The purpose of this study was to determine what difficulties King Saud University students encounter when learning to write academic English and to differentiate between students' learning needs and objectives. The sample consisted of 50 postgraduate students enrolled in King Saud University during the academic year 2009-2010. Analysis of the data…

Gender has been a controversial issue which affects the language learning process. McNamara (1996) has proposed that there are some variables affecting second language performance one of which is sex. In much the same way, it has been reported that gender plays a role in the area of language testing (Brown, 2003; Lumley & O'Sullivan, 2005;…

This study aimed to explore pre-service English teachers' perceptions of teaching speaking in Turkey, the importance they give to this language skill, and their self-evaluation of their speaking competence. With case design and maximum variation sampling approach, seven pre-service English teachers' beliefs about speaking skills were gathered in…

This paper introduces and discusses issues related to the challenge of obtaining more valid and reliable assessment and positive backwash of direct spoken English language performance of students in real-life situations. For this purpose, the paper is divided into four sections. The first section is the introduction to the article. The second part…

Speaking proceeds under the constraint of time. While speaking, speakers are under constant pressure to follow the message being received and to formulate rapid responses to their partners. In the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) Speaking Test, the communicative nature of the interview creates an ideal situation for applicants…

This study examines the impact of syntactic priming on production of indirect questions/requests by Persian learners of English as a foreign language. Eighty learners participated in two experiments investigating the impact of syntactic priming on oral production and the possibility of transfer of the priming effects to a different modality.…

Two approaches to grammar instruction are often discussed in the ESL literature: direct explicit grammar instruction (DEGI) (deduction) and indirect explicit grammar instruction (IEGI) (induction). This study aims to explore the effects of indirect explicit grammar instruction on EFL learners' mastery of English tenses. Ninety-four…

The pressing need for English oral communication skills in multifarious contexts today is compelling impetus behind the large number of studies done on oral proficiency interviewing. Moreover, given the recently articulated concerns with the fairness and social dimension of such interviews, parallel concerns have been raised as to how most fairly…

Hesitation strategies appear in speech in the form of filled or unfilled pauses, paralinguistic markers like nervous laughter or coughing, or signals which are used to justify units in the coming utterances in which the speaker struggles to produce. The main functions of these forms of hesitation strategies have been associated with speech…

The ability to speak English offers young adults in Brazil opportunities to prepare for the global job market and promotes cross cultural understanding, which are national curriculum goals for public education. The study reported in this article documents the implementation of the "Empregabilidade," "Tecnologia e…

The present study contributes to developing a Public Speaking Class Anxiety Scale (PSCAS) to measure anxiety in the EFL public speaking class in the Thai context. Items were adopted from previous scales: Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) by Horwitz et al. (1986); Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA-24) and Personal…

The present study examines the effect of negotiated interaction on Mongolian-nationality EFL learners' spoken production, focusing on the teacher-learner interaction in a story-telling task. The study supports the hypothesis that interaction plays a facilitating role in language development for learners. Quantitative analysis shows that Mongolian…

Considering the significant role of vocabulary in learning a language, and teachers' great responsibility in providing opportunities to facilitate this learning, many studies have focused on the best means of achieving a good knowledge of vocabulary. This study set out to investigate the effect of four post-teaching activities, namely game,…

The present paper is an attempt to evaluate "Pacesetter" Series (Strange and Hall, 2005), an EFL course book series, in four levels of "starter", "elementary", "pre-intermediate", and "intermediate", being currently instructed at several language institutes in Iran. The purpose of this study is to…

It is believed that peer assessment equips learners with a skill set withheld from them by teacher assessments that enhances language learning. However, the benefits of peer assessment are limited to how well learners can conduct peer assessment tasks. Therefore, improving the efficacy of peer assessment is essential. One way to increase the…