Readers reading practices of EFL Yemeni students: recommendations for the 21st century

This paper investigates the reading practices of forty-five second year EFL Yemeni undergraduate students using the Four Resources Model of multiliteracy practices. The Four Resources Model of multiliteracy practices organizes reading practices into four key practices: code breaking, text participating, text uses and text analysing levels. Quantitative and qualitative methods, designed based on the Four Resources Model constructs, were used to collect data from a sample of students studying English as a Foreign Language at a university in Yemen. Quantitative data was collected through a questionnaire, while qualitative data was gathered using semi-structured interviews guided by the research objectives. The findings reveal that Yemeni students were medium users of the code breaker and text user practices whereas the meaning making and text analysis practices were reported to be used in low usage. On the whole, these early findings suggest that the reading practices and reading abilities of the Yemeni students are still limited even at the tertiary level and have not developed fully with regard to reading in English. This paper reports in detail, the use of the Four Resources Model as a tool to determine reading efficacy while examining the aforementioned findings. Discussion is put forward on the implications for teaching of reading and its approaches in a Yemeni context, especially in view of the students‟ reading needs at the tertiary level in Yemen

Formative interaction in online writing: making disciplinary expectations explicit

About the book: How to provide appropriate feedback to students on their writing has long been an area of central significance to teachers and educators. Feedback in Second Language Writing: Context and Issues provides scholarly articles on the topic by leading researchers, who explore topics such as the socio-cultural assumptions that participants bring to the writing class; feedback delivery and negotiation systems; and the role of student and teacher identity in negotiating feedback and expectations. This text provides empirical data and an up-to-date analysis of the complex issues involved in offering appropriate feedback during the writing process

The 2005 AMI system for the transcription of speech in meetings

In this paper we describe the 2005 AMI system for the transcription\ud of speech in meetings used for participation in the 2005 NIST\ud RT evaluations. The system was designed for participation in the speech\ud to text part of the evaluations, in particular for transcription of speech\ud recorded with multiple distant microphones and independent headset\ud microphones. System performance was tested on both conference room\ud and lecture style meetings. Although input sources are processed using\ud different front-ends, the recognition process is based on a unified system\ud architecture. The system operates in multiple passes and makes use\ud of state of the art technologies such as discriminative training, vocal\ud tract length normalisation, heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis,\ud speaker adaptation with maximum likelihood linear regression and minimum\ud word error rate decoding. In this paper we describe the system performance\ud on the official development and test sets for the NIST RT05s\ud evaluations. The system was jointly developed in less than 10 months\ud by a multi-site team and was shown to achieve very competitive performance

Tongue Twisters in Pronunciation Class

                                To be able to speak English fluently or native-like for  foreign learners of this language  becomes their expectation to achieve. One of important elements that support successful communication using English is pronunciation. Without sufficient pronunciation skills, the learners may have limit ability to comunicate. The Indonesian language has different system from that of English including the sound system.Therefore, a teaching aid is needed to foster learners to improve their pronunciation skills.Tongue Twisters which consist of a combination of sounds that are hard for the mouth and tongue to manage especially for  non-native learners are meaningful tools to improve pronunciation. In this case, tongue twisters are implemented in pronunciation class of the second semester of English Department Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Slamet Riyadi University. The students reported that they had never used tongue twisters before. They found the drills useful and interesting. The class became fun and active. However, some still found difficulty while using tongue twisters especially the speed and time consuming. Tongue Twisters are useful drills to improve motivation, class condition, and pronunciation skill of the second semester students of English Department Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Slamet Riyadi University