This paper examines explicitness in English as lingua franca (ELF) spoken interactions. Using a conversation analysis procedure, about 11h of audio-recorded naturally occuring ELF interactions of 79 incoming Erasmus students were analyzed for this purpose. The corpus was compiled by means of 54 speech events, 29 interviews and 25 focus group…

This study aims to promote English pre-service teachers' speaking ability by integrating task-based learning (TBL) and the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001) in designing an innovative program (the CEFR-TBL). This presentation discusses the results of an investigation of the preservice teachers' speaking ability using peer-interview technique. Also,…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

This research investigated how teachers express links between ideas in speech, gestures, and other modalities in middle school mathematics instruction. We videotaped 18 lessons (3 from each of 6 teachers), and within each, we identified "linking episodes"--segments of discourse in which the teacher connected mathematical ideas. For each…

This study investigated Chinese test takers' attitudes towards the Versant English Test (VET), an automated spoken English test developed by Pearson Knowledge Technologies. Based on previous attitudinal studies, 'attitude' in this study was conceptualized as a hypothetical psychological construct which consisted of three components: beliefs,…

Research on immediate effects of background television during mother-infant toy play shows that an operating television in the room disrupts maternal communicative behaviors crucial for infants' vocabulary acquisition. This study is the first to examine associations between frequent background TV/video exposure during mother-infant toy play at…

Actuality of studying of an issue on specific manifestations of a monologue speech type in bilingual schoolchildren with stutter has been stipulated by the necessity of elaboration of a constituent concept on central mechanisms underlying this kind of communication disorder, on the nature of disturbances of speech formation mechanisms in the…

This study examines the manifestations of purity and authenticity in 47 Basque bilinguals' reactions to code-switching. The respondents listened to two speech extracts with code-switching, filled in a short questionnaire and talked about the extracts in small groups. These conversations were then recorded. The respondents' beliefs can be…

Which conditional verb forms proved most difficult for Thai secondary school students to produce, and what errors resulted in written and spoken English, were studied. Data was collected from two tasks: 1) a gap-fill task by 68 twelfth-grade students in an integrated English program at a public high school in Bangkok, Thailand and 2) a spoken task…

Purpose: This archival investigation examined the relationship between preliteracy speech sound production skill (SSPS) and spelling in Grade 3 using a dataset in which children's receptive vocabulary was generally within normal limits, speech therapy was not provided until Grade 2, and phonological awareness instruction was discouraged at the…

Large first-year biology classes, with their heavy emphasis on factual content, contribute to low student engagement and misrepresent the dynamic, interdisciplinary nature of biological science. We sought to redesign a course to deliver fundamental biology curriculum through the study of health, promote skills development, and encourage a deeper…

This case study examined the initial and renewed impact of speech generating devices on the expressive communication behaviors of a child with autism spectrum disorder. The study spanned six years of interrupted use of two speech generating devices. The child's communication behaviors were analyzed from video recordings and included communication…

Imagined interactions (IIs) constitute a type of social cognition that can reduce fear of communication. Through the mental preparation enabled by IIs, an individual can reduce disfluencies and mitigate the anxiety that arises from a speech. Study 1 indicated that rehearsal influences the reduction of silent pauses but not vocalized pauses. In…

In the present day Nigeria, the quality of the English language spoken by Nigerians, is perceived to have been deteriorating and needs urgent attention. The proliferation of books and articles in the recent years can be seen as the native outcrop of its received attention and recognition as a matter of discourse. Evidently, every profession,…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often described as visual learners. We tested this assumption in an experiment in which 25 children with ASD, 19 children with global developmental delay (GDD), and 17 typically developing (TD) children were presented a series of videos via an eye tracker in which an actor instructed them to…