No abstract

Linguistic competence, communicative competence, and interactional competence have had a profound impact on second language teaching, learning, and testing. Although a substantial number of studies have been conducted on these three competencies, they have not been conflated for discussion in a single study. Adding this piece to the jigsaw, the current paper explores these three competencies in depth. This paper had a twin purpose of 1) providing a historical account of the linguistic, communicative and interactional competences, and 2) reviewing of the literature on them in order to identify gaps, if any, with the intention to propose new research ideas pertaining to the three types of competences. In order to achieve the study aims, an intensive literature survey was conducted. Based on the review of the related research on linguistic, communicative and interactional competencies, this article offers recommendations for effective classroom practice and future research.

Oral reading fluency skill is considered to be the bridge to reading comprehension. However, it has been neglected in many English reading programs despite the fact that different theories (including behaviorism, information processing model theory, automaticity theory, and Ehri and McCormick’s word learning theory) have shed light on this skill. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to review theories, studies and practices relevant to this skill. This study has two aims: (1) to identify the theories underpinning oral reading strategies and (2) to identify the gap in research so far conducted on oral reading fluency. Various reading-aloud techniques and assessment methods are presented in this study. Moreover, some factors that affect students’ oral reading fluency are illustrated. Significantly, the practices that this study investigates and presents concerning teaching and assessing oral reading fluency might give an inspiration for the policymakers and curriculum designers to integrate oral reading fluency in their reading programs.

The current study explored the second language acquisition (SLA) difficulties that 45 Syrian refugees and asylum seekers encountered in nine countries (Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Malay, Austria, and Romania) that they fled to away from the ongoing war in Syria. The study also sought to elicit the solutions for these difficulties from the participants’ views. This research employed interviews and an open-ended questionnaire utilizing the Facebook Messenger application to gather data. The study builds on and broadens the scope of language acquisition research and questions main SLA theoretical underpinnings. The study found a variety of difficulties pertinent to economic, personal, social, linguistic, temporal, and psychological factors. The participants’ recommendations were classified into refugee-based, community-based, and authority-based ones.

The present paper aimed to compare the influence of two vocabulary teaching strategies on students’ vocabulary retention—roughly used in this paper to refer to the process of acquisition and memorisation. In particular, the strategies of semantic mapping and rote memorisation were compared and contrasted within a trail of evidence-based data gathered systematically from two ESL classes in an international school in the Emirate of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The participants of the study were 30 male students who were in grade 12, the last stage of high school in the UAE educational system. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: a control group and an experimental group. In order to measure the impact of the two strategies under investigation on the students’ vocabulary retention, the two groups sat for a pre-test and a posttest. The intervention that took place between the two tests lasted for three weeks. The results showed that the students’ retrieval of the target vocabulary words improved as a result of implementing both strategies, but that the improvement which resulted from the use of semantic mapping overrode that which ensued from rote memorisation.