Dialogic reading, in which parents engage children in discussion of books, is associated with long-term literacy success. Social media is an emerging platform for promoting behavioral change, but it has yet to be tested as a platform for engaging parents in use of dialogic reading strategies with their young children. This exploratory study was…

The present study aimed to examine the contributions of two separate Pinyin skills and oral vocabulary to Chinese word reading of 70 third graders in a U.S. Mandarin Immersion program where Pinyin was introduced at Grade 3. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that Pinyin initial-final spelling--the skill to spell Chinese syllables using Pinyin…

Oral corrective feedback has attracted the attention of EFL teachers and researchers in recent decades. The current study aims to investigate EFL learners' preferences and emotions about oral corrective feedback with a specific focus on gender and grade level at secondary education in Turkey. Quantitative research methods were used to reveal the…

In a study of approaches to teaching listening, an experimental group (EG) of seventeen English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates received genre-based instruction, beginning with a guided analysis of the context of oral production, the language used, the variations and organization of second language (L2) oral texts about films, leading…

This work was motivated by the idea of approaching teaching practice in multilevel classes based on a problem, namely the need to improve the management of time in these types of classes. The time management strategy, developed in this work, consists of applying two modes of alternating teaching, the classical mode "work and make work"…

This paper intends to provide an Optimality-theoretic analysis of word-stress learnability among Moroccan learners of English. Language acquisition, from an Optimality Theory perspective, is a process of reordering the constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. To account for stress…

More than words are stories to be told. Stories tell a lot about people's thoughts, experiences, and practices which in turn speak about people's language, identity, and cultural heritage. The present study deals with the documentation and analysis of "Mag-Antsi," the native language of Ayta Mag-Antsi indigenous people in the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to test whether a group of older postlingually deafened cochlear implant users (OCIs) use similar verbal memory strategies to those used by older normal-hearing adults (ONHs). Verbal memory functioning was assessed in the visual and auditory modalities separately, enabling us to eliminate possible modality-based…

This study examines how language attitudes play a role in the adoption of dialectal variants in second language (L2) pronunciation in a study abroad context. Twenty-four North American university students participating in a 6-week program in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were administered pre and posttest questionnaires and a posttest oral production…

This study attempts to reveal whether there is unintentional reverse transfer L2[right arrow]L1 (English-Spanish) in the oral L1 production of university learners in formal contexts. The languages used by learners influence each other, and this transfer may occur from the first to the second language ("direct transfer"), or from the…

Assessment is an important element of any effective teaching and learning strategy. Designing an appropriate assessment strategy is a continual challenge for instructors because the assessment structure must be well aligned with the intended learning outcomes. Technological advances have led to an expansion of online and distance modes of course…

Tasks with different design factors may dissimilarly affect oral production, and thus can be adopted for different pedagogical purposes. However, the functions of task types are not fully explored. To address this gap, this study investigates the influence of content familiarity and task repetition on sixty English as a foreign language learners'…

Hundreds of millions of language learners around the globe study a second language with popular apps such as Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Busuu, and Babbel. This study examined the effectiveness of one app, Babbel, for developing both receptive linguistic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, as well as oral communicative ability in Spanish as a second…

The issue of whether, when, and how to respond to learners' oral errors is something every teacher has to consider. Early studies of teachers' feedback practices consisted of observations of how they managed this complex process (e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997). Beginning with these descriptions, a large body of research on types of oral…

In spoken discourse, understanding irony requires the apprehension of subtle cues, such as the speaker's tone of voice (prosody), which often reveal the speaker's affective stance toward the listener in the context of the utterance. To shed light on the interplay of linguistic content and prosody on impressions of spoken criticisms and compliments…