This research is an exploratory study that seeks to evaluate the potentials of the Chinese app WeChat to enhance the spoken fluency of learners of French in China, who report having limited and insufficient opportunities to practice speaking in their daily life. WeChat is an extremely popular instant messenger facilitating communication through a…

This article reports on a case study of how an experienced EFL teacher assessed her students in her oral English course at a university in China. Data were collected over one semester through document analysis, classroom observation and recording, interviews, and student journals. Analysis revealed that the teacher assessed her students through…

This article reports on an exploratory study investigating mobile-assisted oral feedback in teaching Chinese as a second language (CSL). It is aimed at exploring the characteristics of mobile-assisted feedback on oral production with the smartphone social communication app WeChat as a case in point and examining learners' perceptions of…

Oral production is an important part in English learning. Lack of a language environment with efficient instruction and feedback is a big issue for non-native speakers' English spoken skill improvement. A computer-assisted language learning system can provide many potential benefits to language learners. It allows adequate instructions and instant…

Under the constraint of classroom time, English as foreign language (EFL) learners usually do not have adequate opportunity to practice oral English in class nor receive individualized feedback from the instructor. After-class practice constitutes an essential component of foreign language learning. This study investigated the effect of utilizing…

Language test preparation has often been studied within the consequential validity framework in relation to ethics, equity, fairness, and washback of assessment. The use of independent and integrated speaking tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"® test represents a significant development and innovation in assessing speaking ability in academic…

The development of students' professional skills is an important issue in higher education in China. This research reports a 3-month study investigating engineering students' communication strategies (CSs) while they were interacting to do a 12-week mobile-assisted learning project, i.e., "Organizing and Attending a Model International…

In present China, bilingual teaching, as an education model, can meet an urgent demand for increasing interdisciplinary talents who have high levels of professional knowledge as well as competent foreign language abilities to deal with the ever-increasing global social, economic, scientific and technological exchanges, and international…

Chinese EFL learners may have difficulty in speaking fluent and accurate English, for their speaking competence are likely to be influenced by cognitive, linguistic and affective factors. With the aim to enhance those learners' oral proficiency, this paper first discusses three effective models of teaching English speaking, and then proposes a…

Research in EFL and ESL has confirmed that self-efficacy affects language learners' choices of learning tasks, persistence, motivation and achievement. As a cognitive construct, self-efficacy can be strengthened by both outcomes of behaviors and input from the environment. This paper studies the effects of an English Bar, a self-access center for…

This study explores whether and to what degree explicit form-focused instruction (FFI) facilitates the use of morphosyntactic forms in second language oral production and also whether it has differential effects on morphosyntactic forms with different linguistic variables. Twenty-seven university-level Chinese EFL participants were randomly…

This study investigates the attitudes towards, and practices of, computer-assisted autonomous learning in learning English of 160 students from three different higher education institutions in China. To do this, a questionnaire was completed by 160 participants, and follow-up in-depth interviews were undertaken with six participants and six of…

This study was intended to explore the relationship of gender, perceived language ability with communication strategy use by tourism-oriented EFL learners studying at the universities in the Southwest China to improve and maintain their oral communication in English. The Communication Strategy Questionnaire was used for data collection, and the…

Intonation is the melody and soul of speech, and plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, the acquisition of English intonation by Chinese EFL learners is far from being satisfactory. It is found by empirical study that the main problems existing in acquiring English rising tone are improper placement of nucleus stress, failure…

This paper investigated the current situation of oral English teaching, learning, and assessment at the tertiary level in China through needs analysis and explored the implications for the development of a diagnostic speaking test. Through random sampling, the researcher administered both a student questionnaire and a teacher questionnaire to over…