This article reports a qualitative action research study regarding the influence of strategies that may be used in oral conversation to avoid communication breakdowns. After analyzing college students' performance in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes, the problem was that many adult learners exhibited poor oral English communication…

The article shines light upon the differences in the vocabulary demands of academic spoken discourse between three broad scientific disciplines: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. By employing the Academic Word List (AWL) and British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) wordlist, the present study…

This study aims to analyze the representation of global competence in English textbooks for higher vocational education in China. A two-dimensional textbook theoretical framework based on global competence was developed, including four indicators of global competence (vertical) and 3 dimensions of textbook content (horizontal). Through a…

This study had purposes of exploring the factors inhibiting the students in speaking English and knowing teacher's perception toward the factors inhibiting the students in speaking English as a foreign language. It was done to overcome students' problems in learning the target language and solve students' problems in learning to speak. Descriptive…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of using media in EFL classes on enhancing EFL university learners' oral fluency and global awareness. It adopted the one-group pre-experimental design, with a one-group pre-post interview along with a mixed research approach integrating both quantitative and qualitative assessment. A group of 30 Arabic…

This article presents an investigation of L2 pragmatic development by a group of 19 Chinese EFL teachers who participated in a five-month program in Canada (SA group). A written discourse-completion task (WDCT) was administered to assess participants' pragmatic knowledge of how to make requests in English. They also completed a paper-based…

This volume celebrates the life and groundbreaking work of Richard Schmidt, the developer of the influential Noticing Hypothesis in the field of second language acquisition. The 19 chapters encompass a compelling collection of cutting­-edge research studies exploring such constructs as noticing, attention, and awareness from multiple perspectives,…

This study examined whether the observed effectiveness of recasts is influenced by the type of outcome measure used and whether different aspects of working memory are differentially associated with learners' performance on the various outcome measures. The participants were 90 learners of English as a foreign language, who were randomly assigned…

This study examined the effectiveness of explicit instruction on second language (L2) learners' implicit and explicit knowledge of English. Explicit instruction on the generic and non-generic use of English articles was delivered by CALL activities. Four tasks assessed acquisition: elicited imitation, oral production, grammaticality judgement, and…

The importance of oral language development among elementary school students is widely acknowledged, both in the research and in policy documents worldwide. Facility with one particular style of language, decontextualized language, is critical for success in the school context. This style of language is not readily accessible to all students. This…

This article presents a research study that analyses eighth and twelfth graders' knowledge of speaking strategies to communicate in English. The Oral Communication Strategy Inventory, developed by Nakatani in 2006, was applied to 108 students belonging to the public, semi-public and private educational sectors in Chile. The findings show that 8th…

The sheer quantity of words known (breadth) is strongly predictive of reading comprehension, yet little is understood about how quality of word knowledge (depth) affects comprehension. A group of 35 bilingual and monolingual 5th-grade students worked on developing depth of knowledge of 8 words, culminating in an activity in which the students…

This report describes the design and implementation of the three interventions tested in Project Upgrade, one of four experiments conducted as part of the Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies. The evaluation was a multi-site, multi-year effort to determine whether and how different child care subsidy policies and procedures and quality…

The aim of this report is to present the findings of the second phase in a longitudinal study of the impact of changes in the TOEFL® test on teaching and learning in test preparation classrooms. The focus of this phase was to monitor six teachers from five countries in Central and Eastern Europe as they received news about changes in the TOEFL and…

The influence on interlocutors' relative content knowledge on conversational participation in interactions between native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) with limited oral skills is investigated. Results indicate that both NSs and NNSs appeared conversationally active, but there were different patterns of participation that could to…