This study examines student perspectives on gender differences in Japanese speech. Expanding on a small-scale survey by Siegal & Okamoto (2003) that investigated the views of eleven Japanese-language college teachers, this study analyzes 238 questionnaire responses from 220 Japanese-language students at four universities and a US government…

Background: Feedback is one of the most significant factors for students' development of writing skills. For feedback to be successful, however, students and teachers need a common language--a meta-language--for discussing texts. Not least because in science education such a meta-language might contribute to improve writing training and…

The need to teach medical students plain language for their future engagement in pain communication can no longer be underestimated. Pain education has traditionally neglected the teaching of pain language, yet patients' descriptive accounts have been acknowledged as the standard in medical care. English for Medical Purposes (EMP) can make its…

Pronunciation plays a vital role in creating a language acceptable to all. This is also true in the case of Sri Lankan English (hereafter SLE). This study concentrates mainly on the phonological features of non-standard SLE, identified mainly by deviations in pronunciation of a few vowels and consonants. The objective of this paper is to analyze…

The paper's aim is to propose a design for a syllabus for the new Muslims who have recently converted to Islam. The syllabus is multifaceted, addressing the basic linguistic, stylistic, and lexical features of 3 Surahs (chapters) in the holy book in addition to highlighting the most basic information a new Muslim has to know about the sacred book.…

The transformation of higher education has been a pressing concern for policy makers and practitioners. This article provides examples of the transformative potential of assessments designed within the framework of a multi-literacies and heteroglossic pedagogy in an Applied English Language course at a South African university. These assessments,…

This study explores relationships among reading literature, creative writing, and language development in a university-level advanced French grammar course through the theoretical lens of the multiliteracies framework. The goal is to investigate reading-writing connections and whether these literacy practices facilitate students' understanding and…

The emergence of English as the international language of communication has increased the attention and concern given its teaching and learning. This survey-based study explores the attitudes of Spanish practitioners and undergraduate students towards English as the vehicular language in the field of medicine and towards Medical Electronic…

The research reported in this paper adopts a sociocultural approach to the comparative study of Thai and Serbian foreign language learning settings, seeking to identify similarities and differences in student perception of teacher approaches to teaching EFL. The participants in the research included a total of 439 Thai and 106 Serbian students.…

The "e-rater"® automated essay scoring system is used operationally in the scoring of the argument and issue tasks that form the Analytical Writing measure of the "GRE"® General Test. For each of these tasks, this study explored the value added of reporting 4 trait scores for each of these 2 tasks over the total e-rater score.…

Studies have examined various factors that affect pronunciation including phonetic context, style variation, first language transfer, and experience abroad. A plethora of research has also linked motivation to higher levels of proficiency in the second language. The present study uses native speaker ratings and multiple regression analysis to…

The present study focuses on the language attitudes underlying patterns of stylistic variation in the speech of a female former President of the Spanish local Government of Murcia. We build on previous quantitative work demonstrating that this speaker shows unexpectedly high usage levels for nonstandard Murcian Spanish features in public speech,…

The demand for communication skills training for science research postgraduates (RPGs) has been increasing over the years. Many potential scientists and researchers in the industry are under enormous pressure to get published (Cargill, O'Connor & Li, 2012) and to attend conferences and seminars. In light of the aforementioned needs, all…

Granted the fact that different cultures have different speaking styles, knowledge of these styles can help people grasp the essence of social cultural knowledge to communicate with others more successfully. In this regard, the present paper aims at comparing the use of speech act of gratitude in Persian and Chinese EFL learners and English native…

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate whether powerful language training affected student participation, impression formation, and gender communication style in online discussions. Powerful language was defined as a lack of the use of powerless language. Participants in this study were 507 freshmen taking a first-year college…