Although the existing research on educational robots has exhibited the assistance for EFL learners' English skills, the evidence which shows robot-assisted systems' effect on adult learners' English read-aloud is still rare. Nevertheless, read-aloud is still treated as a useful approach in English classes for speech pronunciations in particular in…

Teaching English to first-grade elementary school children presents its own challenges for teachers. This is because children at this age have characteristics such as having a short attention span, enjoying playing, and learning more effectively when they are having fun. On the other hand, children in this group are still learning to read and…

This study was conducted to understand issues related to the current practice of English teacher education development in the Lao People's Democratic Republic with a focus on reading. It recognizes that what pre-service teachers experience both prior to and during their teacher education are important and need to be understood if the goals of…

With the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses globally, the overall aim of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the linguistic aptitude of autistic individuals. Given that the autism diagnosis is a spectrum, we rely on the Autism Quotient (AQ) test, which measures the quantity of autistic-like traits an individual possesses,…

This paper provides an experimental study of interlanguage phonological characteristics of Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language and the accentedness perceived by native Thai speakers. Both production and perception experiments were designed to see how Chinese students acoustically produced Thai final nasal consonants and how Thai…

This study considers the performance of tone pronunciation and morpheme intelligibility by L2 Polish Mandarin learners. A mixed-effects ordinal regression model and Tukey's HSD multiple test were used to examine the start-point, end-point, of syllables as a means of assessing their intelligibility by L2 Polish learners regarding the tones with the…

This paper presents the results of a brief mixed-methods intervention which sought to modify the production of prominence-related features in L2 English by four native French-speaking university lecturers, in read-aloud speech. Selected parts of participants' productions were acoustically modified and then used as the model in a Listen-and-Repeat…

Idiomatic expressions like "hit the road" or "turn the tables" are known to be problematic for L2 learners, but research indicates that learning L2 idiomatic language is important. Relatively few studies, most of them focusing on English idioms, have investigated how L2 idioms are actually acquired and how this process is…

The perennial challenge of reading fluency, notably profound among Asian EFL learners, stems largely from linguistic disparities, conventional teaching paradigms, and ingrained cognitive practices. This study critically investigates the challenges Chinese undergraduates face with English reading fluency, notably due to linguistic disparities and…

In order to inform English foreign language (EFL) diagnostic assessment of literacy, this study examined the extent to which 175 first-language Hebrew-speaking EFL young learners from fifth to tenth grade exhibited differences in single-letter grapheme recognition, sub-word, and word reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and…

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalization process. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2) acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as their first language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of…

The present study investigates whether training second language pronunciation with tactile cues facilitates the production of non-native sounds involving accessible articulatory features. In a between-subjects experiment with a pretest-training-posttest design, 50 Turkish learners of English received audiovisual training on a set of target words…

This study examined the effects of Spaceteam ESL, a digital shouting game, on the development of oral reading fluency (ORF) among 71 English as a second language (ESL) students in three primary and secondary schools in Mombasa, Kenya. Following a mixed-methods approach for data collection and analysis, we pre-tested and post-tested the…

One of the challenges in teaching a foreign language is: finding appropriate ways to enable students to develop their reading fluency and comprehension. Repeated reading and listening-while-reading are two significant strategies that enhance students' fluency and comprehension. This study aimed to develop fluency and comprehension of EFL college…

This study explores collaborative and individual computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT) through a quasi-experimental design. Eighteen adult Algerian EFL learners were recruited and randomly assigned into a control group receiving no treatment and two experimental groups, a collaborative CAPT group where the participants practiced in pairs, and…