This study investigated whether the provision of out-of-class speaking practice to young learners of English could contribute to improving speaking proficiency grades, and have a positive impact on children's willingness to communicate. Two intact classes of Grade 3 Turkish learners participated. Recorded communicative exercises provided asynchronous speaking practice homework with the classroom teacher as the children's interlocutor, while the control group received traditional paper-based exercises. The content of materials used in both groups was based on the class syllabus. A comparison of the speaking test scores of the control and experimental groups revealed that, over a four-month period, the use of the interactive recordings contributed to a significant improvement in the children's assessed oral performance. The implementation was particularly successful in raising the speaking test scores of children who had initially received lower scores. A subsequent ANOVA analysis revealed that the experimental group demonstrated an improvement in their ability to respond confidently with minimal pauses and hesitations, although the length of responses did not change significantly. The integration of such computer-mediated activities for homework speaking practice is potentially particularly useful in contexts where parents lack sufficient English skills to support children with their English-language homework tasks.
This study investigates how a group of 13 Turkish scholars from the humanities faculty of a prominent Turkish university perceive the development of their discipline-specific second language writing skills. Personal interviews were used to elicit data and excerpts from the interviews have been recorded in this paper. The acquisition strategies identified in the data reveal that the acquisition of scholarly writing expertise was an extended process of exploration of genre conventions, with a strong component of largely self-directed analysis of linguistic and organizational norms. The study considers how these strategies can be incorporated into a field study or portfolio-based academic writing program, with a view to training junior researchers to recognize the rhetorical, organizational, and linguistic characteristics of scholarly writing from their own discipline, and to monitor the development of their own writing competence.
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