The freedom to express the self and the right to a free public education sets the American public school experience apart from those of many other nations. The combination of the two often creates tensions and confrontations that become contentious leading to litigation. For the past fifty years the courts have attempted to balance the symbolic…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined how signal clarity interacts with the use of sentence context information in determining speech-in-noise recognition for children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing. Method: One hundred and twenty sentences in which the final word varied in predictability (high vs. low semantic…

This study investigated the influence of professional development on 20 preschool teachers' use of instructional conversations in classrooms for 2- to 5-year-old children. Instructional conversation is a small group discussion that builds on children's prior knowledge to assess and assist conceptual understanding. Over a 3-year period, the…

From the early elementary grades through high school, the Common Core State Standards ask students to organize and explain their ideas in oral presentations, use visual aids, and speak appropriately for various contexts and tasks. Although teachers could give assignments that teach some of these skills in isolation, the authors have found that…

To establish which social interactive behaviours predict later psychiatric diagnosis, we examined 180 videos of a parent-infant interaction when children were aged one year, from within the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort. Sixty of the videos involved infants who were later diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder at…

Audiovisual speech consists of overlapping and invariant patterns of dynamic acoustic and optic articulatory information. Research has shown that infants can perceive a variety of basic auditory-visual (A-V) relations but no studies have investigated whether and when infants begin to perceive higher order A-V relations inherent in speech. Here, we…

This study aimed to explore the effects of synchronous and asynchronous computer mediated communication (CMC) oral discussions on question types and strategies used by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The participants were randomly assigned to two treatment conditions/groups; the first group used synchronous CMC, while the second…

The recent "TESOL Quarterly" article by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) raises important considerations with respect to the use of syntactic complexity (SC) measures in second language (L2) studies. The article draws the field's attention to one particular measure--complexity of noun phrases (NP) (i.e., noun phrases with modifiers, such as…

This study investigated the relationship between student satisfaction with speaking classes, speaking skills self-efficacy beliefs, and speaking skills achievement. To this end, one hundred Iranian EFL undergraduate students filled out two questionnaires; a research-made and pilot-tested questionnaire for student satisfaction with speaking…

The present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of English verbal songs on connected speech aspects of adult English learners' speech production. 40 participants were selected based on the results of their performance in a piloted and validated version of NELSON test given to 60 intermediate English learners in a language institute in…

The present intervention study explored the word learning of 18 children with cochlear implants in response to E-book instruction. Capitalizing on the multimedia options available in electronic storybooks, the intervention incorporated videos and definitions to provide a vocabulary intervention that includes evidence-based teaching strategies. The…

In recent years, there has been a growth in the use of rater cognitive data to inform test development and validity arguments. In this study, we examined differences in feature attention and categorisation between experienced and inexperienced raters for a college-level assessment of oral communication. The focus was two-fold: (a) rater cognition…

In a data set of 291 spontaneous utterances from German 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults, nuclear pitch contours were labeled manually using the GToBI annotation system. Ten different contour types were identified.The fundamental frequency (F0) of these contours was modeled using third-order orthogonal polynomials, following an approach similar…

The presented study is aimed at investigating the interaction of palatalization and intrinsic prosodic features of the vowel in CVC (consonant+vowel+consonant) syllables in Russian. The universal nature of intrinsic prosodic vowel features was confirmed with the data from the Russian language. It was found that palatalization of the consonants…

Speaking is sending the message which is desired to be transferred to another one with vocal organs and produced by complicated operations in the brain. Speaking, which is a complicated process, is the most common and important means of communication among people. Speaking, which has essential place both individually and socially, affects success…