Purpose: Spoken language sample analysis (LSA) is widely considered to be a critical component of assessment for child language disorders. It is our best window into a preschool child's everyday expressive communicative skills. However, historically, the process can be cumbersome, and reference values against which LSA findings can be…

As a result of the Japanese Ministry of Education's recent edict that students' written and spoken English should be assessed in university entrance exams, there is an urgent need for tools to help teachers and students prepare for these exams. Although some commercial tools already exist, they are generally expensive and inflexible. To address…

Children use language structures as a basis for learning how to read. Therefore, literacy learning for young children must incorporate the child's personal use of oral language. It is their personal oral language that supports them as they attempt new concepts and become better readers. Because of the important role that oral language plays in a…

The Spring 2020 semester will be marked in our history as one of the most challenging semesters for higher education, although through the adversity, we were presented with opportunities for classroom innovation. A reflective account of the teaching insights gained from implementing a COVID-19 miniunit and utilizing remote oral examinations is…

This paper explains how the mobile app and computer software Moxtra has augmented presentation and oral communication classes at the university level. Even the free version of Moxtra allows students to compile a digital portfolio of presentation and storytelling work, involving voice and visuals, to which both the teacher and fellow students have…

Although data collection has been used in language learning settings for some time, it is only in recent decades that large corpora have become available, along with efficient tools for their use. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled rich tagging and annotation of corpus data, essential for their effective use in language…

This article discusses principles involved in developing course materials for technology-mediated Chinese language learning, with examples from a new course designed to take into account the needs of distance and independent learners. Which learning environment is most efficient for a given learning activity needs to be carefully considered. It…

This article provides an overview of the Autobiography Project, listing the topics of the ten chapters and the targeted skills that accompany them. The authors discuss the purposes of each chapter and describe the methods incorporated to promote the four broad components of literacy. This unit also addresses almost all components of the Common…

This paper presents two nine-year-old children who used different oral, written, visual, and digital modes as resources to create meaning and to position themselves socially through multimodal stories. Their diverging experiences with technology as a resource for storytelling draw attention to the importance of studying "the ways that old and new…

The Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field continues to experience increased valuing of experiential practitioner knowledge. A welcome result of this evolution has been the broadening of research perspectives. The 16 practitioner narratives in "Insights on Teaching Speaking in TESOL" are written by…

Speech recognition is one of five main areas in the field of speech processing. Difficulties in speech recognition include variability in sound within and across speakers, in channel, in background noise, and of speech production. Speech recognition can be used in a variety of situations: to perform query operations and phone call transfers; for…

Discusses the design and use of the Computer Model for Language Acquisition (COMOLA), a computer program designed to analyze syntactic development in second-language learners by examining their oral utterances. Also compares COMOLA to the recently developed Computer-Aides Linguistic Analysis (COALA) program. (MDM)

This paper describes a CALL approach which integrates software for speaker independent continuous speech recognition with embodied virtual agents and virtual worlds to create an immersive environment in which learners can converse in the target language in contextualised scenarios. The result is a self-access learning package: SPELL (Spoken…

This article reports on the Pittsburgh Public Schools Oral Ratings Assessment for Language Students (PPS ORALS) project, a Title VI Foreign Language Assistance Program grant-funded project to create an online testing Software program that makes large-scale oral testing in a world language not only feasible, but also easy to create, administer, and…

Most languages of the world have not been the focus of a speech recognition development effort, and the choice of technical approaches best suited to a language can be substantially impacted by the cultural context surrounding it. As the technologist and the teacher of or expert in a non-mainstream language and its culture are typically not the…