Introduction and Purpose of the Study Scientific literacy for all students has been a major educational goal in the United States understanding of science makes it possible to discuss scientific issues that affect society, to use scientific knowledge and processes in making personal decisions, and to share in the excitement of scientific discovery and comprehension " (p. ix). Often, this unders...

The present study intended to propose a causal model of factors that would predict Oral Communication Apprehension (OCA) of Iranian learners of English as a foreign language. To conduct the study, 135 male and female University students majoring in English were selected. Five variables including: learners’self-esteem and introversion/extroversion(as independent variables), their gender and prof...

This study uses a moving windows self-paced reading task to assess text comprehension of beginning and intermediate-level simplified texts and authentic texts by L2 learners engaged in a text-retelling task. Linear mixed effects (LME) models revealed statistically significant main effects for reading proficiency and text level on the number of text-based propositions recalled: More proficient r...

In this study, we explore a human benchmark in language recognition, for the purpose of comparing human performance to machine performance in the context of the NIST LRE 2007. Humans are categorised in terms of language proficiency, and performance is presented per proficiency. The main challenge in this work is the design of a test and application of a performance metric which allows a meaning...

Determining the language proficiency level required to understand a given text is a key requirement in vetting documents for use in second language learning. In this work, we describe our approach for developing an automatic text analytic to estimate the text difficulty level using the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale. The approach we take is to use machine translation to...

OBJECTIVE To document oral language proficiency in a group of prelingually deaf bilingual children with a cochlear implant. DESIGN Using a repeated-measures paradigm, oral language skills in the first and second language were evaluated at 2 yearly intervals after implantation. Language data were compared with normative data from children with normal hearing. SUBJECTS Twelve deaf children be...

Background: English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses should empower students to satisfy their language needs. However, at many Iranian universities, these courses are mostly taught based on the Grammar Translation Method focusing on teaching grammatical rules and reading comprehension. The present study aims at proposing an innovative approach for teaching English to Medical students that ca...

Speaking and writing are the productive skills of language and share similar components. In other words, writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the modes of production are different. In addition, among a number of personality variables in predicting English language proficiency, extraversion/introversion has been extensively studied. This quasi-experimental study aims at explo...