Till date, English as a Second Language (ESL) educators involved in teaching language and communication to engineering students face an uphill task in developing graduate communicative competency. This challenge is accentuated by the apparent lack of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) materials for engineering students in the engineering curriculum. As such, most ESL educators are forced to pl...

Introduction In recent decades, large-scale English language proficiency testing and testing research have seen an increased interest in constructed-response essay-writing items (Aschbacher, 1991; Powers, Burstein, Chodorow, Fowles, & Kukich, 2001; Weigle, 2002). The TOEFL iBT, for example, includes two constructed-response writing tasks, one of which is an integrative task requiring the test-t...

In this study we evaluate the ability of a state-of-the-art speechto-speech machine translation system, Skype Translator, to preserve the communicative effectiveness of its input speech. Specifically, we elicited Spanish spoken responses from 24 native speakers of Spanish in the following two scenarios: academic speaking (in the context of 6 questions from a standardized assessment of academic ...

Broca's area, a cerebral cortical area located in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) of the human brain, has been identified as one of several critical regions associated with the motor planning and execution of language. Anatomically, Broca's area is most often larger in the left hemisphere, and functional imaging studies in humans indicate significant left-lateralized patterns of activation dur...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have known impairments in social and motor skills. Identifying putative underlying mechanisms of these impairments could lead to improved understanding of the etiology of core social/communicative deficits in ASDs, and identification of novel intervention targets. The ability to perceptually integrate one's physical capacities with one's environ...

Domestic dogs comprehend human gestural communication in a way that other animal species do not. But little is known about the specific cues they use to determine when human communication is intended for them. In a series of four studies, we confronted both adult dogs and young dog puppies with object choice tasks in which a human indicated one of two opaque cups by either pointing to it or gaz...

This article is organised in five main sections. First, the sub-area of task-based instruction is introduced and contextualised. Its origins within communicative language teaching and second language acquisition research are sketched, and the notion of a task in language learning is defined. There is also brief coverage of the different and sometimes contrasting groups who are interested in the...

Research goals: determine particularities of using cloud services in English communicative competence forming process and develop the model of distance learning system (DLS) and cloud services interaction that improves the quality of the learning process. Research objectives: to identify, describe and develop methodological features of the model of distance learning system and cloud services in...

the study was conducted with the aim of examining the rate of foreign language anxiety in male and female language learners. flcas (foreign language classroom anxiety scale) was administered to two groups of male and female learners. the mean scores of flcas indicated a significant difference with females having considerably higher levels of anxiety than males. from 38 female learners, 22 were ...