Prosody has been demonstrated to be a key component in second language acquisition and assessment. This study analyzes raters’ ability to distinguish different levels of L1 and L2 prosody when listening to filtered speech. The goal of this study is to investigate how many levels of prosodic proficiency can be made when it is isolated in a filtered speech condition. An experiment was conducted w...

The study investigated how well Swedish adolescents recognize the meaning of derived words in English and whether this knowledge is determined by learner proficiency, word frequency, or affix type. Participants were 88 school students two proficiency groups: 39 advanced 12th graders 49 intermediate 9th graders. Two tests receptive vocabulary administered. first test had 80 basewords (e.g., main...

As this paper was a very close version of “Investigating task difficulty: learners’ and teachers’ perceptions” by Dr. Parvaneh Tavakoli (published in “International Journal of Applied Linguistics”, Vol. 19, No. 1) in terms of content, research design, analytic framework and research findings without appropriately referencing resources used or obtaining author's consent, the paper wa...

the purpose of present study was to determine the effect of different levels of balance task difficulty and visual feedback on balance in elderly women. fourteen healthy elderly women (mean age 57/65 yr) were selected voluntarily. participants were asked to stand still on a stability platform under each of two conditions (with visual feedback and without visual feedback) in three levels of diff...

The current study investigates phonological involvement in Japanese word recognition by advanced and intermediate Chinese learners. A homophonic, semantic and unrelated (control) primed lexical decision task was used to test the participants’ reactions times (RTs) and accuracy scores. Only the RTs of the participants’ accurate YES responses in the lexical decision task (yes/no) were used as dep...

linguistic/cultural differences of learners’ native language with english as a foreign language, gender and english proficiency level are among those numerous variables which affect english learning and its quality in iranian context. the present study was an attempt to illuminate the effects of these variables on performing integrative approach of general english tests (cloze test and recall t...

In recent years, a number of large-scale writing assessments (e.g., TOEFL iBT) have employed integrated writing tests to measure test takers’ academic writing ability. Using a quantitative method, the current study examined how written textual features and use of source material(s) varied across two types of text-based integrated writing tasks (i.e., listening-to-write vs. reading-to-write) and...

How do proficiency-based accountability systems affect inequality in academic achievement? This paper reconciles mixed findings in the literature by demonstrating that three factors jointly determine accountability's impact. First, by analyzing student-level data from a large urban school district, we find that when educators face accountability pressure, they focus attention on students closes...

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) can provide learners with more authentic communicative activities, particularly in foreign language context, where learners may experience few such opportunities. From the perspective of sociocultural theory (SCT), scaffolding is a process of supportive interaction that occurs when learners are communicating with each other. There are situations in which the ...