CHILD, FAMILY, AND SCHOOL CHARACTERISTICS RELATED TO ENGLISH PROFICIENCY DEVELOPMENT AMONG FOUR-YEAR-OLD ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS (ELLS) IN MIAMI Yoon Kyong Kim, Ph.D George Mason University, 2011 Dissertation Director: Dr. Adam Winsler English Language Learners (ELLs), in addition to increased risk for living in poverty, experience the extra challenge of learning a second language while tryin...

the aim of the current study was to examine the effect of metacognitive instruction on efl learners’ metacognitive awareness of listening strategies, listening comprehension, and oral language proficiency. fifty students of two upper-intermediate english courses participated in the study and were sampled as the experimental and control groups. for sixteen weeks the experimental group participat...

This paper studies the effects of English proficiency on employment of U.S. foreign-born immigrants, using data from the 2001 American Community Survey (ACS). It shows that English proficiency plays an important role in immigrants’ employment and its effects on employment patterns across genders are different. Probit regressions show that immigrants with a higher level of English proficiency ar...

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of 240 spoken texts and 240 written texts produced by...

This paper addresses the effect of English proficiency on economic growth empirically with Barro-type cross-sectional growth regression. The empirical results provide evidence of positive correlation between initial English proficiency and economic growth only for the countries in the Asia and Europe. Therefore, countries with higher levels of English proficiency among the fraction of its popul...

This article reports on a longitudinal, quasi-experimental comparison of two English language development (ELD) models implemented from kindergarten through Grade 3 to support oral among Spanish-speaking learners (ELLs). Specifically, the study examined proficiency students who received only integrated (I-ELD; n = 39) and I-ELD with 30 minutes daily designated ELD (D-ELD) entailing four specifi...

In this study the author tries to assess the effects of Theme-based Oral Approach (TOA) on the oral English proficiency of non-English majors as well as students’ leaning motives and interests resulted from the approach in EFL class of China. The study follows the quantitative and qualitative method in light of questionnaire, interview, class observation with the causal-comparative study betwee...

University of Tehran administers a test known as The University of Tehran English Proficiency Test (the UTEPT) to PhD candidates on a yearly basis. By definition, the test can be considered a high-stakes one. The validity of high stakes tests needs to be known (Roever, 2001). As Mesick (1988) maintains, if the validity of high stakes tests are not known, it might have some undesirable consequen...