Scoring language learners' speaking skills is open to a number of measurement errors since raters' personal judgements could involve in the process. Different grading designs in which raters score a student's whole speaking skills or a specific dimension of the speaking performance could be settled to control and minimize the amount of the error…

In teaching Turkish language as a foreign language, the purpose is to enable the target audience, who have diverse purposes for learning the language, coming from a variety of cultures and languages, to reach such a level that they could understand whatever they listen and read and they could express their feelings, thoughts and dreams verbally as…

Aside from learning the basic and common grammatical structures, English as foreign language learners ("hereafter EFL") have to be familiar with a wide range of lexical chunks called collocations. Being sensitive to collocations is the key of attaining a native-like fluency in English. The aim of this study is twofold: to explore the…

This paper reports on an investigation of Turkish English-medium university students' perceptions of the change in their language ability and difference between students' level of English proficiency when they start their departmental studies and in their 4th semester and onwards based on their proficiency exam scores. Results revealed that 1)…

The quality of a writing highly depends on cohesion and coherence as they affect the tone of writing to a great extent. Linking adverbials (LAs) are among the types of cohesive devices which help connect ideas in a more smooth way. However, use of linking adverbials is often problematic for non-native speakers of English as they often overuse,…

Traditionally, native speakers have been considered as the most reliable source of linguistic data (Chomsky, 1965), although non-native speakers of English already outnumber the native ones (Kachru, 1994), and 80% of the English teachers in the world are non-native English speakers (Canagarajah, 2005). Today, there is a tendency towards including…