The paper reports an experimental study on the learning of stress placement rules of Chinese EFL learners. The F0 slope of stress assignment rules in English by 30 Chinese EFL learners were compared with that of native speakers. The learners had an average of 5-minute instruction with a tenminute practice period. The stimulus words, sentences, and paragraph contrast the compound stress rule and...

The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL lea...

Although is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners’ although output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’ although employment in Chinese EFL learners’ writing. The study is a corpus-based analysis launched under the analytical framework of contrasti...

Over the recent years, the study of language learning strategies has received much attention worldwide in general, and in Iran in particular. Many scholars have tried to investigate the function of language learning strategies in EFL learning and teaching. Not enough attention, however, has been paid to language skills, especially speaking skill, in Iran. Therefore, the present study aimed at s...

This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between teachers' personality type (feeling vs. thinking) and speaking skill of pre- intermediate EFL students in Iranian context. Twelve teachers and forty eight students from a local language institute participated in the study. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an instrument based on Jung’s personality theory, was taken from tea...

This paper reports on how top EFL students foster oral communication strategies (OCSs) throughout their 4-year English program at the university level. It is a cross-sectional study of 40 EFL learners enrolled in the Department of English, Faculty of Education, Taiz University, Yemen. Data were collected through a questionnaire based on Oxford’s Strategy inventory for language learning (SILL). ...

This paper, as part of an ongoing study, reports a qualitative case study in investigating pre-writing activities among three English as Foreign language (EFL) learners in an online community via a facebook group. The data were collected from the learners’ interactional exchanges, observation notes of their interaction and responses to online written interview questions. Based on a qualitative ...

The activity of speaking is conducted spontaneously and there is not much time devoted to preplanning and arranging the utterances the speaker intends to deliver. Briefly defined, gambits and routines refer to the words and phrases that facilitate the flow of conversations. As such, one way to help learners acquire oral proficiency is to teach gambits that support the social skills emphasized. ...

Speaking and writing are the productive skills of language and share similar components. In other words, writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the modes of production are different. In addition, among a number of personality variables in predicting English language proficiency, extraversion/introversion has been extensively studied. This quasi-experimental study aims at explo...