This study was an attempt to examine the effect of using comic strips on improving grammar recognition and performance among Iranian young EFL learners. To this end, one experimental and one control groups were formed, each having 45 preintermediate participants chosen via convenience sampling. The researcher-made pretests of grammar and speaking assured the researchers that the participants di...

Individuals with public speaking anxiety (PSA) experience fear and avoidance that can cause extreme distress, impaired speaking performance, and associated problems in psychosocial functioning. Most extant interventions for PSA emphasize anxiety reduction rather than enhancing behavioral performance. We compared the efficacy of two brief cognitive-behavioral interventions, a traditional cogniti...

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...

Previous studies have shown that children’s speech is more difficult to recognize by machine than adults’ speech. This paper presents the results of experiments which investigate recognition performance variation within a small population of children. Results suggest that recogniser performance on a child’s speech is well correlated with a teacher’s assessment of the child’s speaking proficienc...

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A-->AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A-->AB). The children in A-->AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A-->AB supplied ...

Voice fonts are created and stored for a speaker, to be used to synthesize speech in the speaker’s voice. The most important descriptors of voice fonts are spectral envelope for acoustic units and prosodic features such as fundamental frequency and average speaking rate. In this paper, we present a new approach to model the speaking rate so that it can be easily incorporated in voice fonts and ...

This study explores the construct validity of speaking tasks included in the TOEFL iBT (e.g., integrated and independent speaking tasks). Specifically, advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools, MANOVA difference statistics, and discriminant function analyses (DFA) are used to assess the degree to which and in what ways responses to these tasks differ with regard to linguistic characteri...