the significant effect of employing readers theater (rt) in reading comprehension, fluency, and motivation of english language students has already been established. however, this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of rt on the oral proficiency of iranian learners of english as a foreign language. from among the learners studying english at a language school in isfahan, iran, a samp...

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ACTFL generic proficiency guidelines describe what learners are able to perform at various proficiency levels. These guidelines, in particular the oral proficiency guidelines (OPG), have been widely used to assess learners’ proficiency across institutions – via the oral proficiency interview (OPI) technique – irrespective of curriculum, teaching methods, and materials. Many institutions and org...

Automaticity and real-time aspects of performance are directly relevant to L2 spoken language proficiency. This paper analyzes data from L2 speakers of English and Spanish spread over a range of proficiency levels as identified by traditional holistic, rubric-based human ratings. In spontaneous speech samples from these L2 populations, we studied timed measures of spoken fluency (linguistic uni...

A naturalistic experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) can indirectly improve L2 oral proficiency by developing the same cognitive mechanisms underlying spontaneous conversational speech. The theoretical framework guiding this inquiry consists of Levelt’s (1989) model of language production augmented by concepts from Working Memory ...

Second language (L2) learners tend to speak slower at every level of linguistic analysis, often in an uneven tempo, with longer pauses at the start and before some words and constructions, than is typical of native speech. As noted by Zhang & Elder [1], native listeners focus on phonological fluency in making judgments about L2 proficiency. Improved understanding of how fluency grows with progr...

The pressing need for English oral communication skills in multifarious contexts today is compelling impetus behind the large number of studies done on oral proficiency interviewing. Moreover, given the recently articulated concerns with the fairness and social dimension of such interviews, parallel concerns have been raised as to how most fairly to assess the oral communication skills of exami...

Inconsistent results in the field of bilingualism and cognition may be largely influenced by variation in the nature of bilingual language proficiency. Here we explore the relationship between inhibitory control and bilingual proficiency in 43 8-year-old English-Chinese children in Singapore where bilingualism is prolific. Proficiency estimates are based on Oral and Written exam scores and care...