Background: While practitioners are increasingly asked to be mindful of the evidence base of intervention programmes, evidence from rigorous trials for the effectiveness of interventions that promote oral language abilities in the early years is sparse. Aims: To evaluate the effectiveness of a language intervention programme for children…

The aim of the study was to investigate how raters come to their decisions when judging spoken vocabulary. Segmental rating was introduced to quantify raters' decision-making process. It is hoped that this simulated study brings fresh insight to future methodological considerations with spoken data. Twenty trainee raters assessed five Chinese…

For Chinese as a second language (L2 Chinese), there has been little research into "distinguishing features" (Fulcher, 1996; Iwashita et al., 2008) used in scoring L2 Chinese speaking performance. The study reported here investigates the relationship between the distinguishing features of L2 Chinese spoken performances and the scores…

This paper reports a case study of the nature and extent of progress in speaking skills made by a group of upper intermediate instructed learners, and also assessors' perceptions of that progress. Initial and final interview data were analysed using several measures of Grammatical and Lexical Complexity, Language Accuracy and Fluency. These…

This cross-linguistic comparison of metalinguistic development in French and English examines early ability to manipulate derivational suffixes in oral language games as a function of chronological age, receptive vocabulary, and year of schooling. Data from judgment and production tasks are presented for children aged between 5 and 8 years in…

The aim of this paper is to describe vocabulary use during semi-spontaneous oral production among instructed learners of French and Spanish at two different stages in the UK educational system: year 9 (near beginners) and year 13 (approximately low-intermediates). The paper mainly focuses on comparing lexical diversity (range or variety of…

This study aimed at determining the effectiveness of using reflection in developing Tourism and Hospitality students' oracy in English. Two modes of reflection (i.e., "active reflection" and "proactive reflection") were used for developing two aspects of oracy: language awareness of some features of spoken language (i.e.,…

14,000 Saudi students are currently studying in the UK. Before they start their coursework in their major, most take English language courses for at least a year and should pass the IELTS test. Interviews with a sample of Saudi students studying in the UK showed that focus in the English courses that students take is mainly on grammar and written…