No abstract

The very notion of fluency seems to be relatively problematic. On the one hand, most native speakers of any language, even without much formal education, are able to voice their opinions on whether or not somebody they hear talking is fluent. This intuitive understanding, however, is not homogeneous across social and age groups. It can be easily observed in the results of oral fluency judgement tests, such as the one conducted by Rossiter (2009), where various groups of judges, despite some observable consistency, were, in certain cases, found to pay attention to very different features of subjects' speech production. Moreover there seems to be a disagreement as regards the very nature of this phenomenon. As it was mentioned by Lennon (1990), the term fluency can stand for overall oral proficiency, as well as one of its components, namely temporal features of speech production (number of pruned syllables per minute, distribution and duration of pauses, etc.). In such a case, the remaining components of proficient speech production are referred to as accuracy (Brumfit 1984). The binary opposition between the two (or, rather, as Harmer explains it-two ends of "the communication continuum"-1993: 50) proves useful in teaching terms, since it provides a clear-cut division between two different types of exercises or classroom activities. Essentially, the difference between these two terms seems highly correlated with providing students with feedback. In fluency-oriented tasks,

The paper explores the accuracy of feedback provided to non-native learners of English by a pronunciation module included in Microsoft Reading Progress. We compared pronunciation assessment offered by Reading Progress against two university pronunciation teachers. Recordings from students of English who aim for native-like pronunciation were assessed independently by Reading Progress and the human raters. The output was standardized as negative binary feedback assigned to orthographic words, which matches the Microsoft format. Our results indicate that Reading Progress is not yet ready to be used as a CAPT tool. Inter-rater reliability analysis showed a moderate level of agreement for all raters and a good level of agreement upon eliminating feedback from Reading Progress. Meanwhile, the qualitative analysis revealed certain problems, notably false positives, i.e., words pronounced within the boundaries of academic pronunciation standards, but still marked as incorrect by the digital rater. We recommend that EFL teachers and researchers approach the current version of Reading Progress with caution, especially as regards automated feedback. However, its design may still be useful for manual feedback. Given Microsoft declarations that Reading Progress would be developed to include more accents, it has the potential to evolve into a fully-functional CAPT tool for EFL pedagogy and research.

The paper explores learners' responses to a new course format introduced in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Łódź. The course contained an interactive component with online tasks conducted in real time in the classroom. Instead of using dedicated Response Systems, we adopted Moodle LMS to verify whether it may be successfully used in that capacity. It may be concluded that despite its dated UI this system is still a viable option for offering interactive in-class instruction. The results of the student survey indicate that the course was well-received, although not all of its components were equally appreciated by the students. In particular, there was a significant difference between the reception of Open-Ended and Close-Ended questions. This difference might be explored from various perspectives, e.g. convenience vs learning effort or memorization vs acquiring skills The paper offers pedagogical implications which may help deal with the aforementioned problems.

This article looks into the interface of temporality and quantification. Drawing on the principles of Cognitive Linguistics, we use experimental as well as corpus methods to provide evidence on how the conceptual organisation and linguistic coding of content can play a role in meaning construction. With that broad agenda in mind, a major objective is to shed light on the construct of conventionalisation. For that purpose, construal coding variants are examined with a focus on nominal phrases that express time quantities. The examination involves two construal types (termed “cumulative” and “fractional”) that differ primarily in their prominence configurations, across three granularity levels of time conceptualisation. Our main finding – that the fractional and cumulative constructions are asymmetrically conventionalised – is contextualised through a qualitative analysis of naturally-occurring data to identify additional language use patterns and offer explanatory hypotheses.