This paper provides a review of oracy in primary education (5-11) in England. It discusses the nature of talk, acknowledging it as integral to the learning and teaching process and traces the history and development of the place of oracy within the curriculum. The article provides a critique of related policy initiatives including various…

This mixed-methods study examines the effects of rating scale length and rater experience on listeners' judgments of second-language (L2) speech. Twenty experienced and 20 novice raters, who were randomly assigned to 5-point or 9-point rating scale conditions, judged speech samples of 38 newcomers to Canada on numerical rating scales for…

This dissertation presents results from a series of experiments investigating adult learning of an artificial language and the effects that input frequency (high vs. low token frequency), frequency distribution (skewed vs. balanced), presentation mode (structured vs. scrambled), and first language (English vs. Japanese) have on such learning.…