abstract this study aimed at investigating the possible impact of gender and proficiency level on the relationship between autonomy and listening comprehension ability among iranian low and high proficiency male and female efl learners. one hundred six english learners, based on the results of oxford placement test (opt), version ii, took part in this study. both female and male learners with t...

The main concern of this study was communication strategies (CSs) which are used to compensate for communication breakdown. The goals of this study were to examine whether proficiency level of Iranian students had any relationship with their choice of CSs. This research was descriptive in nature. The participants were 15 pre-intermediate and 14 intermediate EFL learners between 16 to 21years ol...

Functional imaging methods show differences in the pattern of cerebral activation associated with the subject's native language (L1) compared with a second language (L2). In a recent PET investigation on bilingualism we showed that auditory processing of stories in L1 (Italian) engages the temporal lobes and temporoparietal cortex more extensively than L2 (English). However, in that study the I...

Language proficiency is predicted to modulate orthographic-semantic association in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition, in accordance with the assumptions of the Developmental Bilingual Interactive-Activation model (BIA-d) (Grainger et al., 2010). The current study explored this modulation during pre-attentive L2 orthographic perception. ERPs were recorded from Chinese-English bilingual...

This paper presents results from investigations into the effect of allowing examinee autonomy in a computerized test of oral proficiency. It begins with a description of the computerized assessment, the Computerized Oral Proficiency Instrument (COPI), as operationalized in Spanish and Arabic. It then presents results from research on allowing examinee autonomy in the assessment. The talk will p...

Constructing a student model for language tutors is a challenging task. This paper describes using knowledge tracing to construct a student model of reading proficiency and validates the model. We use speech recognition to assess a student’s reading proficiency at a subword level, even though the speech recognizer output is at the level of words. Specifically, we estimate the student’s knowledg...

The present study has been conducted with the purpose of exploring the relationship between EDBI staff's General English proficiency and their technical English Writing as well as the way each ESBP and GE courses affect their writing skill. The kind of the study is quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test, being conducted among EDBI staff in Tehran Branches and Headquarters. In data colle...