symmetrical, asymmetrical, and control group. The experimental and control groups...

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...

Traditional assessments of public speaking skills rely on human scoring. We report a n initial study on the development of an automated scoring model for public speaking performances using multimodal technologies. Task design, rubric development, and human rating were conducted according to standards in educational assessment. An initial corpus of 17 speakers with four speaking tasks was collec...

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They fou...

Pet-directed speech is strikingly similar to infant-directed speech, a peculiar speaking pattern with higher pitch and slower tempo known to engage infants' attention and promote language learning. Here, we report the first investigation of potential factors modulating the use of dog-directed speech, as well as its immediate impact on dogs' behaviour. We recorded adult participants speaking in ...

This paper reports on the on-going evaluation of a computer-assisted system (CEOTS) for the assessing of spoken English skills among Chinese university students. This system is being developed to deal with the negative backwash effects of the present system of assessment of speaking skills which is only available to a tiny minority. We present data from a survey of students at the developing in...

This paper uses data from the Mexican Family Life Survey to estimate the impact of a household member’s migration to the United States on the cognitive development of children remaining in Mexico. While there is no developmental effect of a child’s sibling migrating to the United States, there is an adverse effect when another household member—typically the child’s parent—migrates. This is part...