The study examined the insight of English Teacher towards students of standard XI in acquiring communicative skill in English. The main objective of the paper was to identify the problems of the students in acquiring communicative skill in English. The Normative survey method was adopted in the study. One hundred teachers were considered as a…

In the assessment of aural skills of second language learners, the study of the inclusion of visual stimuli has almost exclusively been conducted in the context of listening assessment. While the inclusion of contextual information in test input has been advocated for by numerous researchers (Ockey, 2010), little has been said regarding the…

Elementary school English language teachers in Swiss public schools often question the role of writing in early years language instruction because there is a significant disparity in messages they receive from Board of Education members, from fellow teachers and from teacher trainers. This study describes the issues concerning writing in the first…

This study examined the heterogeneity in the English-as-a-second-language (ESL) test population by modeling the relationship between test-taker background characteristics and test performance as measured by the "TOEFL iBT"® using a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with covariate approach. The background characteristics studied…

This paper argues for the incorporation of bottom-up activities for English as a foreign language (EFL) listening. It discusses theoretical concepts and pedagogic options for addressing bottom-up aural processing in the EFL classroom as well as how and why teachers may wish to include such activities in lessons. This discussion is augmented by a…

The purpose of the present study is twofold. The first goal is to examine the effects of phonological input on students' vocabulary learning. The second is to discuss how different pre­-listening activities affect students' second language listening comprehension. The participants were first-­year students at a Japanese university. There were two…

Although English oral language proficiency in the primary grades is critical to the literacy development of English learners (ELs), we know little about how to foster these skills. This study examined a yearlong K-2 drama and creative movement intervention. A randomized experimental design (N = 5,240) was used to address two research questions:…

The "School Leader's Literacy Walkthrough" is designed to assist school leaders in observing specific research-based practices during literacy instruction (or students' independent use or application of those practices). This tool is based on rigorous research that indicates the most effective way to teach reading (see Foorman &…

The article describes how the dictogloss method and cooperative learning can be combined to promote the development of listening and speaking skills of second language learners. The paper begins with an outline of the dictogloss procedure and the theoretical background behind it. The procedures for conducting a dictogloss-based listening class are…

Philosophical teaching gives permission to learners to explore the meaning of texts by drawing on their own experiences. By thinking out loud, they construct new meanings of texts. As a result of this oral work, what texts mean shifts in the unique relationship between text and reader and include child's voice. If educators nurture…

This study compared the effectiveness of balanced and skewed input at facilitating the acquisition of the transitive construction in Esperanto, characterized by the accusative suffix "-n" and variable word order (SVO, OVS). Thai university students (N = 98) listened to 24 sentences under skewed (one noun with high token frequency) or…

Morphological awareness (MA), defined as the ability to understand the morphemic structure of the words, has been reported to affect various aspects of second language performance including reading comprehension ability, spelling performance, etc. But the concept has been far less treated with reference to l2 listening. Against this background,…

Recent experiments showed that the perception of vowel length by German listeners exhibits the characteristics of categorical perception. The present study sought to find the neural activity reflecting categorical vowel length and the short-long boundary by examining the processing of non-contrastive durations and categorical length using MEG.…

Recently, research in foreign language anxiety has extended to the examination of more language-skill-specific anxieties. Existing research findings on the language-skill-specific anxieties indicate a consistent negative relationship between individual skill-based anxieties (e.g. listening anxiety) and more general foreign language classroom…

This paper presents a study of factors affecting judgments of native and non-native accent in German. The data suggest that listener status (native or non-native speakers) and degree of experience with German play a role in the aspects of speech which raters cite as salient. Interestingly, the same descriptive terms used by raters were shown to…