As language learners scale up in terms of speaking proficiency, they expand the volume of expressions in the target language that they can use in a robust fashion, combining vocabulary and syntactic structures into novel constructions and transferring them to new contexts. In the ISLET Project, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), we have developed a strategy for allowing a dialog-r...

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...

Background: The present study examined the validity of a university-based speaking assessment (Test of Oral Proficiency in English, TOPE for short) in mainland China. The speaking assessment was developed to meet the standards (Standard for Oral Proficiency in English, SOPE for short) set for teaching and learning of the oral English by the university. Methods: The degree of interaction among c...

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 ...

We present a method that filters out nonscorable (NS) responses, such as responses with a technical difficulty, in an automated speaking proficiency assessment system. The assessment system described in this study first filters out the non-scorable responses and then predicts a proficiency score using a scoring model for the remaining responses. The data were collected from non-native speakers ...

Researchers have suggested that interactional feedback is associated with foreign/second language learning because it prompts learners to notice foreign/second language forms. Using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and Long’s interaction hypothesis as conceptual frameworks, this study explores the use of systematic explicit feedback to undergraduates (N = 1180) at three assessment points...

The present study investigated the effects of a shadowing activity using movies on Korean EFL college students’ speaking skills and their affective attitudes. Over semester, total 138 students participated in they were assigned to an experimental group (n = 71) control 67). According language proficiency, participants advanced, intermediate, beginner-level groups. all groups engaged once week w...

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...