Reports on the development of the Matriculation English Test oral subtest (METOS) in China. Having undergone repeated piloting and moderation, the METOS format has attained validity on the strength of its being a message-based test of the interactive and contextualized use of English. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on question-response sequences in academic and work settings and examines the type of description of questioning conventionally offered in published English language teaching materials for higher-level learners. (Author/VWL)

A study identified second-person singular pronoun usage among Salvadoran speakers living in Houston, Texas, to see what changes, if any, have been caused by contact with other Spanish speakers with different speech patterns. Although the results confirm some linguistic behavior observed by others, some unexpected facts and diverging trends were…

Investigates agreement among teacher-, self-, and peer-assessments of students in the presence of peer feedback. This is done in the context of oral presentation skills of first year undergraduate students of ethnic Chinese background. Findings how that when assessment criteria are firmly set, peer feedback enables students to judge the…

Discusses part of a large-scale survey on the oral performance of advanced French-as-a-second-language students, as represented by recorded speech. Although schwa rarely leads to semantic confusions, its analysis in word-median or monosyllabic contexts shows interesting phonostylistic variations. (Author/VWL)

The communicative approach to language instruction emphasizes ways to increase student-talk and decrease teacher-talk. It necessitates including the production or performance stage in lesson plans to give students the opportunity to use the new language in simulated real-life situations. (Author/VWL)

In investigating the use of authentic texts, this study asked college students of the German language to rate 53 situations (composed of 12 authenticity factors) on level of authenticity, contribution to language learning, ease/difficulty, and resulting anxiety/enjoyment. Learners enjoyed interacting with authentic materials but were appreciative…

When presented with stimuli that contain illegal consonant clusters, Japanese listeners tend to hear an illusory vowel that makes their perception conform to the phonotactics of the language. Assesses an alternate hypothesis that this illusion is due to a top-down lexical effect. (Author/VWL)

Explores the close link between perception and production of sounds and suggests that teachers need to ensure that their students can distinguish between individual sounds of a language, particularly those that do not exist in their native language. Describes a study in which two groups of Chinese learners of English were compared in their ability…

In a study of teenage learners of French, the aspect of teachers' language that was found to be most responsive to the ability of their students was lexical diversity. Focuses on this finding using a new measure. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a qualitative study of dyadic discourse between university students of Spanish as a foreign language. Explored the social and cognitive behavior of learners as they participated in second language speaking activities. Repair, as it is formulated in the ethnomethodological approach to conversation analysis provided the lens through which…

Offers immersion classroom data focusing on the use of collaborative tasks related to the content to be learned that draw learners attention to formal properties of French. Such tasks provide both oral practice and lead to more accurate language use. (Author/VWL)

What is the role of oral language in reading competence during the transition to school? Is oral language in preschool best conceptualized as vocabulary knowledge or as more comprehensive language including grammar, vocabulary, and semantics? These questions were examined longitudinally using 1,137 children from the National Institute of Child…

The research examined the extent to which (a) Grade 2 English-as-a-second-language (ESL) and English-as-a-first-language (EL1) children resemble each other on word and text reading efficiency and (b) whether individual differences in word and text reading efficiency in the two language groups can be understood in terms of similar underlying…

Most postgraduate research students face the task of presenting an oral seminar on their proposed research early in their candidature. Those of us who work with international postgraduate research students know that they can find this task daunting, and the literature both in Australia and abroad confirms that these students often lack confidence…