Courses: Public Speaking, Storytelling, Performance Ethnography, Oral Interpretation, Language and Communication. Objectives: The aims of this class exercise are: (1) To engage in a collaborative creative process of developing a story/topic from a simple idea to deepening the relationship with the audience through vivid and evocative language; (2)…

Focus on his biography and his performance in the media has long been the basis of interpretation of Bob Dylan's identity. This has resulted in the accepted critical theory of Dylan's identity as mercurial and lacking a central ipseity. However, as Michael Strachan argues, rock biography is an unstable genre because it treats its subjects as…

Previous research has considered the effects of content familiarity and task repetition on second language (L2) performance, but few studies have looked at the effect of these factors on learners' engagement in task performance. This study explores the influence of content familiarity and task repetition on English as a foreign language (EFL)…

This article reports on a study that investigated the role of metapragmatic awareness of L2 learners in Hong Kong, and the impact it has on language choices when addressing requests in English. Simulated open role-plays and retrospective interviews were used to explore the ways in which mainland Chinese undergraduates assess, plan and produce…

This dissertation investigates L2 student language production, task-based instruction, and teachers' scaffolding strategies in two special EFL classes in a Vietnamese university. Two English teachers and 73 students were studied as they participated in a nationwide educational project known as the Advanced Curriculum (AC), an initiative launched…

This article presents preliminary data correlating students' scores on measures of speaking, listening, and reading with their grades in Spanish courses. As might be expected, students with higher grades generally scored higher on performance assessments than did classmates with lower course grades. However, large score ranges resulted within a…

The theme of this volume, complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as dimensions of second language production, proficiency and development, represents a thriving area of research that addresses two general questions that are at the heart of many studies in second language acquisition and applied linguistics: What makes a second language (L2)…

The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic…

The present study explores the use of conjunctions in simple versus complex argumentative tasks performed by second language (L2) learners as a specific measure for the amount of reasoning involved in task performance. The Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2005) states that an increase in cognitive task complexity promotes improvements in L2…

This study investigated how task complexity affected native and non-native speakers' speaking performance in terms of a measure of communicative success (functional adequacy), three types of fluency (breakdown fluency, speed fluency, and repair fluency), and lexical diversity. Participants (208 non-native and 59 native speakers of Dutch) carried…

This study investigated the effects of synchronous and asynchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication)on the development of linguistic features of learners' speech in Japanese. Using learners from fourth-semester Japanese classes, the following research questions were examined: (a) Does CMC have positive effects on the development of oral…

The author reviews tri-ad language models and suggests that they are not sufficient in describing language use. He introduces a six component language model adopted from the model originally intended for persuasive oratory. (MS)

The spoken language of Israeli children from various socioeconomic and ethnic groups was compared in terms of pragmatic strategies of communication in order to evaluate whether disadvantaged children were linguistically deficient. Interviews were conducted with a sample of 11- and 12-year-old children from privileged and disadvantaged backgrounds.…

This paper provides a brief but broad review of studies in semantics. Particular attention is given to I.A. Richards' analyses of utterances, to value statements which express moral or ethical judgments, and to recent efforts to formulate a logic of contextual implication. J.L. Austin's analysis of performative, or illocutionary, utterances and…

Confirms that listeners rely on communicators' levels of linguistic nonimmediacy (the degree of verbal indirectness with which communicators refer to themselves) for impression formation. (RB)