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Speaking in public involves three parts: an act, a process, and art; however, stage fright is a common dilemma for students across all proficiency levels and cultural orientations. In this paper, some critical factors of successful public speaking affecting both students' self-scoring and the professor's grading of in-class presentations were scrutinized using a likert-based survey method with quantitative and qualitative results. Specifically, areas investigated were anxiety, gestures and facial expressions, voice tone and relaxed attitude or behavior, spontaneity, and planned organization of delivery. It was found by the professors in this course that there are no statistically significant values or differences between students' self-evaluation and actual delivery in the five factors or aspects of their public speaking performances. However, whether the differences are huge or tiny, the resulting report of our research was informative, as the differences provide the vehicle for understanding some issues in teaching and learning which require further attention and reconciliation in a public speaking class. This paper offers insights to guide teachers and students in carrying out their goals and objectives more realistically in public speaking classes by examining student perspectives on public speaking in the target language.

The Sylheti Bangla, a variety of Bangla language is primarily spoken in the Sylhet District of Bangladesh, Barak Valley of Assam, Tripura, especially in North Tripura. The systematic perusal on English spoken by Sylheti Bangla speakers demonstrates that it carries a huge difference with English (RP) specially in respect to pronunciation, syllable structure, stress, intonation. The disparities between Sylheti English and English (RP) are because of a number of divergent variances between Sylheti Bangla and English which often makes the acquisition of English an arduous job for the Sylheti speakers. The errors committed by Sylheti speakers during their speaking in English can be attributed to the interference of the rule of mother tongue in learning the second language. This interference can be of phonological, morphological and sentence structure. However, the domain of this paper is exclusive to phonological interference of L1 on L2 through the contrastive analysis of the phonological aspects of Sylheti Bangla and English (RP). This paper intends to improve the status of English teaching-learning process compared to contemporary practices. Thus, it aspires to contribute to the theory of second language acquisition with a particular focus on learning English by the Sylheti speakers.

The teaching and learning of Chinese remains a fragile undertaking across all stages of Australian schooling. This paper reports on a practitioner inquiry into pedagogic practices and student engagement with disadvantaged primary school students in a Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) classroom in Sydney, Australia. Drawing upon studies of affect as well as the Fair Go Project's theoretical framework concerning student engagement, the research explores how 'difficult' Chinese knowledge and pedagogies of discomfort disrupt social norms and practices. The engagement of students is conceptualised as an interplay of highly affective, highly cognitive and highly operative learning experiences. In this paper, we argue that 'discomforting' emotions evoked by curricular and pedagogic approaches can influence significant change and foster curiosity for CFL education. The paper concludes with a consideration of pedagogic implications for foreign language education and possibilities for future research.

Besides numerous positive transformations and unique opportunities in language pedagogy, the post-method era brought with itself several challenges for language teachers. After intensive research and empirical studies, the use of literature was welcomed in ELT classrooms. But the question arises as to what extent and in what ways does literature support language learning? In an attempt to answer these questions and fill this lacuna, the present paper highlights ways in which literature assist language teachers. Moreover, the paper presents resourceful strategies to frame exercises using poems for ELT classroom. Shakespeare's "Sonnet 65" is used to illustrate some vital themes explored in this paper. In spite of the observed difficulty level of the sonnet and the layers of meaning it encapsulates, dynamic and engaging activities can be crafted out of this poem. Since the elements discussed in this study are ubiquitous to the genre of poetry, therefore the use of the presented methodology would also be universal.

This paper seeks to outline and describe the features of Ewe causative verbs and how they encode causative events. It explores the sub-lexical analysis of verbs' meanings since they form the basis of the classification of causal relations that allow us to explore the different imports between (sub-)events and how these events are structured, and how the participants in the events are related to the description of the event itself. It acknowledges that establishing causal connections between events and their participants is one of the principal means by which we structure our experience of our social and physical environment. Previous typological studies have focused on event segmentation into syntactic and intonational units as well as motion events. This study is descriptive in nature and focuses on causative verbs and their relational analysis with the causative events they construe. Two types of linguistic data are employed in this paper: textual and introspective. This paper identifies that just as English and other languages do, causation is at the heart of the majority of semantic analyses of verbs' meaning relevant to argument realization to involve the causal structure of the events they encode.

In a language, certain phenomena are sensitive to specific prosodic domains. In a model of morphology-syntax-phonology interaction in which morphological and syntactic structure projects phonological domains belonging to a set hierarchy, each phonological process refers to a specific level of that hierarchy. Therefore, describing a phonological process generally requires specifying the domain within which it applies. In Kisa, a Bantu language spoken in Western Kenya, a sequence of two vowels with different qualities is unacceptable. The ill-formed sequence is repaired through at least one of the vowel processes: gliding, coalescence, raising, assimilation and deletion. These vowel processes involve vowels occurring at different morphological and syntactic boundaries and apply within different prosodic domains in Kisa. Using a descriptive design and basing on data generated by two native speakers of Kisa and verified by the author as a native speaker of Kisa, this paper identifies and describes the boundaries at which and the prosodic domains in which the vowel processes stated above apply. The findings show that unacceptable vowel sequences occur both at morphological and syntactic boundaries in Kisa. The strategies used to repair the unwanted vowel sequences at each boundary differ depending on the combining vowels. Further, the findings of the paper show that the vowel processes attested in the language apply in different domains.

Collaborative learning has numerous benefits such as enhancing learners' critical thinking, developing social skills, and improving learning gains. While engaging in this interactive process, learners' satisfaction toward their partners plays a crucial role in defining the success of the collaboration. However, detecting learners' satisfaction during an ongoing collaboration remains challenging, and there are no automatic techniques to predict learners' satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a multimodal approach to automatically predict peer satisfaction for co-located collaboration with features extracted from 44 middle school learners' collaborative dialogues. We investigated three types of features extracted from learners' dialogues: 1) linguistic features indicating semantics and sentiment; 2) acoustic-prosodic features including energy and pitch; and 3) visual features including eye gaze, head pose, facial action units, and body pose. We then trained several regression models with each of those features to predict the peer satisfaction scores that learners received from their partners. The results revealed that head position and body location were significant indicators of peer satisfaction: lower head and body distances between partners were associated with more positive peer satisfaction. Next, we investigated the influence of multimodal feature fusion methods on peer satisfaction prediction accuracy: early fusion versus late fusion. We report the comparison results between models trained with (1) best-performing unimodal features, (2) multimodal features combined by early fusion, and (3) multimodal features combined by late fusion. This line of research reveals how multimodal features from collaborative dialogues are associated with peer satisfaction, and represents a step toward the development of real-time intelligent systems that support collaborative learning.

This paper explored and analyzed features of English pronunciation that could cause intelligibility problems for Nepali English learners (ELs), who use English as a foreign language (EFL) or English as a second language (ESL). We examined the Nepali ELs' pronunciation issues by juxtaposing them with comparable segmental and suprasegmental features of the Nepali language. We found that Nepali has far less sound inventory and voiceless consonants than English, yet it has a lot of contrastive consonants. Similarly, the Nepali language has fewer vowels, minimal diphthongs, and no triphthongs. While both English and Nepali share limited suprasegmental characteristics, they do not complement each other. Given the distinctiveness in pronunciation of the two languages, Nepali ELs are likely to face several intelligibility challenges as they encounter other non-Nepali English users. Thus, they need knowledge and appropriate training to enhance intelligibility for effective communication in workplaces and academic spaces that promote English.

Intercultural studies have underexplored the issue of children's theatre as a tool for symbolic representations of (new, hybrid) identities. In this paper, I analyze two theatrical productions addressing both Spanish society and Romanian diaspora (first/second generation) to answer these questions: how are diasporic identities re-constructed in literary works written in the country of origin and translated by diaspora translators for mixed audiences? How useful are these products for bilingual/bicultural children and adolescents in their search for new spaces of belonging? How can educators incorporate them? Methodology envisages translators' decisions (titles, names, prosody); imagology (text/performance) and reception (in-depth interviews and survey).

Aka (2019) conducted an year-long large-scale study demonstrating that Japanese high school students who undertook extensive reading performed better than a control group who undertook grammatical instruction. Those showing the greatest gains were those of lower and intermediate proficiency. The students' achievement was measured in terms of language knowledge and reading ability. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether reading skills would improve through extensive reading, rather than listening skills. According to Aka (2019), one advantage of extensive reading is that it presents a vastly greater amount of vocabulary than that is found in Japanese school textbooks. The extent of input is clearly important, but so is the quality. This paper argues that the mono-modal input mode of extensive reading programs neglects critical features for reading comprehension, such as intonation, which could be provided with bi-modal input. [This is a response to the article "Reading Performance of Japanese High School Learners Following a One-Year Extensive Reading Program" (EJ1212809).]

Referring to the "vital parts" of speech that do not appear in print, E. B. Huey (1908/1968) described prosody in reading as "the rise and fall of pitch and inflection, the hurrying here and slowing there, what we have called the melody of speech." In this paper, we discuss the role prosody plays in reading, contextualized in the Reading Systems Framework, as a source of linguistic knowledge that impacts the orthographic system, the lexicon, and comprehension processes in tonal and non-tonal languages. Prosody at the word, phrase, and discourse levels is considered. We also review empirical evidence from experimental, longitudinal, and training studies to show the current state of knowledge about the role of prosodic competence in reading development. We conclude the paper with recommendations for future directions in research.

This paper presents specific reference tools to provide institutional language integrated support with a specific language plan for a bilingual programme at the University of Malaga. This follows experts' opinions that claim the need of such a plan. While studies show the importance of language support in bilingual instruction, they rarely address specific content professors' needs tending to remain distant from real teaching contexts. The title "The language of learning" highlights the reality of bilingual classrooms to address specific needs of this unique academic scenario. The article examines how language support has a dual focus that includes both students and instructors. The paper concludes with a reflection on interdisciplinary innovation projects that provide professors with the tools to ensure the quality of bilingual programmes.

This paper intends to examine the efficacy of song education to develop English proficiency in China's EFL context. By conducting a comparative study between two parallel classes and analyzing the results of forty-eight questionnaires, the paper reveals the following: 1) song education can help improve pronunciation and intonation skills to a great extent; 2) only carefully selected songs can be evidently helpful with the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar; and 3) song education makes it possible for students to be more culturally informed and culturally interested. Thus this paper casts some light on how song education can be employed as an effective strategy to develop English proficiency for English majors in China.