The problem addressed through this study was that, in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms, adult learners in an intensive English program often suffer from tiredness, mental overload, and not having enough time for learning, these are factors which negatively impact their ability to learn English successfully. The purpose of this study…

Many foreign language learners encounter difficulties in pronouncing English language sounds, which potentially leads to misunderstanding in oral communication. Sometimes, the Albanian learners find pronunciation quite tricky when learning English language because they have to replicate lots of new strange sounds that are completely unknown to…

Apart from speaking competence and vocabulary used, refusal strategies play an important role in a communication scenario. This paper investigates how Thai students realise the speech act of refusals to the initiating acts of suggestions, offers, requests, and invitations with regard to the status of the interlocutor. To achieve this objective,…

Elicited imitation (EI), a short-cut measure of global proficiency in second language (L2) research, requires participants to listen to sentences and repeat them as closely as possible. To support instrument sharing and assessment of L2 proficiency for longitudinal and crosslinguistic research, we created a parallel form of an EI task (EIT) for L2…

The current era of globalization and emergence of English as an international language (EIL) has brought about new opportunities for L2 pragmatic learning and teaching. The common view of pragmatic learning as an approximation to native-likeness is changing towards conceiving pragmatic ability as a tool to interact with people of different…

The present study investigates the effect of task repetition and individual differences on Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' lexical use and fluency in oral task performance. The study adopts a within-subjects design with forty students performing the same narrative task twice. Students also completed two prior vocabulary…

Thesis defense presentation slides (TDPS) are a significant and unique genre in the final ritual of master's students' learning journey. However, few studies have explored this genre, especially its rhetorical structure, so students have scant knowledge of it. This study investigates the moves and steps of this genre focusing on their Introduction…

This study attempts to investigate how four groups of participants at Tra Vinh University perceive oral fluency. This study is conducted in the hope to obtain more perceptions of oral fluency so future rubrics can be developed based on such perceptions. The study used a set of items stating what oral fluency should be like, which was developed…

It is common to have good declarative but poor procedural knowledge of a foreign language, especially for classroom learners. To study this gap in a constrained manner, we asked Chinese learners of English to repeat, correct and produce indirect speech. The indirect speech construction was selected in the present study because it is known to be a…

The current study tried to investigate the impact of cooperative learning (CL) on improving Iranian intermediate EFL learners' oral proficiency motivations toward learning English. To fulfil this objective, 90 participants were selected and divided into two equal groups; one experimental and one control group. Then, the sample's speaking skills…

Speaking fluently is characterized not only by the speed of oral delivery but also by the absence of non-fluent pauses. This paper aims at investigating the pausing phenomena in the speech of the Yemeni learners of English. It investigated three aspects of silent pauses, the frequency, the placement and the length. The data were collected from 20…

Over the last three decades, emotional intelligence (EI) has received considerable empirical attention especially in academic context. Following this line of research, the study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between trait EI and EFL learners' second language (L2) oral performance. A sample of 102 Iranian EFL students, all…

This paper explores the extent gender differences affect foreign language anxiety and student beliefs about spoken corrective feedback. A random sample of 100 Turkish students (50 males, 50 females) who were preintermediate level learners of English as a foreign language at a state preparatory school in Turkey completed two questionnaires which…

This study compared Korean adult learners' English speech in dialogic and monologic tasks, measuring 57 college students' oral proficiency in terms of holistic and analytic grades. The statistical analyses were focused on two questions: (1) how much do the holistic grades of oral proficiency and analytic grades of the four linguistic features…

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these…