French learners at university meet difficulties in the comprehension of oral English. Being in a formal context of language learning, they need to develop language awareness to compensate for insufficient exposure to the English language. To meet the students' needs, data was collected in order to pinpoint the main errors made by French learners…

This paper investigates difficulties that teachers encounter in teaching oral English in higher education in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Open-ended question surveys and semi-structured interviews were used to elicit data. There were 331 EFL teachers from 44 universities in 22 cities across China that responded to the survey…

There is a system of English mouthing during interpretation that appears to be the result of language contact between spoken language and signed language. English mouthing is a voiceless visual representation of words on a signer's lips produced concurrently with manual signs. It is a type of borrowing prevalent among English-dominant…

Effective listening comprehension skills are important as the world becomes increasingly global and television, radio, and the Internet become forums for English communication. However, many countries, such as Tunisia, do not use English as a first or second language, but as a foreign language. Therefore, realizing the importance of English, the…

This hands-on guide shows elementary school teachers how to create multilingual classroom communities that support every learner's success in reading, writing, and general literacy development. The author provides a practical overview of key ideas and techniques and describes specific literacy activities that lead to vocabulary and oral English…

Research concerning the spatial dimension "fit" ("tight" versus "loose") has been based on a tacit but untested assumption that the dimension "fit" is symmetrical, with tight- and loose-fitting relations highlighting the dimension "fit" with equal force. We propose a reformulation, documenting that adult speakers of English (Experiment 1) and…

Purpose: The paper sought to investigate TESL teachers' knowledge and understanding of the Malaysian School Based Oral English Assessment (SBOEA) after five years into its implementation in upper secondary ESL classrooms in Malaysian public schools Method: The descriptive study involved a total of 80 TESL trained teachers from the 19 schools…

According to Ur (1996, 120), "of all the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), speaking seems intuitively the most important." Indeed, whether for business or pleasure, a primary motivation to learn a second language is to be able to converse with speakers of that language. However, in addition to being an important…

This exploratory study investigates the impact of class size on the rhetorical move structures and lexico-grammatical features of academic lecture introductions. From the MICASE corpus (The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), two small corpora of lecture introductions of small- and large-class lectures were compiled. Using a genre-based…

This study examines the academic experiences of heritage Spanish-speakers who were placed in a traditional Spanish class for non-Spanish speakers at the secondary level. Each of the participants in the study demonstrated advanced-levels of oral proficiency in Spanish yet each was placed in a beginning-level Spanish class. An ethnographic case…

The study reported here examined the evaluation criteria used to assess the proficiency and effectiveness of the language produced in an oral performance test of English conducted in an American university context. Empirical methods were used to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively transcriptions of the Oral English Tests (OET) of 44…

This article examines the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) to develop a profile of immigrant adults with varying levels of oral English proficiency. The NAAL data on adult limited English proficient (LEP) immigrants are used here to examine their education levels, workforce involvement, incomes, use of public benefits,…

It is argued that tasks with different structures yield different performances in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity. The present study is thus an attempt to investigate the impact of task structure on second language task performance. Thirty two upper-intermediate Iranian learners of English performed two narrative tasks (Structured vs.…

How to improve students' ability of speaking English? That is the key point we are concerned about. This paper discusses the possibility and necessity of improving students' ability by combining the four skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Davison and Leung (this issue) describe the field of teacher-based English language assessment as having "much variability, a lack of systematic principles and procedures and a dearth of information as to the impact of teacher-based assessments on learning and teaching" (p. 389). In this article, the author briefly explores an example of…