the present study adopts the perspective that metacognitive strategy instruction is bound to occur inside the classroom especially on oral tasks. accordingly, the researchers investigated whether metacognitive strategy instruction prior to oral tasks was more successful than conventional ways in improving efl learners’ oral proficiency. to this end, 56 participants studying in a language school...

abstractthis study aimed to shed light on young iranian efl students’ oral proficiency improvement through explicit instruction of formulaic sequences (fss). this pretest-posttest quasi experimental study was conducted in a bilingual school in shahrekord, iran. accordingly, based on actfl opi test, two groups of low intermediate students with age range of 11 to 12 were chosen to be assigned as ...

In this review article, empirical studies published from 2004 through 2014 on second-language (L2) oral proficiency testing are analyzed, with a specific focus on discourse and social interaction in such tests. Taking three common test setups, oral proficiency interviews (OPIs), paired peer tests, and group peer tests as an organizing principle for the studies examined, recent developments in L...

This paper presents results from investigations into the effect of allowing examinee autonomy in a computerized test of oral proficiency. It begins with a description of the computerized assessment, the Computerized Oral Proficiency Instrument (COPI), as operationalized in Spanish and Arabic. It then presents results from research on allowing examinee autonomy in the assessment. The talk will p...

Meta-discourse markers are an inevitable part of oral proficiency which improve both the quality and comprehension of learners’ speech. While studies of oral meta-discourse have been conducted since the 1980s in a European or US context, they have remained relatively untouched in Iran. Therefore, this study aimed to seek the impact of both explicit and implicit teaching of formal meta-discourse...

This study investigates relationships between global oral proficiency ratings and measures of grammatical competence in the acquisition of Korean as a second language. Data were collected on the linguistic abilities of learners’ at 1+ to 4 on the ILR scale, focusing on perception and production in phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis and collocation. The results show that (i) most of the tasks ...

The role of corrective feedback (CF) is debated in second language acquisition (SLA). It has not been unequivocally shown that CF is effective in SLA, in particular not in the case of on-line processing, as in oral second language (L2) proficiency. This might be because, to date, it has not been feasible to create appropriate research conditions. We claim that these problems can be alleviated b...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the effectiveness of nonnutritive sucking (NNS) and oral stimulation (OS), either applied alone or in combination, to reduce the transition time from tube feeding to independent oral feeding. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial. SETTING A 40-bed neonatal ICU in a university hospital in the People's Republic of China. PATIENTS A total of 120 preterm infants were admit...

This study investigates the factors influencing the oral communication strategies of technological university students in Taiwan. Ninety-eight sophomore students of Lunghwa University of Science and Technology participated in it. Nakatani’s Oral Communication Strategy Inventory (OCSI) (2006), along with the demographics and English learning backgrounds of students, was used to collect data. Des...