This study investigated the effect of oral dialogue journals on communicative competence of Iranian EFL learners. Participants of this study were 80 students of two Payam-e-Noor Universities who were proved to be homogenous in the communicative competence based on TSE (Test of Spoken English) interview. The participants of one of these universities were considered as the experimental group. The...

Speech-sign or "bimodal" bilingualism is exceptional because distinct modalities allow for simultaneous production of two languages. We investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon for models of language production by eliciting language mixing from eleven hearing native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Instead of switching between languages, bilinguals frequently produced...

This article explores the impact of English proficiency on labour supply of recent immigrants in Australia. Previous research has shown that English ability is important for participation and employment, however little research has been done with respect to hours worked. This study uses the second cohort of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (LSIA) data to estimate a random effe...

The present study investigates the extent of word-final devoicing in Russian for three groups of speakers: monolingual native Russian speakers (4 Ss), native Russian speakers with knowledge of English (7 Ss), and American English learners of Russian (9 Ss). Thirty-four minimal pairs of Russian words differing in the underlying voicing of word-final obstruents were recorded. Acoustic analysis fo...

Syntactic complexity as an indicator in the study of English learners’ language proficiency has been frequently employed in language development assessment. Using the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, developed by Lu (2010), this article collected data representing the syntactic complexity indexes from the writing of Chinese non-English major students and from the writing of proficient users of En...

This paper investigates how the language of instruction in Dutch higher education (Dutch versus English) affects speech production by L1 Dutch-speaking lecturers. In a pairwise design, three young lecturers that were highly proficient English gave two comparable lectures each (L1 and L2 English). Results show consistently given at slightly syllabic articulation rates filled pauses shorter occur...

As children become proficient readers, there are substantial changes in the eye movements that subserve reading. Some of these changes reflect universal developmental factors while others may be specific to a particular writing system. This study attempts to disentangle effects of universal and script-dependent factors by comparing the development of eye movements of English and Chinese speaker...

This interview study of seven highly proficient Korean users of English examines the role of the ‘ideal second language self’ as a motivator in the learning of English as a global language. It explores their perspectives on the cultural associations that English holds, the degree to which a ‘global identity’ is a part of their own self-understandings, and whether or not they visualize elements ...

For purposes of the present study, it was hypothesized that field (in)dependence would introduce systematic variance into Iranian EFL learners’ overall and task-specific performance on task-based reading comprehension tests. 1743 freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior students all majoring in English at different Iranian universities and colleges took the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT). Th...