As a growing number of testing programs use integrated writing tasks, more validation research is needed to inform stakeholders about score use and interpretation. The current study investigates the relationship between writing proficiency and discourse features in an integrated reading-writing task. At a Middle Eastern university, 136…

This study investigated how task-based learning (TBL) developed the verbal competence of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) by employing qualitative and quantitative analyses. We compared the impromptu oral presentations on reading texts of 76 intermediate EFL learners given respectively in the beginning and the end of the…

Language testing and second language acquisition research are both concerned with proficiency in the second language; given this shared interest, the rapprochement between these two domains may prove revealing and productive not only in terms of teaching practices, but also in taking a wide view of language, ranging across cognition, society and…

This paper highlights the role of speech community members on a series of interconnected projects to document, study and maintain Kokama, a deeply endangered language from the Peruvian Amazon. The remaining fluent speakers of the language are mostly older than 60 years of age, are spread out across various small villages, and speak the language in…

More than 112,000 Indiana students speak a language other than English at home, and there are over 275 different languages represented in Indiana schools. Of these, over 50,000 students have been formally identified as English learners due to limited proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing academic English. English learners make…

The objective of our study is to introduce a fully automated, computational linguistic technique to quantify semantic relations between words generated on a standard semantic verbal fluency test and to determine its cognitive and clinical correlates. Cognitive differences between patients with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment are…

Background: The basal ganglia (BG) are involved in executive language functions (i.e., verbal fluency) through their connections with cortical structures. The caudate and putamen receive separate inputs from prefrontal and premotor cortices, and may differentially contribute to verbal fluency performance. We examined BG integrity in relation to…

In the Basque Country, Northern Spain, Basque (Euskera) and Spanish are official languages. In recent decades, Basque language revitalization and the efforts to make this an unmarked language (normalization) have co-existed with the rapid increase in immigration from outside the Basque region, and most recently from outside Spain. Given the…

The present study explored the relation between language control and nonverbal cognitive control in different bilingual populations. We compared monolinguals, Dutch-French unbalanced bilinguals, balanced bilinguals, and interpreters on the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967) and the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz,…

Despite the stream of directives about improving students' English communicative ability from the Japanese Education Ministry since 2003 [1-4] significant development has remained elusive. One obstacle to communication (as an individual and a cooperative faculty) is the inflexible "one-size-fits-all" philosophy of commercial textbooks…

This paper reports on a study investigating the potential effect of synchronous and asynchronous text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) on oral fluency development of second-language (L2) learners. Sixty-three intermediate learners of English were randomly assigned to one of three groups (two experimental groups and one control group),…

This article addresses the question of how far working memory may affect second language (L2) learners' improvement in spoken language during a period of immersion. Research is presented testing the hypothesis that individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are associated with individual variation in improvements in oral production of…

The "indigenous assessment practices" (Jacoby & McNamara, 1999) in selected health professions were investigated to inform a review of the scope of assessment in the speaking sub-test of a specific-purpose English language test for health professionals, the Occupational English Test (OET). The assessment criteria in current use on…

The Texas Education Code (§ 29.051) requires school districts to provide every language minority student with the opportunity to participate in either a bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) program. This evaluation report summarizes the performance of students who participated in the district's Dual Language Bilingual Program. Included…

Studying task repetition for adult and young foreign language learners of English (EFL) has received growing interest in recent literature within the task-based approach (Bygate, 2009; Hawkes, 2012; Mackey, Kanganas, & Oliver, 2007; Pinter, 2007b). Earlier work suggests that second language (L2) learners benefit from repeating the same or a…