Language learning activities involving time-pressured repetition of similar content have been shown to facilitate improvements in fluency. However, concerns have been voiced about whether these gains might be offset by reduced levels of grammatical accuracy. This descriptive study tracked the oral proficiency of 32 Japanese university students…

The article, "morphosyntactic peculiarities of the speech of children with Down's syndrome", treats, important aspects of the study of two adjacent branches of linguistics, namely, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics-Language development of the child accompanied by speech disorders, on the other hand, those morphosyntactic features…

Providing feedback on EFL Learners' speaking errors has been extensively researched, with numerous studies highlighting its benefits (Van Ha, et al., 2021; Hartono, 2022). This study investigates the impact of "pending feedback", a type of feedback where students must independently discover the correct answer. This research emphasizes…

This article discusses, from a sociocognitive perspective, the integration of usage-based linguistics (UBL) models in favor of conversation analysis (CA) for second language acquisition (SLA). On this basis, it presents a pedagogical approach, viz. role-based interaction analysis (RBIA) for foreign language learning (FLL), by scaffolding, tracking…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock-teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The…

This study sought to identify the challenges and needs of TOEFL iBT candidates in achieving C1 level scores in the speaking and writing sections of the exam. To this end, the researcher employed a mixed-method approach to collect data from a population of 46 students, both male and female, between the ages of 22 and 30. The participants were…

Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the trajectory of Spanish article accuracy in Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) from preschool to first grade, addressing the need for longitudinal data on the variability of Spanish grammatical skills in DLLs in English immersion classrooms. Method: Language sample analysis was conducted…

The present study investigated the influence of orthographic input on the recognition of second language (L2) spoken words with phonological variants, when first language (L1) and L2 have different orthographic structures. Lexical encoding for intermediate-to-advanced level Mandarin learners of Korean was assessed using masked cross-modal and…

The rating of proficiency tests that use the Inter-agency Roundtable (ILR) and American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines claims that each major level is based on hierarchal linguistic functions that require mastery of multidimensional traits in such a way that each level subsumes the levels beneath it. These…

Research has suggested the important role of vocabulary knowledge in second language (L2) speaking proficiency. However, earlier studies tended to disregard the congruence in test format between assessing vocabulary knowledge and speaking skills with the former predominantly measured in written format. The current study measured vocabulary…

Nonverbal behavior can impact language proficiency scores in speaking tests, but there is little empirical information of the size or consistency of its effects or whether language proficiency may be a moderating variable. In this study, 100 novice raters watched and scored 30 recordings of test takers taking an international, high stakes…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Companion Volume (CEFR CV) emphasizes macro-functions of language (i.e., reception, production, interaction, and mediation). However, there seems to be little consensus on whether the macro-functions are commensurable with CEFR-based proficiency tests. This paper focuses on the Examination…

The study investigates which grammar features need high priority of pedagogical intervention to develop implicit knowledge, unlike grammatical features in need of explanation of explicit rules. Two types of data were collected from 29 Korean college students: a sentence completion test in English and a meta-linguistic knowledge test (requiring…

The factors that influence rater scoring have been a subject of great interest to researchers in second language assessment. However, the research on the impact of test-takers' speech profiles (e.g., a jagged or a flat profile reflecting analytic subscores) on raters' scoring behaviors remains to be seen. To investigate the role of speech profiles…