During the last decades, global interest in learning English as a foreign language has increased, encouraging countries to include it in school education. This trend was followed by the Chilean Ministry of Education, which suggests teaching English based on a communicative approach starting in early childhood education. To foster students'…

This action research centered on features of oral fluency among Chilean higher education students, focusing on the 'describing picture strategy' innovation. Set in the context of the Advanced English II course, the study determines the effects of the strategy in boosting oral fluency. The intervention of this investigation was enhanced by…

Technology has influenced not only our everyday lives, but our education systems and the opportunities for teacher development. The introduction of information and communications technology has presented new training platforms to respond to the needs of the workforce. While traditional institutions have greatly impacted teachers, there are now…

This study deeply examines the potential impact of Project-Based Learning (PBL) on the speaking abilities of a group of seventh-grade students at a public school in Cartagena, Colombia, and its connection to language learning strategies. A mixed-gender group of thirty-five students aged between 12 and 15 was randomly chosen for this explorative…

Fostering target language use in second language classrooms is a persistent challenge for teachers. A lack of specific guidelines in curriculum documents, inexperience with a wide variety of pedagogical approaches, and the tendency to default to English have been documented as reasons behind this challenge. Strategies from the neurolinguistic…

Speaking is considered as a challenging skill to improve as it is a productive one which requires the learners to be unique and creative in the way they express themselves. Therefore, teaching speaking takes the attention of the researchers in the field of English language teaching. Therefore, the way "speaking" was integrated into the…

When an endangered or minority language is spoken by children and taught in schools, both oral and literacy skills are crucial for continued language maintenance. In school settings, literacy skills are often prioritised to support the transition to second language literacy, and rich oral language development is overlooked. This paper presents a…

This book innovatively connects the two fields of oracy and practice-oriented empirical research in English language education. It creates synergies and proposes innovative approaches to the study of oracy in the context of learning and teaching English as a second, additional or foreign language. The book also develops a contemporary and holistic…

The study reported in this article was aimed at investigating whether making the findings of second language fluency research accessible to language teachers has an impact on their self-reported understanding of the concept of oral fluency, confidence in promoting it, and classroom practice in short and medium term. The data come from 106 initial…

This article reports how simulation strategy applied to improve student's speaking skill. The participants were 36 students of State Junior High School 1 Citeureup, Kranggan, West Java. For about two months they were taught speaking using simulation strategy. The instruments used were speaking test and observation. The data were analyzed using the…

In student-teachers' education, it is fundamental to foster the intercultural communicative competence for them to express their views on cultural concepts and phenomena in written and orally, with native and non-native speakers of a foreign language. In the same vein, future foreign language teachers, particularly at an early stage of their…

Whereas previous research revealed the interactional variability occurring in oral assessments, demonstrating how it could undermine test validity (e.g., A. Brown, 2003), little has been published regarding how language programs can mine and analyze video recordings of in-house oral placement tests for validation purposes. Addressing this need,…

This paper reports an action-research study aimed at exploring the benefits of the critical analysis of YouTubers' content through the empowerment spiral model to foster students' talk as performance. Twenty 11th-grade students shared alternative messages related to social issues based on content analysis and reflections. Data were collected via…

This study represents program-level action research. A U.S. university Spanish language program had a goal for students to reach the ACTFL (2012) Intermediate Mid level after 2 years. An empirical question that resulted after regular end-of-year testing was whether the students were doing their best on assessments. To investigate this, 253…

This paper presents a study that looked into the structuring of tasks that may foster oral fluency in an intensive eight-week course with 25 young adult and adult learners of English as a foreign language in a format of tutoring sessions for conversation. The action research involved two teachers and a research advisor, coauthors of this paper.…