This paper is based on a study on speaking fluency performed by six low level students using retelling technique. The aim of the study is to find out the effect of retelling on the students' speaking fluency and to know the strategies used by those students while retelling a story. The data were the speaking transcripts which were analyzed to see…

This article addresses the importance of language underlying the stratification process in Taiwan within the context of globalization. Specifically, I ask if one's language skills may serve as a key to getting ahead. The Taiwanese government has imposed Mandarin as the official language since 1945 and introduced English courses into compulsory…

This study compares characteristics of fluency in student audio journals recorded in a laboratory setting with those recorded using mobile audio devices. Forty graduate students enrolled in four oral communication courses at an American university recorded weekly audio journals for a 10-week term. Students chose the environment in which they…

Extant research has primarily assessed the quality of the American school experience for immigrant students by focusing on performance-based outcomes (e.g., grade point average [GPA]). Unlike such research, the current study examines the impact of generational status and language proficiency on Latino and Asian students' (n = 2,261) attitudes…

A dual immersion program in Chinese and English at the 3e International School in Beijing is helping children become fluent in both languages, even though many students spoke neither language when they entered the school. Children enter the program as young as two years old. Studies indicate that bilingual children have higher levels of cognitive…

Many secondary-level students from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds need to nurture their ongoing literacy growth to become independent, tenacious readers. Middle and high school teachers' use of direct and explicit strategies that are focused on culturally and linguistically responsive practices (e.g., use of relevant texts…

While knowledge of what constitutes fluent speech has developed over the past several decades, it is still unclear how language teachers can facilitate its acquisition by second language learners. Fluency is generally accepted as being a function of temporal variables of speech such as rate of speaking and the number of words or syllables uttered…

This study analyzes the variation of syllable- and word-final /s/ among two generations of Cubans in Miami, Florida (USA): older, early exile immigrants who arrived in Miami as adults in the 1960s and 1970s, and young Miami-born Cubans whose maternal and paternal grandparents immigrated to Miami from Cuba prior to 1980. Since sibilant weakening is…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…

Second language (L2) oral performance assessment always involves raters' subjective judgments and is thus subject to rater variability. The variability due to rater characteristics has important consequential impacts on decision-making processes, particularly in high-stakes testing situations (Bachman, Lynch, & Mason, 1995; A. Brown, 1995;…

There are many kinds of speech and language disorders that can affect children. This fact sheet will present four major areas in which these impairments occur. These are the areas of: (1) Articulation; (2) Fluency; (3) Voice; and (4) Language. Following a brief narrative on a day in the life of a Speech Language Pathologist, this fact sheet…

Fluency training focuses on increasing the speed of accurate responding (Martens & Witt, 2004). This research was conducted with an elementary aged boy diagnosed with autism who responded accurately, but slowly to calendar and time related questions. Set in a public school, the student's personal aide was trained to make rewards contingent on…

This is an English communication instruction system designed to teach children basic, easy to remember conversation strategies without the use of a textbook or to serve as a supplement learning system to a textbook. This English communication training method provides learners with concrete language patterns, a broad spectrum of vocabulary and…

Background: The risk of developing a negative attitude to communication as a consequence of having a speech disorder has been in focus for decades in research concerning fluency disorders in relation to both children and adults. The Communication Attitude Test (CAT), which was created to measure children's attitudes towards their own…

Previous studies have found that proficiency in a second language affects how the meanings of words are accessed. Support for this hypothesis is based on data from explicit memory tasks with bilingual participants who know two languages that are relatively similar phonologically and orthographically (e.g., Dutch-English, French-English). The…