The use of speech technology in children’s reading assessment can help teachers to diagnose reading difficulties and plan appropriate interventions for a large number of students. We present a Bayesian Network model of student reading comprehension that can be used to estimate automatic scores for a child’s spoken answers to open-ended questions about a text. Through the use of features derived...

This paper reports on the experiences of four Australian teachers who provide English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction to Indonesian secondary school students in a regional area of Central Java, Indonesia. These four teachers were all native English speakers and experienced qualified teachers, however, the Australian State Department of Education that sent them to Indonesia did not provi...

The purpose of this study was to compare apology strategies used by Iranian EFL learner students and native English speaking students (NSS) in formal and informal situations. The aim was further to investigate gender differentiation among participants. For this purpose, data were elicited from 40 Iranian (16 males and 24 females) and 40 native English speaking students (20 males and 20 females)...

AbstractThe interference of the native language in acquiring a foreign language is unavoidable. In an attempt to explore the phenomenon why this occurs, the study was conducted in English as a foreign language writing. The study also investigated how the native language interference occurred in the writing process. In fact, this qualitative study explored the reasons and the process of na...

The utility of ethnoscience as a methodology to improve American Indian education programs is discussed. Data from two native American communities is presented, focusing on the cultural conflict prevalent in their schools. The San Carlos Apache, a reservation-tribe of Western Apache in Arizona and an off-reservation community of Oglala Sioux from North-western Nebraska, are compared, emphasis b...

AbstractThe interference of the native language in acquiring a foreign language is unavoidable. In an attempt to explore the phenomenon why this occurs, the study was conducted in English as a foreign language writing. The study also investigated how the native language interference occurred in the writing process. In fact, this qualitative study explored the reasons and the process of na...

onveying a strong message within a language stems from not only a linguistically appropriate utterance but also a pragmatically appropriate discourse. Broadly considering various facets of pragmatics, pragmatic assessment has not been potentially brought into perspective. To address this discourse gap, this study, guided by the principles of mixed-method design, pursued three purposes: ...

Pragmatic rating is considered as one of the novel and crucial aspects of second language education which has not been maneuvered upon in the literature. To address this gap, the current study aimed to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of the speech act of agreement in L2 by non-...