The results of our previous research on the pedagogical use of Speaking Robots (SRs) revealed positive effects on motivating students to practice their oral skills in a stress-free environment. However, our findings indicated that the SR was sometimes unable to understand students' foreign accented speech. In this paper, we report the results of a…

Mobile (m)-learning is motivating to learners to improve foreign language skills, as it offers them a rich, informal, contextual, and ubiquitous learning environment. In this paper I report on the results of two empirical studies that focused on two projects, both of which incorporated e-learning and m-learning, to determine if a blended-learning…

Background: University Entrance Examinations provide information the student's opportunities to succeed in their academic university career. However, the current foreign language paper of the Spanish University Entrance Examination does no permit to obtain enough evidence to make academic inferences. Purpose of Study: The purpose of this study was…

Like many countries building up human and technological resources, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has embarked on the goal of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) to its citizens. One goal for the KSA Ministry of Education is increasing acceptance rates at teacher colleges for both genders specializing in English, in addition to…

Although questions concerning the effects of literacy on society, culture, and the mind remain problematic for anthropology and psychology, considerations of the role played by orality, literacy, or other media in creating different communicative potentials between writer and reader, should not seem out of place in the discipline of rhetoric. Hugh…

A case study examines a nontraditional African-American student enrolled in English 90 at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. The first person in her family to attend college, she is attractive, personal, outspoken and speaks not only the dialect of her family, which shows the influence of French, but also standard English. When asked how…

A replication was conducted of Sterling Leonard's 1932 survey of "Current English Usage," which submitted a questionnaire of expressions to judges consisting of linguists, journalists, teachers, and businessmen. It was hypothesized that more of the expressions in Leonard's study would be acceptable today (looser standards) than was the…

This paper describes and discusses the school leaving examination in oral English in South Africa, which is designed for those whose first language is English and involves the presentation of a prepared talk, reading aloud, and a conversation with a teacher. Each element of the test is discussed and evaluated separately. Problems of reticence in…

In this investigation, 72 second-, fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade speakers of black English were studied in an attempt to determine whether a relationship exists between the speaking of black English and the reading of standard English. Two variables of oral language were examined: the degree of divergence from standard English and the ability…

This paper is a critical survey of the work of various linguists in the field of English intonation studies. Crystal's work is cited as being particularly influential in the author's work. It is argued that there is a lack of progress in this field because of a preoccupation on the part of scholars with their own studies and their application and…

Code-switching is examined in oral narratives of 30 African-American women as they switched from Standard English to Black English Vernacular. A little over half of the speakers assign positive values to their code switches. Examples are given from interviews with two subjects. (SLD)

This study examines the effect upon comprehension, as measured by cloze scores, of material in mathematics that is rewritten on the basis of elementary and junior high school subjects' oral language patterns. Syntactic structures were identified which appeared to inhibit or facilitate comprehension for the subjects involved. The mean number of…

This paper argues that it may be much more damaging, psychologically, to try to correct the written usage of persons whose nonstandard written forms correlate with their spoken dialect than to try to correct the nonstandard written forms of persons who do not use nonstandard forms in their speech. It is possible that nonstandard speakers will view…

This study attempted to assess the linguistic competence of black lower-class speakers within each of two language systems: standard English and Black English. The subjects were 72 black kindergarten, third-, and sixth-graders in a predominantly black community in Toledo, Ohio. All children attending the school were considered lower-class, since…

This paper argues that storytelling needs to be reexamined in light of the changing nature of the elementary school. The problems of storytelling are discussed and five teaching procedures are offered: it is important for the teacher to read several stories before selecting one; the story must be divided into units of action; those sections of the…