This qualitative case study examined the impact of listening to Global Englishes on the development of listening comprehension in pre-intermediate English students at Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica. Using questionnaires, focus groups, and observations, the research explored students' perceptions of various English speakers from different…

This paper considers one of the relevant problems of modern pedagogy - the use of logical approaches in teaching to the development of thought and language of primary schoolchildren. The purpose of the study is to determine the main criteria for the developmental education of thought and language to primary school children and to assess the level…

The "home literacy environment" (HLE) refers to the physical, interpersonal, and emotional/motivational factors in the home that have been found to be important for children's literacy development. In this paper, the emergence of HLE research, its conceptualizations, and the effects of HLE factors are reviewed with an emphasis on the…

Mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a growing interest in the functional impact of masks on speech and communication. Prior work has shown that masks dampen sound, impede visual communication cues, and reduce intelligibility. However, more work is needed to understand how speakers change their speech while wearing a mask and to…

Research on the development of children's decontextualized language has focused primarily on their references to events displaced in time. Here, we examine children's early emerging ability to talk about individuals who are elsewhere and therefore not participating in the conversation. We analyzed the references made by three Mandarin-speaking…

Richards (2015) states that receptive competence is far more developed in all language users than productive competence and that in L2 learning, new lexis first shows as passive knowledge and later as active or productive competence. Moreover, productive competence is not a natural corollary to receptive competence; rather, the former requires…

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and…

Willingness to communicate (WTC) is an important individual learner difference that can help account for varying rates of language-learning success across individuals. As learner talk is considered to be a key pedagogical activity, instructors and researchers often strive to identify and manipulate key variables that will increase and arouse a…

This study examines whether or not cultural capital has a predictive role in speaking performance. This is a mixed-methods study. Its data were collected from 263 participants (118 females, 145 males) of different ages and professions. The Cultural Capital Scale and a semi-structured interview form were used to collect the data. The participants'…

Purpose: Speech recognition percent correct scores fail to capture the effort of mentally repairing the perception of speech that was initially misheard. This study measured the effort of listening to stimuli specifically designed to elicit mental repair in adults who use cochlear implants (CIs). Method: CI listeners heard and repeated sentences…

Teacher talk has been found to significantly affect children's early language development during shared book reading; however, the mechanism of such influence remains unclear. The current study has zoomed in on vocabulary development in Mandarin as a heritage language (HL) in Singapore kindergartens, 1) exploring the linguistic features (i.e.…

International studies of talk-intensive (or 'dialogic') pedagogies have demonstrated that children who experience academically challenging classroom discussion ('dialogue') make greater progress than their peers who have not had this experience. In England, gains in achievement have been greatest for pupils from less privileged socio-economic…

This study investigates using the concept of norms whether English-Thai interpreters regard direct speech as an appropriate interpreting style in simultaneous interpreting. It also explores whether gender-specific linguistic terms in Thai, which consist of first-person pronouns and formality-marking particles (FMPs), affect the interpreter to…

High-quality public speaking skills convey strong and effective communication, a critical professional and workplace competency that positively impacts personal lives as well. Skill acquisition and mastery improve public speaking confidence, which in turn reinforces the speaker's abilities. Improving oral communication skills requires instruction,…

The author describes a challenge that is familiar to many language teachers: trying to get students to speak up independently, share thoughts, and participate authentically in the target language. The article includes general and specific tips for creating a comfortable, communicative classroom environment.