Oral Communication Strategies are conscious techniques that L2 interlocutors employ to overcome the communication breakdowns in the target language. Hence, they can help to promote the effectiveness of communication ability. However, it must be noted that many variables can influence the use of these strategies. The present study, therefore, aimed to investigate the role of language proficiency...

PURPOSE Research has identified English oral language proficiency as being critical for bilingual students' literacy development. This study examines developmental patterns and associations among oral vocabulary and narrative skills in a longitudinal sample of 24 Spanish/English bilingual children from low socioeconomic backgrounds so as to further our understanding of the development of oral p...

We consider the automatic assessment of oral proficiency for advanced second language speakers. A spoken dialogue system is used to guide students through a reading and a repeating exercise and to record their responses. Automatically-derived indicators of proficiency that have proved successful in other studies are calculated from their speech and compared with human ratings of the same data. ...

Proficiency testing is an important ingredient in successful language teaching. However, repeated testing for course placement, over the course of instruction or for certification can be time-consuming and costly. We present the design and validation of the Versant Arabic Test, a fully automated test of spoken Modern Standard Arabic, that evaluates test-takers' facility in listening and speakin...

Proficiency testing is an important ingredient in successful language teaching. However, repeated testing for course placement, over the course of instruction or for certification can be time-consuming and costly. We present the design and validation of the Versant Arabic Test, a fully automated test of spoken Modern Standard Arabic, that evaluates test-takers' facility in listening and speakin...

In traditional English learning as a second language, learners rarely have the opportunity to practice oral communication, so the acquisition of oral proficiency is a slow process. In this paper, we propose a task-based second language learning game system. The task-based learning method enables learners to obtain communicative skills through the practice of particular “missions” using voice an...

The study examines how prototypes and typological relationships between the L1, L2 target language (TL) interact with TL proficiency in learning Italian as additional language. Low-proficiency high-proficiency undergraduate learners of (N = 25) Swedish L1 performed an oral retelling story test, aiming to elicit aspectual contrast perfective-imperfective. Their tense selection was analyzed consi...

Abstract This study focuses on the issue of language proficiency attainment among young heritage speakers Russian living in Spain and examines factors that have been claimed to promote proficiency, namely, age, gender, age onset L2, quantity exposure family use. A group 30 Russian-Spanish-Catalan trilingual children aged 7–11 participated study. In order measure (L1 Russian), oral narratives we...