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.

While the spread of English as a lingua franca has led to calls for multidialectal competence, EFL learners often still consider inner circle native English speaker (NES) pronunciation as their learning goal, and may profess a preference for particular teachers based on their NES or non-native English speaker (NNES) status. This study investigates whether a teacher's NES/NNES status may affect Omani students' level of confidence towards the teacher. Using an adapted matched-guise technique with almost 350 students, the study reveals a preference for speakers and accents students understand to be from the UK, although students also responded favourably to Arabic native speakers. Where the NES/NNES variable remained constant, no significant difference in student's ratings of the teacher was found. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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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.

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Previous research has revealed that although EFL students may claim to prefer British/US accents they often have difficulty identifying them, especially when such accents may differ from 'standard' accents presented in ELT materials. In the Gulf, English is widely used as a lingua franca or as a second language by the large expatriate workforce. Particular accents in English characteristic for L1 speakers of Arabic or South Asian languages are commonly heard in the education and service sectors. This study investigates whether Omani university students are able to distinguish between native English speaker (NES) and non-native English speaker NNES EFL teachers' accents commonly heard in their educational context and their evaluations of these accents as pedagogical models. Specifically, the study seeks to ascertain whether a relationship exists between students' assumptions regarding the NES status of an EFL teacher and their evaluations of the teacher's accent as a suitable model for pronunciation. Results show that, in most cases, a moderate to strong correlation exists between these two variables, particularly among students who claim that having a NES teacher is desirable for the purpose of improving pronunciation

This study investigates how a group of 30 multilingual academics, all users of English as an additional language (EAL) working at a private university in Oman, acquired discourse community membership in their disciplines through publishing in English, and the strategies they use to sustain the level of literacy needed to disseminate their research in refereed journals while working on the periphery. The participants, from the natural sciences, information technology, and economics, originate from countries in the surrounding region and, although many did not study in one of the traditional Anglophone countries, their academic literacy skills in English have been the cornerstones of their peripatetic academic careers. Participants describe their experience publishing from the periphery and perceptions of reviewer bias, and identify strategies used to overcome material shortcomings and linguistic challenges. The practice of language reuse to support the drafting of particular sections of an article is a recurring theme in many interviews. The article discusses the importance of conventional language in the sciences and the differing understandings of plagiarism among academics from the humanities and sciences. An implication from this study is the need for greater institutional support for the writing process in environments where most faculty members are EAL users. doi: 10.1002/tesq.124 T his article presents the results of a qualitative study into the role of English in the careers of 30 multilingual academics from the sciences, engineering, and economics at the second largest university in the Sultanate of Oman. It investigates how these scholars, all speakers of English as an additional language (EAL) 1 originating from countries surrounding the Arabian Gulf, acquired discourse community 1 In addition to EAL, the traditional terms of nonnative English speaker (NNES) and native English speaker (NES) are used in this article, because these are the terms used by the participants in this study.

This study examines how the promotion of goods and services is lexicalized in commercial signs on shops in contemporary Omani society. The analysis of lexical features is based on data drawn from a corpus of over 1,600 signs photographed nation-wide. Processes identified include the lexicalization of cultural concepts, lexical innovation and borrowing, foreign cultural referents, and the use of repetition, attributes, and generalization and specification strategies to enhance salience and explicitness. This study contributes to our understanding of the use of English in lingua franca contexts in a region of pronounced ethnolinguistic diversity. English is used to reflect localized cultural values and practices and may display the influence of Arabic and South Asian English dialects. Evidence for the stabilization of particular innovative lexemes is found in their extensive use country-wide, which suggests their widespread acceptance and emergent nativization within this genre.