Currently little is known about how students use podcasts of exercise material (as opposed to lecture material), and whether they perceive such podcasts to be beneficial. This study aimed to assess how exercise podcasts for phonetics are used and perceived by second year speech and language therapy students. Eleven podcasts of graded phonetics…

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English, a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English. The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of…

This paper reports a series of experiments with text-to-speech (TTS) voices. These experiments have been conducted to develop audio materials for listening comprehension as an alternative technology to traditionally used audio equipment like the compact cassette. The new generation of TTS voices based on unit selection synthesis provides…

Research indicates that preschool children need to learn pre-math skills to build a foundation for primary- and secondary-level mathematics. This paper presents the results from the early stages of a pilot mathematics program implemented in Cordillera, Paraguay. In a context of significant gaps in teacher preparation and pedagogy, the program uses…

While many adult learners may feel hesitant to voice their opinions in a classroom, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) adults are especially aware that they are functioning in a critical, heteronormative society. However, in a climate of respect and safety they can gain confidence in sharing their true selves and opinions. An…

This article focuses on the learner's use of Code-switching to learn the TL (Target Language) equivalent of an L1 word. The interactional pattern that this situation creates defines the Request-Provision-Acknowledgement (RPA) sequence. The article explains each of the turns of the sequence under the combination of the Ethnomethodological…

A study conducted from 1996-2000 focused on the academic development of children within a statewide educational reform effort, including changing the organizational structure of the early years of schooling into nongraded primary programs (formerly age-based classrooms for kindergarteners through third grade). The multisite study involved children…

Coaching has become an increasingly utilized professional development strategy to improve mathematics instruction at the elementary level. However, little research has been conducted on the nature of mathematics coaching and its effects. This study has examined factors that affected elementary teachers who participated in a specific coaching model…

This mixed-methods study compared the outcomes of 5 general education teachers in a suburban, upper-middle-class elementary school engaged in transcript analysis during small-group reading strategies instruction to those obtained when engaged in audio analysis. Over a 5-month period, the teachers recorded one lesson per week and debriefed with the…

The development of oral skills poses a challenge in language teaching whether this takes place face-to-face, through distance education or in blended learning contexts. Two main problems arise: first of all students don't have enough opportunity to use their target language orally, and secondly, students oral performance is mostly unrecorded and…

This study explores the way in which the European Language Portfolio (ELP) is used for teaching English as a foreign language to young learners with the aim of enhancing their involvement in the language learning process. The data for the study were collected through observations in a fourth-grade and a fifth-grade classroom (students' ages varied…

This article presents results from a study of 36 pupils (8-10 years of age) in face-to-face conversations with their teachers about water as an environmental phenomenon based on a photograph of a rainforest. The teachers' rather vague goal was to have the pupils talk about the water cycle. The sessions were audio-recorded and analyzed with respect…

In this article we report on two experiments about the perception of audiovisual cues to emotional speech. The article addresses two questions: (1) how do visual cues from a speaker's face to emotion relate to auditory cues, and (2) what is the recognition speed for various facial cues to emotion? Both experiments reported below are based on tests…

In this paper we propose that taking time before the work begins to develop agreements about how to work together in participatory action research enables researchers to directly address several ethical issues that can be problematic in this type of research: gaining fully informed consent; in-group confidentiality; cultural misconceptions; and…

Seventy-eight native English speakers rated the foreign-accented speech (FAS) of 24 international students enrolled in an Intensive English programme at a public university in Texas on degree of accent, comprehensibility and communicative ability. Variables considered to potentially impact listeners' ratings were the sex of the speaker, the first…