Working within a task-based approach to the teaching of speaking, two interactive whiteboard-based pre-task activities focusing on different phases of the speech production process (Levelt, 1989) were developed and compared with an activity based on the speaking activities currently offered in English as a foreign language course books. The first activity, Dialogue Expansion, was based on expan...

Task variation is an integrative method aiming at the importance of learner-to-learner interactions in a wide range of learning contexts and fostering authentic use of language and meaningful communication. This study investigated the impact of task variation on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian EFL learners’ oral speech. In so doing, 80 intermediate EFL learners, majoring English at the I...

BACKGROUND National Institutes of Health asthma guidelines recommend questionnaires to assess asthma control, but these questionnaires are not useable across the entire pediatric age spectrum and have not been validated among significant numbers of minority or Spanish-speaking children. OBJECTIVE We sought to evaluate a questionnaire designed to assess asthma control across a broad age range ...

The main purpose of the study reported in this paper was to examine the interrelationships between L2 risk-taking, English learning motivation, L2 speaking anxiety, linguistic confidence, and low-proficiency English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). A secondary purpose was to test whether task repetition can influence the level of the mentio...

Speech recognition technology holds great potential for such users with motor impairments due to the hands-free interaction it affords without significant investment in specialized hardware. Its accuracy and performance have been steadily improving, leading to accurate recognition engines such as Dragon Naturally Speaking from Nuance as well as the Windows Speech Recognizer in the Vista operati...

research on multiword clusters (chunks) is based on the assumption that native speakers use plenty of chunks in their everyday language and they are considered as fluent speakers of language. therefore the present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of using chunks on speaking fluency of iranian efl learners. in the first phase of the study, the students of two intermediate classes s...

Foreign language enjoyment and speaking anxiety in the classroom are two potential emotion-inducing factors for foreign language learning. This sequential mixed methods study investigated whether and to what extent Iranian EFL students experienced foreign language enjoyment and public speaking anxiety in their English classrooms, and how they characterize the sources of the enjoyment and speaki...

Semi-Lagranging schemes have been explored by several authors recently for transport problems in particular for moving interfaces using level set method. We incorporate the backward error compensation method developed in [2] into the semi-Lagranging schemes with almost the same simplicity and three times the complexity of a first order semi-Lagranging scheme but improve the order of accuracy. W...