Gender Differences in Verbal Fluency and Language Dominance by Arab Students

This study falls within Multi-lingual Processing area. The aim of this study is to investigate the language dominance and gender differences in verbal fluency by Arab students in a foreign country. The impact of duration residence's years and the differences in the phonological and semantic fluency by gender in English as a foreign language, Standard Arabic and Arabic dialect among Arab students at Pannonia University in Hungary are examined. Ten Arab students were involved in this study (five males and five females) between the ages of 25-35 years old. The task in this study contained two main categories to measure the phonological and semantic fluency. The participants were asked to write as many words as they could that started with letter (S) in one minute in the phonological category. While in the semantic category, they were required to write as many jobs as they could in English, Standard Arabic and Arabic dialect. This study concludes that the phonological fluency in English and Arabic dialect is higher than in Standard Arabic. However, the semantic fluency in Standard Arabic and Arabic dialect is higher than English because vocabulary in both categories are almost the same. It is also found that female participants are more fluent in the phonological and semantic categories. Nevertheless, there are no real differences in processing the phonological and semantic tasks according to gender among educated Arab students residing in a foreign country

The Effect of Education and Gender on Language Proficiency: A Study of Multilingual Hungarian Young Adults’ Verbal Fluency

Recent developments in the field of multilingual processing have led to a renewed interest in exploring the effect of verbal fluency tasks from a new perspective (hishkin & Ecke, 2018).  This Hungarian case study intends to investigate the effect of verbal fluency tasks on multilingual participants’ language proficiency with special attention to gender differences and educational background. Six participants were recruited to take part in the study: three males and three females. Respondents’ first language (L1) was Hungarian while their two foreign languages include English (L2/ L3) and German (L2/ L3). Data for this study were collected by using verbal fluency tasks, namely phonological and semantic fluency tests. Data management and analysis were performed using SPSS 22. The results suggest that students outperformed their graduate peers. The majority of the participants obtained better scores in English in terms of semantic fluency meanwhile most of the subjects achieved greater results in German as for the phonemic category. Female participants outperformed males both in the majority of phonemic and semantic tasks

Total Physical Response- Storytelling Salah Satu Pendekatan Komunikatif pada Pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris Bagi Anak Usia Dini

Everyone might agree with the statement ‘learning is an activity that starts at birth and can be expected to continue for a lifetime'. In learning, children are not a miniature of adult, they have their own world, means that they do not learn things exactly the same way adults do. More specifically, children have their own culture and learning preferences. That is, children learn by way of physical activities (i.e., hands on experiences) in the context of doing things embedded in their daily lives, both individually and socially. Total Physical Response-Storytelling (TPR-S) provides other benefits over traditional approaches to foreign language teaching. Through consistent and comprehensible exposure to grammatically-correct language, students develop an "ear" for language. By allowing students to proceed with natural language acquisition, fluency is promoted. This article describes some theories of how children learn foreign language and how TPR-S can be used as one of effective technique in teaching foreign language to children

The Interrelationship among Language Use, Linguistic Competence, and Higher Order Skills

This research aims to investigate the relationship amongst three concepts: language use, linguistic competence, and critical thinking. Pedagogical and cognitive aspects of language learning are evident in the implications of this research concerning how thought influences learning, and how learning influences thought. The sample of the study consisted of 52 students from Mutah University in Jordan who are enrolled in the BA program in the department of English language and literature.  The instruments used in the study included the LEAP-Q to measure the multilingual level of participants to determine language use, a critical thinking test to measure the participants’ level of reasoning, and a TOEFL proficiency test to measure the participants’ level of linguistic competence. The findings show significant positive correlations between language use and critical thinking, between linguistic competence and critical thinking, and between language use and linguistic competence. We conclude that language use enhances the linguistic abilities and possibly enhances the cognitive capabilities of the participants. We recommend encouraging students to use the second language inside and outside the classroom to enhance their linguistic and cognitive abilities. 

TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE- STORYTELLING Salah Satu Pendekatan Komunikatif pada Pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris Bagi Anak Usia Dini

Everyone might agree with the statement ‘learning is an activity that starts at birth and can be expected to continue for a lifetime’. In learning, children are not a miniature of adult, they have their own world, means that they do not learn things exactly the same way adults do. More specifically, children have their own culture and learning preferences. That is, children learn by way of physical activities (i.e., hands on experiences) in the context of doing things embedded in their daily lives, both individually and socially. Total Physical Response-Storytelling (TPR-S) provides other benefits over traditional approaches to foreign language teaching. Through consistent and comprehensible exposure to grammatically-correct language, students develop an "ear" for language. By allowing students to proceed with natural language acquisition, fluency is promoted. This article describes some theories of how children learn foreign language and how TPR-S can be used as one of effective technique in teaching foreign language to children. Key words: Children, Total Physical Response-Storytelling technique, language learning

Investigating EFL Kindergarten Teachers’ Media and Challenges in Teaching Vocabulary

These qualitative research purposes are to investigate EFL kindergarten teachers' media and challenges in teaching vocabulary. This research design was a qualitative method with a case study approach. The data was collected through interviews and audio-visuals with three participants from private kindergarten schools. The data was analyzed by thematic analysis. The findings revealed that they are similar to the media used by teachers. Most of them used printed properties and technology. Printed and properties are books and flashcards. Technology is software games, educational videos, television computer devices, songs, and games. The results of the study also indicated that the teachers faced some challenges when teaching vocabulary in the classroom, including challenges from students (noisy students, inclusive students, and students' mood), schools/institutions (lack of facility), and teachers themselves (classroom management and teachers' mood). Keywords: Challenges; EFL Teachers; Media; Vocabulary; Young Learners

Measuring Indonesian Students’ Lexical Diversity and Lexical Sophistication

The aim of the present study was to look at a description of Indonesian EFL students’ vocabulary knowledge. The focus was on their lexical diversity (how many different words students used) and lexical sophistication (how many advance words students used) in the English production, which is learnt by them as a foreign language. Their vocabulary knowledge was assessed using the D_tools and P_Lex software for the analysis.  These statistical programs describe students’ detail computation results in both number and graph. Ten participants’ word production through a story-telling test was recorded and analyzed to look at their D and Lambda value. Based on the results gathered, it can be concluded that as foreign language learners, lower level of proficiency participants could produce more lexically rich texts than higher level participants and vice versa

Using “Listening Time Podcast” on Spotify to Improve Students’ Listening Comprehension

This pre-experimental study investigates whether the use of “Listening Time Podcast” on Spotify is able to improve students’ listening comprehension. It was conducted at class R002 which consisted of 29 students. They were the students of English Department, Universitas Jambi academic year 2022/2023. The data was gathered through pre-test and post-test. The findings of the study show that the mean score for post-test is higher than the post-test score. The mean score for pre-test was 59.72 while the post-test score was 73.24.  This result indicates that there is an increase in the student's listening ability after they were taught by using the Listening Time podcast on the Spotify application. Comparison of the mean score of pretest and post-test by conducting a T-test paired sample T-test shows the result of the significance value (2-tailed) was 0.001 < 0.005. This means that H0 hypothesis is rejected and H1 is accepted. &nbsp