Research continues to suggest that adolescents struggle with reading, indicating that much work remains to ensure that all students read at levels consistent with the skills required for academic achievement (Biancarosa & Snow, 2006). This article investigates whole class choral reading (WCCR) within the context of a sixth-grade language arts setting for the purpose of improving oral reading fl...

The automatic grading of oral language tests has been the subject of much research in recent years. Several obstacles lie in the way of achieving this goal. Recent work suggests a testing technique called elicited imitation (EI) that can serve to accurately approximate global oral proficiency. This testing methodology, however, does not incorporate some fundamental aspects of language, such as ...

Ordinate developed an automatic assessment of oral reading fluency that was administered to a large sample of American adults. Because fluent reading entails accuracy, the machine evaluations of oral reading accuracy were assessed. This paper reviews the methods and results of a study to assess accuracy and bias within a large-scale automatic assessment of oral reading fluency. An experiment co...

one of the major criticisms leveled at task-based language teaching (tblt), despite its countless merits, is developing fluency at the cost of accuracy. the post-task stage affords a number of options to counteract this downside through task repetition and task recycling. these two options are considered to positively affect learners' oral performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexi...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved v...

We examined the prominent theoretical explanations of the RAN-reading relationship in a relatively transparent language (Greek) in a sample of children (n = 286) followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2. Specifically, we tested the fit of eight different models, as defined by the type of reading performance predicted (oral vs. silent word reading fluency), the type of RAN tasks (non-alphanumeric vs. al...

This article describes the development of speaking fluency through authentic oral production in a six-week action research study public high school Guayaquil, Ecuador. The methodology included pre-test and post-test that measured quantitative aspects student’s spoken (speed, pauses, repetitions, corrections), survey with closed-ended questions collected learners’ perspectives towards their own ...

Fluency in terms of speed speech and (lack of) hesitations such as silent filled pauses (‘uhm’s) is part oral proficiency. Language assessment rubrics therefore include aspects fluency. Measuring fluency, however, highly time-consuming because the manual labour involved. The current paper aims to automatically measure L2 including pauses, both Dutch English. A revised existing script a new for ...

One of the major criticisms leveled at task-based language teaching (TBLT), despite its countless merits, is developing fluency at the cost of accuracy. The post-task stage affords a number of options to counteract this downside through task repetition and task recycling. These two options are considered to positively affect learners' oral performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexi...