Learning functional expressions is one of the difficulties for language learners, since functional expressions tend to have multiple meanings and complicated usages in various situations. In this paper, we report an experiment of simplifying example sentences of Japanese functional expressions especially for Chinese-speaking learners. For this purpose, we developed “Japanese Functional Expressi...

the present research examines the academic listening comprehension strategies (lcs) among a total number of 59 intermediate and upper-intermediate persian learners who were taking pre-university courses in 2011 in persian language centre in imam khomeini international university, qazvin. the study examined nature of lcs, the variety of applying lcs, and finally predictability of strategies as a...

  A growing body of research has indicated that students of ESL/EFL are reticent and unwilling to be engaged in oral activities in English lessons. Communicative language ability includes speaking ability, so vocabulary knowledge plays an integral role in speaking a language. However, there have been few studies examining the degree to which vocabulary knowledge affects speaking ability. The pr...

Speech recognition in Persian (Farsi) has recently been addressed by a few native speaking researchers and some approaches to isolated word and phoneme recognition have been reported. A main bottleneck in this research field is the lack of a recognition-specific speech corpus. In this work, a phonetically balanced speech database of Persian has been modified and used in continuous speech recogn...

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 study had two main steps. the first one was introducing and examining the long’s model of needs analysis (na) for distinguishing the general language needs. by doing the first step, we tried to recognize the shortages of long’s model, in the second step to realize the general language needs of persian language learners and find out what language functions are needed to be learned for gener...

Previous research [9] suggests that Dutch learners of (British) English are not able to express sarcasm prosodically in their L2. The present study investigates whether explicit training on the prosodic markers of sarcasm in English can improve learners’ realisation of sarcasm. Sarcastic speech was elicited in short simulated telephone conversations between Dutch advanced learners of English an...

This study investigated the effects of learners’ L1 on their identification of Japanese phonological vowel length at three speaking rates. Native listeners of Japanese (NJ) and learners of Japanese with L1 backgrounds in Finnish (NFin), American English (NE), Russian (NR), and French (NFr) participated in the study. The results showed that the proportion of “long” responses increased as a funct...

This study sought to promote EFL learners' speaking ability drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse pattern (DDP) and to explore their perceptions towards implementing dialogic teaching (DT) in a speaking classroom. To this end, from the population of students in different language institutes, 47 students were selected based on a purposive sampling method. The data were collected at t...

Although the operational scoring of the TOEFL iBT speaking section features the overall judgment of an examinee's speaking ability, the evaluation of specific components of speech such as delivery (pace and clarity of speech) and language use (vocabulary and grammar use) may be a promising approach to providing diagnostic information to learners. This study used an evidence-centered design appr...