{"title":"What Do Stakeholders Think About Language Assessment?","authors":"John Sekar Jeyaraj","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3486453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3486453","url":null,"abstract":"Assessment is an integral, critical element in language education. It is a product of reflection, instruction, and innovation. It is supposed to provide valid, reliable, and relevant information about learners’ progress. It ought to be used to inform course evaluation and instructional design with the view to meeting the needs of language learners and facilitators who serve the former. Assessment comes out of testing. It should be a learning experience for both learners and teachers. In the present scenario, teachers’ and learners’ attitude toward testing and assessment is material rather than ideal. Besides, the attitudes of parents and administrators can also positively influence language assessment of learners by teachers. The present paper purports to quantify their attitudes toward what they think language assessment and tests are about.","PeriodicalId":321076,"journal":{"name":"LingRN: Pedagogy & Language Teaching (Topic)","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116955950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prosodic Variation in Academic Public Presentations","authors":"E. Freydina","doi":"10.17323/2411-7390-2015-1-2-13-19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/2411-7390-2015-1-2-13-19","url":null,"abstract":"The article reports on a study of the prosodic characteristics of academic public presentations. Prosodic variation is analysed with regard to the social and cultural context which is significant for the adequate description of discourse prosody. The paper draws on the findings made in the course of the analysis (auditory and acoustic) of presentations delivered by British lecturers. The article contains an overview of contextual factors and discourse strategies used in academic presentations. Special focus is given to prosodic variations in spoken discourse determined by the extralinguistic context. The author argues that that the choice of prosodic means depends on a variety of contextual parameters: speaker-audience relationships (reflected in the tenor of discourse), the speaker’s rhetorical competence, method of delivery, rhetorical tradition and others. The observations made in the paper may be useful to develop expertise in the delivery of academic public presentations which is an important aspect of EFL teachers’ professional training. \u0000 \u0000This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.","PeriodicalId":321076,"journal":{"name":"LingRN: Pedagogy & Language Teaching (Topic)","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133212338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}