Most Taiwanese universities and colleges offer a wide selection of English courses, compulsory or elective to cater to student needs. Compulsory courses are usually prerequisites for selective courses, except when students can prove an exceptionally high proficiency level with authenticated evidence, then the course can be waived and take…

There is extensive research in elementary education on effective practices that support academic success for students with mild to moderate disabilities in general education; however there is a dearth of research on high school inclusion practices. A survey examined the current inclusionary practices at a Central Coast High School. California…

The context clue strategy to derive the meaning of unfamiliar words and its effectiveness have been generally accepted, and the strategy is widely taught to ESL/EFL students. This study aimed to (1) compare the abilities in making use of context clues to derive the meaning of vocabulary among four groups of English major undergraduate students…

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of scaffolding strategies using input and output-oriented tasks on Iranian EFL learners' receptive and productive knowledge of lexical collocations. For this purpose, 540 adult intermediate-level EFL learners--both male and female--were selected and divided into six experimental groups; three…

Purpose: Using a new measure of family-level executive functioning (EF; the Family Characteristics Scale [FCS]), we investigated associations between family-level EF, spoken language, and neurocognitive skills in children with hearing loss (HL), compared to children with normal hearing. Method: Parents of children with HL (n = 61) or children with…

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…

The present study aims at scrutinizing the inference complexity level (henceforth ICL) of test items of the Iranian State University TEFL Ph.D. entrance exam (ISUTPEE) from 2010 to 2017 through the lens of Kintsch's "construction-integration theory" (C-I) (Kintsch, 1988, 1998). Though there is ample research on inferencing in the field…

This study examines low-intermediate to advanced ESL learners' awareness of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is a word/unit association that expresses an attitudinal meaning (described as favourable, neutral, unfavourable), which emerges from the word's typical lexical environment. Sensitivity to and awareness of such associations is an…

Studies of lexical coverage are valuable because they reveal the importance of vocabulary knowledge to comprehension. Lexical profiling research is also extremely useful because it indicates the vocabulary knowledge necessary to understand different text types such as novels, newspapers, academic lectures, television programs, and movies.…

The last three decades have seen an increase of tests aimed at measuring an individual's vocabulary level or size. The target words used in these tests are typically sampled from word frequency lists, which are in turn based on language corpora. Conventionally, test developers sample items from frequency bands of 1000 words; different tests employ…

The outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide in 2020 has posed tremendous challenges to higher education globally. Teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) is among the many areas affected by the pandemic. The unexpected transition to online teaching has increased challenges for improving and/or retaining students' language proficiency. WeChat, a…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the diagnostic accuracy of traditional measures of phonological ability developed for monolingual English-speaking children with their bilingual peers in both English and Spanish. We predicted that a composite measure, derived from a combination of English and Spanish phonological measures, would…

Dynamic Assessment (DA) is proposed as a workable diagnostic tool in second or foreign language context. Compared to traditional non-dynamic testing, DA presents a more comprehensive account of human beings' abilities through addressing both the fully internalized abilities and the abilities that are in the process of being internalized. However,…

While aptitude has been seen to contribute to second language (L2) development, most studies have examined its contribution as a fixed trait, rather than viewing it as a dynamic, changing variable. There appears to have been little or no investigation of the role that aptitude plays in the development of L2 pragmatic ability. Therefore, this study…

The present study empirically scrutinizes the fixed natural order of grammatical morphemes relying on a manual analysis of an EFL learner corpus. Specifically, we test whether the accuracy order of L2 grammatical morphemes in the case of L1 Turkish speakers of English deviates from Krashen's (1977) natural order and whether proficiency levels play…