The current study examined the effects of Korean elementary school teachers' accents on their students' listening comprehension. It also examined students' attitudes toward teachers with American-accented English (a native speaker model) and Korean-accented English (a nonnative speaker model). A matched-guised technique was used. A Korean American…

This article examines what one university has done to prepare for its program review for recognition by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), a Specialized Professional Association (SPA) of NCATE. The history of the standards movement within higher…

This paper analyses the effects of manipulating the cognitive complexity of L2 oral tasks on language production. It specifically focuses on self-repairs, which are taken as a measure of accuracy since they denote both attention to form and an attempt at being accurate. By means of a repeated measures design, 42 lower-intermediate students were…

The role of hearing, although invisible, is critical to the development of language and literacy skills across key stage 1. Yet, Foundation stage and key stage 1 pupils are the most likely of all children to experience reduced hearing sensitivity, under developed listening skills and a less than ideal acoustic learning environment. The paper…

In this article, the author argues that, if schools truly were based on standards, they would look much different than they do now. She describes the standards-based system of an experimental school in Colorado. Here, she discusses how students document their work in a variety of ways, such as: (1) various types of portfolios; (2) oral delivery;…

"Ready, Set, Leap!"[R] is a comprehensive preschool curriculum that focuses on early reading skills such as phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and letter-sound correspondence using multi-sensory technology that incorporates touch, sight, and sound. The "Ready, Set, Leap!"[R] curriculum is available in English and Spanish.…

The Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field continues to experience increased valuing of experiential practitioner knowledge. A welcome result of this evolution has been the broadening of research perspectives. The 16 practitioner narratives in "Insights on Teaching Speaking in TESOL" are written by…

Oral language is an important component of literacy development, yet is often ignored in research and stifled in the classroom. The varied contexts for literate talk in a first-grade classroom were explored. Oral sharing time, writing workshop, reading workshop, whole-class reading time, and project-centers time provided opportunities for rich…

A practicum was designed to increase teacher awareness of how the diversity and dynamics of oral language impacted student participation in the classroom. Participation in classroom activities, such as following directions and group discussions, was influenced by each student's ability to express ideas and to remember, process, and retrieve…

This report addresses the reliability of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), not as a measure of speaking ability, but rather as practiced by testers trained by the ACTFL, such as by the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR), in English as a Second Language (ESL), French, German,…

Four group summary papers from an Australian national workshop on discourse analysis discuss verbal and written discourse and the classroom. Papers reflect the four workshop discussion groups of casual conversation, classroom discourse, expository discourse, and literary narrative. They include: "On Casual Conversation" (M. A. K.…

This guide to conversational language in Yup'ik Eskimo is designed to accompany audiotape recordings (not included here). It contains the phrases and sentences used in 30 lessons. A brief introduction comments on the format of the text. Lessons are on these topics: Yup'ik phonology and common brief expressions; exclamations; greetings and…

In this paper, an elementary school teacher describes her experiences with the Memory Stack--a HyperCard based tool that can accommodate a voice recording, a graphic image, and a written text on the same card--which she designed to help her second and third grade students integrate their oral language fluency into the process of learning how to…

The report describes one segment of the Federal Language Testing Board's Unified Language Testing Plan (ULTP), the validation of the speaking proficiency test in Russian. The ULTP is a project to increase standardization of foreign language proficiency measurement and promote sharing of resources among testing programs in the federal government.…

This study sought to develop a description of second language fluency, based on the concept that the microcontext of the testing task and the resulting psycholinguistic demands on speech production affect the nature of the discourse produced so that different tasks have differential impact on an individual's display of fluency. It investigated how…