Listening is regarded as an interactive process involving decoding of information. This study was launched to find out the impact of bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD) techniques on Iranian lower and upper intermediate learners’ listening comprehension. We selected a total of 120 participants in six intact classes, three lower intermediate and three upper intermediate. The proficiency level of th...

Placement tests, along with the growing interest in their validation, have become increasingly important in English as a Second Language programs. To this end, the present paper illustrates procedures in designing a placement test and using it to evaluate students’ language ability by means of statistical analysis. 29 participants from three proficiency levels (beginning, intermediate, and adva...

Previous studies have found quantity of exposure, i.e., frequency of exposure (Horst et al., 1998; Webb, 2008; Pellicer-Sánchez and Schmitt, 2010), is important for second language (L2) contextual word learning. Besides this factor, context constraint and L2 proficiency level have also been found to affect contextual word learning (Pulido, 2003; Tekmen and Daloglu, 2006; Elgort et al., 2015; Ma...

Development of a Sentence Repetition Test (SRT) (Radloff 1991) has resulted in wide employment of this efficient technique for estimating the bilingual proficiency profile of an entire community. The accepted standard is the Oral Proficiency Interview as developed by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. The Second Language Oral Proficiency Evaluation (SLOPE) was adapted from it by SIL (1987) to ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether training otorhinolaryngology residents to criterion performance levels (proficiency) on the Endoscopic Sinus Surgery Simulator produces individuals whose performance in the operating room is at least equal to those who are trained by performing a fixed number of surgical procedures. DESIGN Prospective cohort. SETTING Two academic medical centers in New York City...

the present study is an attempt to explore any significant relationships between learners’ preferences for error correction, demotivation, and language proficiency (lp). one hundred iranian efl students, including both males and females, studying at the departments of foreign languages of shahid bahonar university of kerman and tehran university took part in this study. in order to obtain the r...

This paper presents an analysis of the non-native and native pronunciations observed in a phonetically annotated bilingual French-German corpus. After a forced-choice automatic annotation a large part of the corpus was checked and corrected manually on the phone level which allows a detailed comparison of the realized sounds with the expected sounds. The analysis is reported in terms of phone c...

BACKGROUND Proficiency-based simulator training in laparoscopic suturing leads to improved operative performance, but the skill transfer is incomplete. The objective of this study was to examine the stress level of trainees during the transition from the simulator to the operating room (OR) and its impact on performance. METHODS Novices (n = 20) were randomized into training and control group...