This paper reviews how the construct of oral fluency in a second language (L2) has been defined and researched over the last twenty-five years. The emerging picture is somewhat kaleidoscopic, as domains of cognitive, social, individual and linguistic influences on L2 speech have been opened up for study. L2 fluency research presents a wealth of…

The author, having drawn examples from her doctoral study, describes how a thematic analysis approach was employed to interpret raw data in her doctoral study which explored the impacts of a high-stakes test on students and parents in Nepal. As the main purpose of this paper is to provide some guidelines for English language teaching (ELT)…

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) once meant principally text-based communication mediated by computers, but rapid technological advances in recent years have heralded an era of multimodal communication with a growing emphasis on audio and video synchronous interaction. As CMC, in all its variants (text chats, video chats, forums, blogs, SMS,…

Introduces three papers (published in this issue) contrasting the development of gestures and sign language with spoken language in order to specify the nature of language plasticity (susceptibility to change) and robustness (invariance). Focuses on question of whether these are parallel systems or an integrated system with two forms of…

This study with 10 adults who stutter and 10 nonstuttering controls completed speech, orofacial nonspeech, and finger isochronous rhythmic timing tasks to investigate the role of timing in stuttering. Findings extend growing evidence that stuttering individuals do not differ from nonstuttering individuals in the ability to generate temporal…

A comparison of vocal development in deaf and hearing infants indicates that well-formed syllable production is established in the first 10 months of life by hearing infants but not by deaf infants, suggesting that audition plays an important role in vocal development. (PCB)

This study found that 10 children (ages 9-10) with language impairments showed significant differences from 10 children with normal language in English bound-morpheme skill levels, ability to generalize English bound-morphemes to novel words, and ability to learn novel bound-morphemes attached to novel words. (Author/JDD)

Thirty-three kindergartners from two social classes were tested on an array of prereading and oral language skills. Prereading skills were found to be highly intercorrelated and to relate to ability to provide decontextualized definitions for words. Oral language measures of decontextualized skill correlated within task, but not across tasks. (PCB)

Argues that the ability to narrate experience relies upon pervasive, culturally shared, and unquestioned myths. Analyzes the oral narrative of a seven-year-old Black female elementary school student. (FMW)

The study investigated the alternate forms reliability of four type-token ratios (TTRs) of oral language samples obtained from 52 elementary school children. Findings indicated that TTRs were not comparable when calculated for different sample sizes and that they were not reliable measures of the language performance of this population. (Author/DB)

Tests Halliday's model of context/text relationships and how these relationships vary for 71 children in first, second, and third grades. Children produced oral and written messages about a circus in narrative and persuasive genres. Texts were analyzed for elements of linguistic cohesion and length of clausal themes. (Author/CB)

Essay questions, interviews, and personality inventories of 35 male and female college students revealed that the avoidance of sexist language was linked to less traditional sex role views and a lesser adherence to fundamentalist Christian beliefs. (DM)

Written and spoken language samples for 13 students with hearing impairments (HI) attending special classes in Tel Aviv, Israel, and 9 normal hearing students were analyzed for grammatical deviations. HI students exhibited significantly more deviations in written than spoken language samples, especially failure to supply morphological markers,…

Seventeen children (ages 5-7) with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to age-matched (AM) and language-matched (LM) groups on measures of metalinguistic skill. SLI children's performance was worse than AM peers and indistinguishable from younger LM children, suggesting that morphological awareness is more closely allied to oral…

Compares the effects of intonation training and phonological training on the intelligibility of the speech of two severely unintelligible preschool children. The results indicated that an increase in intelligibility is facilitated through training in the production of intonation patterns. (Author/BB)