The present study investigated the effect of pragmatic eliciting tasks on EFL pre-intermediate learners speaking proficiency. Thus this study aimed at comparing the English language learners who practiced pragmatic eliciting tasks and the ones who used traditional speaking activities such as questions and answers, discussion, etc. In doing so, 40 learners out of 80 were selected through Oxford ...

& Lexical proficiency, as a cognitive construct, is poorly understood. However, lexical proficiency is an important element of language proficiency and fluency, especially for second language (L2) learners. For example, lexical errors are a common cause of L2 miscommunication (Ellis, 1995). Lexical proficiency is also an important attribute of L2 academic achievement (Daller, van Hout, & Treffe...

Gender differences were analyzed across countries of origin and continents, and across mother tongues and language families, using a large-scale database, containing information on 27,119 adult learners of Dutch as a second language. Female learners consistently outperformed male learners in speaking and writing proficiency in Dutch as a second language. This gender gap remained remarkably robu...

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Po...

The present study investigated the effect of pragmatic eliciting tasks on EFL pre-intermediate learners speaking proficiency. Thus this study aimed at comparing the English language learners who practiced pragmatic eliciting tasks and the ones who used traditional speaking activities such as questions and answers, discussion, etc. In doing so, 40 learners out of 80 were selected through Oxford ...

OBJECTIVE To examine differences in the characteristics of adverse events between English speaking patients and patients with limited English proficiency in US hospitals. SETTING Six Joint Commission accredited hospitals in the USA. METHOD Adverse event data on English speaking patients and patients with limited English proficiency were collected from six hospitals over 7 months in 2005 and...

Among many factors affecting learning a language, motivation is the most well- documented in theory and less operationalized in practice entity and it calls for consideration when it comes to learn speaking skill in English as Foreign Language (EFL) education ecology. This study investigates the effect of storytelling through puppets on 60 Iranian pre -intermediate EFL learners' Motivation and ...

Recent advances in ASR and spoken language processing have led to improved systems for automated assessment for spoken language. However, it is still challenging for automated scoring systems to achieve high performance in terms of the agreement with human experts when applied to non-native children’s spontaneous speech. The subpar performance is mainly caused by the relatively low recognition ...

Recent research has shown that a properly designed ASRbased CALL system (Dutch-CAPT) was capable of detecting pronunciation errors and of providing comprehensible feedback on pronunciation. Since pronunciation is not the only skill required for speaking a second language, we explored the possibility of extending the Dutch-CAPT approach to other aspects of speaking proficiency like morphology an...