The present study sought to investigate the effect of podcasting on the listening comprehension skill of Iranian TEFL students at the Islamic Azad University of Shiraz. It also aimed to examine students' motivation towards the use of podcasts as a learning tool. To this end, two groups, an experimental and a control group (n = 30 in each group)…

Derivational knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EFL students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of productive derivational knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that…

This study aims to compare asynchronous distance learning and blended learning in a context in which English is taught as a foreign language; the focal points of the comparison are learner autonomy, motivation and academic success. In this context, asynchronous distance learning refers to an English learning process provided through online videos…

We examined the concurrent relationship between narrative skills (the Renfrew Bus Story Test) and core language measures (vocabulary, grammar and verbal memory) at age 4 and the longitudinal relationship between core language and listening comprehension skills at age 7 in a sample of 215 children using latent variables and structural equation…

Speech fluency has been extensively researched as a core construct for second language (L2) speaking assessment. Despite the broad consensus on its multifaceted nature, few researchers have empirically explored the dimensionality of this construct. Operationalizations of fluency vary across research and practice, using both holistic and…

Background: Phonological difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are well documented. However, abilities regarding prosody, the rhythmic and melodic characteristics of language, have been less widely studied, particularly in Spanish. Moreover, the scant research findings that have been reported are contradictory. These…

The present study peruses EFL learners in a kind of process-product approach in writing and investigates the possible effects of teachers' direct and indirect corrective feedback in four English language institutes in Isfahan, Iran. Four groups of intermediate students participated as a case in this study. The total number of participants was 120…

A number of studies have suggested that extensive reading can lead to gains in different language skills. Few studies on extensive reading have been conducted outside the East Asia classroom setting. This study investigated the impact of an extensive reading programme conducted over 12 weeks with 90- minutes group sessions 3 times a week involving…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

To have more information about the English words known by second language (L2) speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first…

Recent scholarship on Chinese students' English expository essays tends to blur or mitigate the differences between English and Chinese writings. This alleged convergence of English and Chinese rhetorical norms gives rise to a view that rhetorical aspects in second language writing instruction and research in China should be de-emphasized. Drawing…

Placing non-native speakers of English into appropriate classes involves mapping placement test scores onto proficiency levels based on predetermined cut scores. However, studies on how to set boundaries for different levels of proficiency have been lacking in the language testing literature. A top-down approach to standard setting in which a…

This study aimed at finding the correlation between Iranian and Turkish EFL learners' cognitive styles and their preferences for different WCF types. Sixty out of seventy-five EFL students at the intermediate level in two contexts (Iran and Turkey) were selected through the Oxford Placement Test. There were two instruments in this research: The…

Idioms abound in both spoken and written English, yet they present a particularly thorny problem in foreign language learning. One of the reasons for this difficulty is second language learners' ignorance of the holistic nature of English idioms. Based on computerized reading tasks, the present study probes the effects of using electronic glosses…

The study investigated the alignment process of the International English Language Competency Assessment (IELCA) suite examinations' four levels, B1, B2, C1 and C2, onto the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) by explaining and discussing the five linking stages (Council of Europe (CoE 2009). Unlike previous studies, this study used the…