This study investigated the effects of complex problem-solving activities involving children's literature on students' critical thinking dispositions and English production. Thirty-one sixth-grade students were given lessons over a seven-week period. Various types of data were analyzed qualitatively, and the results of a critical thinking…

To have necessary and ready skills for careers in the 21st century, students should be given awareness of the importance of English, not only in formal but also non-formal and informal education. However, students still lack English abilities, and their English communication skills are still in need of development. Thus, this study aims to analyse…

Though revising the existing syllabus is part of the Ethiopian education system, the study of the implementations of the notions of the syllabus attracts a few researchers' interests. Therefore, this study investigates teachers' practices of teaching speaking and compares them with the principles of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), the…

Speaking courses in English language education are important to develop many skills. They are enjoyable courses in which students can practice the words, phrases, idioms, or proverbs they learn. Teachers or lecturers are lucky if their students would like to attend the classroom activities, they prepare for their class hours. When students attend…

A browser-based system to facilitate practice in asking and answering simple questions in English was developed. The user may ask or answer by speaking or typing, and the computer's output is in the form of speech and/or text. The types of questions handled and the permitted vocabulary are limited, though the vocabulary items may be edited freely.…

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

Previous research has shown that there is a relationship between language and identity, and thus the present study focuses on ethnic group affiliation (EGA) as a part of one's ethnic group identity and its association with speech constructs (i.e., intelligibility, comprehensibility, accentedness, and acceptability). EGA scores were collected…

This study examined how in-the-moment behaviour of children and family literacy programme use are associated with the affective quality of mother-child interactions and the content of maternal utterances that occurred during book reading. Ninety-Two Latina mother-child dyads were included. Mothers frequently exhibited warm/positive behaviour and…

As the important factors in EFL speaking classroom activities, building students' motivation and interaction in EFL speaking classroom should be designed in meaningful ways. Many studies reported various ways in minimizing the problems as well as proposed innovative ways in teaching speaking skill. One of the ways recommended by the researches is…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to explore the potential of performance on a Danish sentence repetition (SR) task--including specific morphological and syntactic properties--to identify difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to typically developing (TD) children. Furthermore, the potential of the task as a…

Short-term memory (STM) for serially presented visual items is disrupted by task-irrelevant, to-beignored speech. Five experiments investigated the extent to which irrelevant speech is processed semantically by contrasting the following two hypotheses: (1) semantic processing of irrelevant speech is limited and does not interfere with serial STM…

This rejoinder article first examines the foundational theories and models for metaphor use in a number of related fields, as well as in educational administration and leadership, presenting a model for analysis. Secondly, it reviews the articles in this special issue against the model proposed.

Speaking fluently requires three main processes to run smoothly: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. This study investigates to what extent fluency in spontaneous speech in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages can be explained by individual differences in articulatory skills. A group of L2 English learners (n = 51) performed…

The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of using communicative language teaching (CLT) activities on EFL students' speaking skills at the English Language Institute (ELI) of the University of Jeddah (UJ). The researcher conducted the current study in two classes of 21 female EFL students each; one class was the experimental group…