Automatic Speech Scoring (ASS) has increasingly become a useful tool in oral proficiency testing for Second Language (L2) learners. However, limited studies investigate the alignment of ASS indices with the Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF)--the three dimensions in evaluating L2 speakers' oral proficiency, and the subsequent impact indices…

This study intends to contribute to the methodological debate into L2 pragmatics research by examining the usability of immersive virtual reality (VR) for developing a pragmatics task. The study compared participants' speech act performance between two closed role-play tasks using different mediums: computer-based and VR-based. Sixty-two native…

This chapter reports on a study investigating non-expert raters' scoring behavior and cognitive processes involved in evaluating speech acts and pragmatic routines in L2 Chinese. Pragmatic production data were collected from 51 American learners of Chinese, who completed a 12-item oral Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The learners were divided…

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on…

Being able to speak or communicate orally is an ultimate goal for most English language learners. Thus, teaching speaking is a main component of the curriculum in most communicative-based English language classrooms. However, teachers struggle to teach speaking in English language classrooms. Two main reasons contribute to this struggle:…

This study adopted an action research design to analyze the contribution of the Elevator Pitch technique on English as foreign language learners' oral fluency. Six 11th graders in a rural at-risk context in a vocational public high school in Hualqui, Chile participated in this study. The Elevator Pitch technique was implemented during seven…

Previous research has shown that task repetition can positively affect L2 oral performance. However, few studies have explored the effects of task repetition on young EFL learners' production. Also, task repetition research has paid little attention to effects of "spacing" examined through longer time intervals between the two occasions…

Language testing research has suggested that placement accuracy can be an important factor in the consequences of placement decision-making. However, previous studies primarily have used a one-shot teacher judgment of placement accuracy, suffering from a lack of students' perspectives of their time-varying experiences. The present study aimed to…

To examine the effects of task repetition with different schedules, English-as-a-foreign-language classroom learners performed the same oral narrative task six times under three different schedules. They narrated the same six-frame cartoon story (a) six times consecutively in one class (massed practice), (b) three times at the beginning and at the…

Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research has examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken lexical use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous…

Although lexical diversity is often used as a measure of productive proficiency (e.g., as an aspect of lexical complexity) in SLA studies involving oral tasks, relatively little research has been conducted to support the reliability and/or validity of these indices in spoken contexts. Furthermore, SLA researchers commonly use indices of lexical…

It is common to have good declarative but poor procedural knowledge of a foreign language, especially for classroom learners. To study this gap in a constrained manner, we asked Chinese learners of English to repeat, correct and produce indirect speech. The indirect speech construction was selected in the present study because it is known to be a…

The present study examines the effects of pre-task explicit instruction on second language (L2) oral self-repair behaviour while controlling for the effects of working memory. The participants were 121 Iranian learners of English at incipient levels of language proficiency. Their working memory was measured using an operation span task and then…

Creating its own learner corpus, this research proposed to analyze and classify the transition markers used in solo presentation by 30 Thai engineering students based on Hyland (2019)'s Marker Categorization in Textual Metadiscourse. This research also aimed to identify and compare the quantities of individual transition markers among three groups…

A language 'test' is a systematic procedure for observing a person's behavior and describing it with the aid of a numerical scale or category system (Cronbach LJ 1971: 26). A test cannot be based on a selection of items chosen on linguistic grounds alone, and that to devise an effective test, it is necessary to specify how an examinee requires to…