One of the difficulties in teaching Turkish, which is a phonetically rich language, to foreigners, is that similar sounds are often confused with each other. Since even a single punctuation mark is crucial for writing and reading Turkish letters (i-i, o-ö, u-ü, c-ç, g-g, s-s, etc.), students who use the Arabic alphabet have great difficulty…

The present study seeks to determine whether superior musical hearing is correlated with successful production of second language (L2) intonation patterns. Fifty Polish speakers of English at the university level were recorded before and after an extensive two-semester accent training course in English. Participants were asked to read aloud a…

Automatic Speech Scoring (ASS) has increasingly become a useful tool in oral proficiency testing for Second Language (L2) learners. However, limited studies investigate the alignment of ASS indices with the Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF)--the three dimensions in evaluating L2 speakers' oral proficiency, and the subsequent impact indices…

One of the most important skills to acquire in learning a foreign language is speaking. It is however, viewed as one of the most difficult. This study involved the observation of non-English major students in the foreign language department of Nanjing Tech University. Its aim was to assess critically the factors that affect the speaking…

In this study, we investigated preparatory class students' perceptions of oral presentations and their functions in EFL learning and teaching in connection with language ability, speech anxiety, and language learning motivation. Our participants were 29 adult EFL students in two intact classes attending a mandatory English preparatory program at a…

Speaking difficulty encountered by the students in every level is one of the major issues in the teaching of EFL. Many researchers reported that the factors are ranged from linguistic domain to psychology. Many experts wrote textbooks and articles to discuss this issue in hoping that the teaching of English speaking in particular can achieve…

This study aims to determine the relationship between cultural interaction and language in teaching Turkish as a foreign language and reveal its contribution to the learning process. Therefore, in this study, the cultural exchange of a Lebanese international student studying at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University was evaluated in the context of…

This study aims to investigate viewpoints of the adult learners about the effects of the recorded motivational videos. The study was applied to twelve adult learners between the months of March and May in spring semester of 2019, at Mugla Sitki Koçman University. As to the research design, explanatory mixed methods design was implemented. The…

Due to ever-increasing demands to acquire effective communicative abilities in the English language, increasing numbers of international students choose to study in Western tertiary institutions; however, they frequently encounter difficulties in performing satisfactorily in English. This study aims to identify specific challenges that Japanese…

This paper examines the effectiveness of a mobile assisted blended learning scenario for pronunciation in Korean language. In particular, we analyze how asynchronous oral communication between learners of Korean and native speakers via "kakaotalk" (an open source mobile phone application) may be beneficial to the learner in terms of…

Assessing speaking skills is regarded as a complex and hard process compared with the other language skills. Considering the idiosyncratic characteristics of EFL learners, oral proficiency assessment issue becomes even more important. Keeping this situation in mind, judgements and reliability of raters need to be consistent with each other. This…

This article discusses the strategies used by Cantonese ESL learners to cope with their problems in pronouncing English initial consonant clusters. A small-scale research study was carried out with six secondary and six university students in Hong Kong, who were asked to perform four speech tasks: the reading of a word list, the description of a…

Forty-four university students, of whom 11 had learning disabilities (LD), were tested on tasks requiring multisyllabic pseudoword repetition, oral reading, memory for digits, and vocabulary. In both LD and non-LD groups, significant correlations were found between pseudoword repetition accuracy and reading, suggesting that poor readers also have…

This study investigated the acquisition of speaking skills in an online distance education course of 19 first semester Spanish learners. The possibility of oral development in a strictly online course was examined based on students' pronunciation production in two types of recorded speaking activities and in two real-time conversations. Students…

This study investigated changes in the speech patterns of Japanese college students in an intensive English language course when using a microphone, focusing in part on possible links to "karaoke" activities common in Japan, in which participants sing along with music using a microphone. The researcher first observed several karaoke…