This study employs a method in experimental phonetics to investigate the use of tones in 45 Chinese EFL learners’ read speech. The study is based on O’Connor & Arnold’s (1973) descriptions of tones of English, and takes the recorded spoken data of 8 English-speaking British university students as the norm for comparison. Findings of the study indicate that, so far as primary tones are concerned...

Foreign language learners tend to mispronounce sounds in the target language by subconsciously searching and substituting with “similar corresponding sounds” in their native dialects. Correction of EFL pronunciation is thus difficult for both instructors and learners. Yet Critical Period Hypothesis is being increasingly misused by Chinese teachers and researchers as an excuse for not paying att...

this study investigated the characteristics of effective secondary school iranian efl teachers from students’ and teachers’ perspectives. to this end, 376 junior secondary school students and 32 efl teachers teaching at various iranian secondary schools participated in the study. a validated open-ended questionnaire was distributed among the student and teacher participants and asked for their ...

This study used a novel method to explore different schedules of spacing in young EFL learners. In doing so, we taught young EFL learners English–Farsi word pairs using different spacing schedules (massed vs. spaced). In the massed condition, learners studied five-word pairs in session one and five-other word pairs one week later. In the spaced condition, the learners studied 10-word pairs in s...

New challenges are coming in the present globalized world of 21 th century that consequently has required deep changes in educational process, since the 21 th century requires more creativity, critical thinking, problem solving as well as communicative skills. English, as the main international language, is playing an important role in the globalized world's people's life, so the scholars try t...

This study investigated the interrelationships among EFL learners’ self-efficacy, autonomy and listening comprehension ability. Ninety female learners of intermediate level participated in the study. They were between 16 and 24 years old. In order to obtain the required data on the three variables (i.e., self-efficacy, autonomy, and listening comprehension ability), the researchers, after admin...

Bronchodilator drugs produce variable improvements in forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV(1)), but larger changes in end-expiratory lung volume (EELV) in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which were suggested to be related to the presence of expiratory flow limitation (EFL) at rest. We tested this concept in 42 COPD patients (FEV(1) 42.3+/-13.8% predicted) during spontaneous breath...

There have been many promises about the benefits of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in classrooms. The assumption underlying those benefits is that computers would be used in a student-centered and a constructivist learning approach, departing from a teacher-centered teaching approach. The uses of computers in the classroom, however, vary depending on the teachers’ perceptions and ex...

Flowering time is an important trait for adaptation and productivity of chickpea in the arid and the semi-arid environments. This study was conducted for molecular mapping of genes/quantitative trait loci (QTLs) controlling flowering time in chickpea using F2 populations derived from four crosses (ICCV 96029 × CDC Frontier, ICC 5810 × CDC Frontier, BGD 132 × CDC Frontier and ICC 16641 × CDC Fro...

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of integrating a learner-centered blogging approach into the EFL writing classroom in Taiwan. For this purpose, a 16-week experiment was conducted, involving an intact class of 18 university-level Taiwanese EFL student writers. During the experiment, the participants first created their own blogs on Lang-8, a free online language blogging platfor...