As a result of the Japanese Ministry of Education's recent edict that students' written and spoken English should be assessed in university entrance exams, there is an urgent need for tools to help teachers and students prepare for these exams. Although some commercial tools already exist, they are generally expensive and inflexible. To address…

Many learners of English as a foreign language often feel that learning spoken English is frustrating and quite difficult, especially when they have to talk to English-speaking foreigners. In general, because they are unfamiliar with the spoken mode of English and are worried about making grammatical errors, they often feel very scared to speak…

This study compared the multidimensional effects of written and oral vocabulary exercises on EFL learners' retention of single-word items (SWI) and multi-word items (MWI). Two teaching experiments (times) were conducted with 54 college students, who studied four themed-based texts, two at a time. A total of 60 unfamiliar vocabulary items, 30 in…

This study investigated the effects of two types of classroom instructions on EFL learners' oral proficiency by implementing teachers' judgment. Two intact classes of EFL university students studied a compulsory subject of their department under two different types of classroom instruction. The first group of students was trained with explicit…

A constructivist approach to language learning can motivate students by activating their brains to create new knowledge and reflect more consistently and deeply on their language learning experience. The present study focused on assessing the use of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) speakers Google Home Mini and Amazon Alexa as part of a Blended…

The study considers the assessment of L2 English learners by trained raters in paired and group oral assessments in comparison to an individual, monologue assessment, to determine 1) the degree to which raters assign pairs/groups shared (the same) scores and the degree to which raters give individual members of pairs/groups higher or lower as…

This study investigates whether a natural order exists for non-native acquisition in the production of English syllable coda obstruents by Korean and Chinese adult native speakers. We recorded L2 English monosyllabic words produced by 66 Chinese and 51 Korean native speakers. The recorded speech was then evaluated by 11 native-speaker listeners of…

Languaging has been identified as a contributor to language learning. Yet, compared to oral languaging, such as collaborative dialogs in contextualized settings, little seems to be known about written languaging. In order to fill this gap, this study investigates languaging in the form of "metanotes," that is, metatalk in a written…

This paper reports the compilation of a corpus of Taiwanese students' spoken English, which is one of the sub-corpora of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010). LINDSEI is one of the largest corpora of learner speech. The compilation process follows the design criteria…

Current literature points to the importance and benefits of extensive reading. Extensive reading provides contextualized clues for better reading comprehension (Krashen, 1982), and substantial linguistic input (Bell, 1998) needed for language development. Several studies have found a correlation between extensive reading and specific linguistic…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) describes language proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and listening on a 6-level scale. In this study, English-language experts from across Europe linked CEFR levels to scores on three tests: the TOEFL® iBT test, the TOEIC® assessment, and the TOEIC "Bridge"™ test.…

The Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC®) is an ETS-developed measure of proficiency in English as a second language (ESL) or foreign language (EFL), designed to assess aspects of English language listening comprehension (LC) and reading comprehension (RC). In general samples of native speakers of Japanese, Korean, French,…

The Common European Framework describes language proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and listening on a six-level scale. The Framework provides a common language with which to discuss students' progress. This report describes a study conducted with two panels of English language experts to map scores from four tests that collectively assess…