Complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) as measures of language proficiency have been used extensively in assessing second language production in English language studies related to task-based language teaching. The present review adds the following critical elements to the existing body of literature: (i) Provides synthesis and critical analysis…

Elicited imitation tasks (EITs) have been shown to be a valid, reliable, and practical method for establishing second-language (L2) oral proficiency across a variety of languages. Nevertheless, research that has validated existing EITs has most often explored a narrow range of learner proficiencies or has examined how well the EIT distinguishes…

Second language (L2) learners can assess their oral skills with some accuracy. A question is whether learners can reliably use self-assessment to track their language gains over time. During the spring of two subsequent years, 80 university L2 Chinese learners completed an oral skills self-assessment based on the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements…

Usage-based linguistics posits that communicative functions, including pragmatics, are at the core of language (Tomasello, 1992). It is surprising, then, that pragmatics is rarely systematically included in second language curricula (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2017), especially since pragmatics instruction has been shown to significantly contribute to…

The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and accompanying proficiency guidelines have become a mainstay in academic foreign language assessment. In 2006, an asynchronous electronic interface of the OPI was made available in which candidates are asked to record themselves responding to questions delivered aurally via computer, labeled the Oral…

This paper reports the outcomes of an experimental evaluation of "Direct Instruction Spoken English" ("DISE"), an English language curriculum that focuses on developing English speaking, listening, and comprehension skills in English Learners (ELs). Twenty-nine middle schools in three states were randomly assigned to teach…

This paper reports the outcomes of an experimental evaluation of "Direct Instruction Spoken English (DISE)," an English language curriculum that focuses on developing English speaking, listening, and comprehension skills in English Learners (ELs). Twenty-nine middle schools in three states were randomly assigned to teach "DISE"…

The present study intended to examine the effectiveness of the Vaughan method for the development of EFL learners' speaking skill. The Vaughan method was compared with two other methods, namely the Audiolingual method and communicative language teaching with regard to the development of learners' speaking skill. In a quasi-experimental design,…

Studies investigating teacher candidate performance on traditional assessments of content knowledge place emphasis on just one of many skills needed to be an effective foreign language teacher; they also fail to explain why many teacher candidates with advanced oral proficiency struggle in the classroom and why some with less advanced language…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

This study was designed to investigate the effects of incidental unfocused prompts and recasts on improving English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' grammatical accuracy as measured in students' oral interviews and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) grammar test. The design of the study was quasi-experimental with pre-tests,…

Corpus linguistics identifies the qualitative difference in the characteristics of spoken discourse vs. written academic discourse. Whereas spoken discourse makes greater use of finite dependent clauses functioning as constituents in other clauses, written academic discourse incorporates noun phrase constituents and complex phrases. This claim can…

Courtroom interpreting requires a high level of accuracy due to the strategic use of language in such an institutional setting. It is generally agreed among interpreting scholars that quality interpreting in court should accurately relay both propositional content and illocutionary force of the original utterances. This high standard of accuracy…

While disagreements are often considered dispreferred choices and potentially face-threatening acts due to their oppositional nature, this perception does not adequately reflect the importance of disagreeing for many types of interaction, such as problem-solving and decision-making. Developing ability in performing this speech act therefore…

Previous studies on hesitation strategies used by beginner or advanced L2 learners revealed that beginners mostly leave their hesitation pauses unfilled which causes their speech to sound disfluent, and advanced learners tend to use various fillers in order to sound like native speakers. The present paper reports on a study which investigated the…