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Review article, studies of teaching and learning english-speaking skills: a review and bibliometric analysis.

• School of Educational Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia

This study conducted a comprehensive historical review and bibliometric analysis of the literature on English-speaking (ES) education and mapped the current state of the field, trends, and emerging topics, as well as identified gaps where further research is needed. We retrieved 361 sample documents on ES teaching and learning in Scopus (2010–2021) under certain conditions and analyzed the extracted data using Excel and VOSviewer 1.6.17 from the perspectives of the number of yearly publications, countries, authors, citation numbers, and keywords. The findings show that the number of publications on ES education increased from 2010 to 2021, but there was a lack of sustained engagement with this topic by researchers. Countries with an ESL or EFL context focused more on the subject of ES, although studies from native ES countries were more influential. The research topics showed a multidimensional trend, covering communicative skills, language knowledge, assessment, teaching or learning methods, ICT-related applications, and cognitive factors, of which ICT-related applications (such as flipped classrooms, blended learning, and e-learning) and cognitive factors (such as motivation, anxiety, and affect) were the areas of focus. Students in higher institutions, rather than children, became the main research subject of ES education over the period studied.

Introduction

A considerable amount of time and money has been invested in English language education (ELE) around the world, especially in countries where English is a Foreign (EFL) or Second Language (ESL). For example, ELE in East Asian countries such as China, South Korea, and Japan has been identified as a necessary skill, which has motivated the development of various approaches and policies ( Song, 2011 ; Hu and McKay, 2012 ). There have been at least three phases of English curriculum reforms by the Malaysian Ministry of Education directed toward improving students’ English proficiency and teachers’ professional development (TPD) ( Rashid et al., 2017 ; Kummin et al., 2020 ).

Despite unremitting efforts in many countries, ELE is still facing the problem of low average English skills. For example, students’ English skills in Turkey are not as good as expected ( Coskun, 2016 ; Özmen et al., 2016 ; Umunĉ and Raw, 2017 ). The survey by Wei and Su (2015) clearly showed that the subjects’ ES proficiency was generally low.

Many terms have been used to refer to the speaking aspects of the English language, e.g., “oral English,” “spoken English,” or “English speaking.” “English speaking” is the term used in this article. Speaking is different from writing, although both are productive skills, in that it is “transient, unplanned, context-dependent, oral/aural, and dynamic” ( Hughes, 2017 ). English-speaking (ES) has been treated as an indivisible language skill for learners in the language education fields of TESOL, EFL, and ESL.

How to improve ES ability, including teaching and learning approaches, influencing factors, and other related issues, have always been a focus of researchers. Thus, in view of the profound changes in society, politics, economics, and technologies, this article aims to give an overview of the current situation and trends regarding ES studies based on Scopus from 2010 to 2021. Moreover, it seeks to provide useful information for further ES teaching and learning research through visualized data analysis using VOSviewer 1.6.17 and Micro Excel.

Thus, the research questions (RQs) of this article are as follows:

RQ1. What is the bibliometric information regarding publications about ES teaching and learning in Scopus (2010–2021), including the number of yearly publications, authors, citations, country contributions, and keywords?

RQ2. What is the status of ES teaching and learning?

RQ3. What are the most influential authors in the field of ES teaching and learning?

RQ4. What are the trends in ES teaching and learning?

RQ5. What are the gaps in ES teaching and learning from the bibliometric information?

Materials and Methods

Bibliometric analysis refers to the cross-science of quantitative analysis of all carriers of knowledge by means of mathematics and statistics ( Broadus, 1987 ). The development of bibliometric software such as VOSviewer, Citespace, and Gephi, and the foundation of the big databases for academic documents such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Taylor and Francis make bibliometric analysis more feasible and practical ( Donthu et al., 2021 ). Meanwhile, according to Rogers et al. (2020) , the recommended minimum sample size for a bibliometric analysis is 200 entries.

Article Selection and Identification

Scopus was chosen as the database for this historical review and bibliometric analysis of ES education. This is because Scopus, as one of the world’s largest databases, covers a wide range of academic journals, conference proceedings, books, and other related publications with relatively high citation indexes and quality, much like the Web of Science ( Pham et al., 2018 ; Baas et al., 2020 ). Scopus is user-friendly in the sense that information can be conveniently retrieved through string retrieval. This study replicated the methodologies used by Lázaro (2022) and Kaya and Erbay (2020) . This article was conducted around RQs after the identification of some keywords as conditions for data mining.

Thus, 23,633 sample documents were first strictly extracted under the condition [TITLE-ABS-KEY (“English speaking” OR “English-speaking” OR “oral English” OR “spoken English”)] AND (“TESOL” OR “EFL” OR “ESL”). Then, the conditions of time span and document type were added for filtering from 2010 to 2021. Then, the articles, conference papers, reviews, book chapters, and books were chosen as the target document types. The detailed conditions can be seen in Table 1 .

Table 1. Retrieval conditions.

Finally, 1,893 documents were obtained. These were exported in the form of an Excel document with citation information, bibliographic information, abstract and keywords, funding details, and other information.

After strict data cleaning through thematic analysis of the abstracts by three researchers for more than three times, 361 sample documents remained, which were classified into four types of documents: journal articles (256; 70.91%), conference papers (79; 21.88%), book chapters (16; 4.43%), and reviews (10; 2.77%), covering more than 10 subject areas, such as social sciences, computer sciences, medicine, engineering, and arts and humanities.

Research Framework and Instruments

In the data selection step, sample documents were screened for information about authors, titles, years, citations, author keywords, index keywords, publishers, document types, countries, and author affiliations from Scopus under strict conditions. The sample documents were then uploaded to Excel and VOSviewer 1.6.17 during the data-processing step. Excel and VOSviewer 1.6.17 were used to perform the visualized bibliometric analysis of the number of publications per year, contributions of authors and countries, and keywords ( Chen, 2016 ; Van Eck and Waltman, 2017 ). Finally, the current situation, developing trends, research gaps, and lessons we can learn about ES teaching were sorted. Thus, the research framework is divided into four main steps, as shown in Figure 1 .

Figure 1. The conceptual framework.

Compared with studies on English writing and reading, studies on ES education are relatively very small in scale. Although only 361 sample documents conforming to the screening conditions were identified, it was still feasible to conduct a bibliometric analysis from the perspectives of the number of yearly publications, countries, authors, citations, and keywords.

Number of Publications by Year

According to the linear trend line in Figure 2 , the overall trend of the ES education literature in Scopus was on the rise from 2010 to 2021. The number of publications in 2021 was six times more than that in 2010, indicating that ES education was gradually beginning to be taken seriously by researchers.

Figure 2. Yearly publications on English-speaking teaching and learning (2010–2021).

However, there were some tortuous changes. In 2010, only 10 studies were identified, but the percentage of the high citation index occupied 50%. From 2011 to 2018, the number of documents published in this area presented an up-and-down curve. The number of publications was slightly lower in 2012 than in 2021. This might be due to the decreased demand for ES education as a result of the economic downturn in many emerging economies such as China, South Korea, and Brazil ( Reid, 2013 ). Yearly publications in this field increased from 2012 to 2013, but decreased again from 2013 to 2015, which was again in line with the global economic situation ( Mau and Ulyukaev, 2015 ). In 2015, the number of publications was more or less the same as in 2010. The reasons for this might be that world trade reduced during the global crisis from 2014 to 2015 ( Baber, 2015 ; Xu and Carey, 2015 ) or that no new research directions were explored during that time. After 2015, there was a continuous increase until 2017. After a subtle decrease in 2018, there was a significant accumulation in the number of publications from 2018 to 2021, showing a new growth trend. Especially in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought disaster to the whole world, publications on ES education increased, reflecting the increasing requirement for ES communication during this time of global cooperation ( Sun and Lan, 2021 ). The influence of the date on the extraction of the sample documents was not very great, as it was 12 December 2021.

Contributions and Collaborations by Country/Region

The 361 sample records extracted in Scopus from 2010 to 2021 were associated with around 40 countries, showing the global distribution of interest by country in ES education.

Figure 3 shows the top 20 countries/regions publishing articles in this field, and they were responsible for 344 ES education publications (2010–2021) (accounting for 95.29% of the total). The countries with big and bright circles were the ones with the large number of the publications. Apart from the 75 publications contributed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Spain, and New Zealand, the remaining 269 publications were published by 10 Asian countries, accounting for 74.52% of the total sample documents, which implied the huge demand for the improvement of the learners’ ES skills in those countries. Mainland China contributed 128 publications, accounting for 40.44% of the total, followed by the United States, with 38 documents, accounting for 10.53%.

Figure 3. Density map of the top 10 countries.

Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, countries in South-East Asia, occupied the third, fourth, and fifth positions, with 22, 22, and 18 publications, respectively. Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Bangladesh began to participate in country collaborations in recent years, in contrast to countries such as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Singapore where English is the native language or first language.

The citation network in Figure 4 shows only countries with more than five publications, which reflected the passive collaboration among the countries. As one of the native ES countries, home to many ELE approaches and English assessment tools such as TOFEL, the publications by the United States were cited 518 times (total link strength = 10). Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, home to IELTS, contributed 12 publications, which were cited 72 times (total link strength = 5). Malaysia, where ESL, contributed 22 publications, which were cited 90 times (total link strength = 17). Meanwhile, China, with an EFL context, ranked second with 128 publications, which were cited 395 times, and the total link strength achieved 24.

Figure 4. Country co-authorship in the field of English speaking teaching and learning.

The total citation number of the 361 sample publications was 1,828. Table 2 provides detailed information on the 15 countries that published the most cited articles. The publication and the corresponding citation rate of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore showed huge contrasts, respectively, 12.92, 19.45, 19.5, and 13.83. The high citation rate may to a certain extent represent a high reference value, although it may also be influenced by some highly cited papers ( Schubert and Braun, 1986 ; Aksnes et al., 2012 ; Brika et al., 2021 ). Thus, it was concluded that the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, where English was the official language, were the leading countries with high citation rates in the field of ES education studies. Similarly, native ES countries—the United Kingdom and Canada—showed relatively high citation rates of 5.83 and 6.14, respectively. Meanwhile, the citation rates of Asian countries such as China (4.73), Japan (6.35), South Korea (5.08), Vietnam (8.38), and Oman (6.75) indicated the progress and the relatively high reference value of publications on ES education studies in those countries. The non-ES European countries such as Spain received 4.57 in citation rates, which were much lower than those of the native ES countries.

Table 2. Description of the 15 countries that published the most cited articles in the field of English-speaking (ES) education studies in Scopus (2010–2021).

Co-authorship among the countries is shown in Figure 5 , which is a presentation of active collaborations. The co-authorship links among Malaysia, India, China, and the United States were linear. However, the collaboration in the map showed a tendency toward a partial focus. For instance, the United States was the main collaborating country for Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Canada, Australia, and Singapore. While China collaborated mainly with the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Thus, there was a need for an omnidirectional and multi-angle collaboration among the countries for ES teaching and learning research across the world for further studies.

Figure 5. The map of the co-authorship among the countries on English-speaking teaching and learning.

Author Contributions

Table 3 shows general information about the citations for the 361 sample documents in Scopus (2010–2021). As can be seen in Table 4 , the topics of the top 10 most frequently cited articles were concerned with the assessment of ES proficiency and fluency, teachers’ influence, lexical acquisition, and the facilitation of mobile social networks. The total citation number was 1,828. On average, each document was cited 5.06 times. An experimental study by Kang et al. (2010) that proposed suprasegmental measurement for pronunciation assessment from the perspective of accent and equipment use was the most frequently cited article, which was cited 134 times. A qualitative study by Ma (2012) was cited 66 times, ranking second among the top 10 most frequently cited. It focused on ES teaching methods and investigated the advantages and disadvantages of native and non-native ES teachers in practice. The third most frequently cited article, which analyzed the academic lexical demands and academic word list coverage for ES communications by means of corpus, was cited 61 times ( Dang and Webb, 2014 ). Obviously, most of the top 10 most frequently cited articles were published before 2016, except for the experimental studies by Sun and Lan (2021) on the application of e-learning to develop young learners’ ES competence, implying the emergence of new research topics after 2016 in ES teaching and learning studies.

Table 3. General citations of English-speaking (ES) education publications in Scopus (2010–2021).

Table 4. Top 10 frequently cited authors on English-speaking (ES) education in Scopus (2010–2021).

The top 10 authors with more than three articles in order, were Ismail, K. (6), Abdullah, M. Y. (5), Hussin, S. (5), Liu, M. (5), Habil, H. (4), Chen, Z. (3), Hasan, M. K. (3), Hwang, G. J. (3), Rao, Z. (3), and Seraj, P. M. I. (4), and the co-authorship relationships can be seen in Figure 6 . Seraj, P. M. I published four articles (one in 2020 and three in 2021) focusing on the topic of a flipped classroom. The other author with four publications was Liu M., studying the problem of Chinese EFL students’ anxiety, respectively, in 2013, 2018, 2018, and 2021. Rao Z. made three publications on the issues of native and non-native English teachers in China in 2010, 2016, and 2020.

Figure 6. Density map of the key words.

Keyword Analysis

There were 1,049 keywords among the 361 sample documents, and only 49 keywords (2.88%) appeared more than five times after merging synonyms and deleting extraneous words. This indicates that the number of high-frequency keywords was relatively small, which reflects the relatively extensive content of ES research in the field of language education. Table 5 lists the top 10 keywords ordered by the frequency of occurrence apart from the retrieval words, among which the frequency of “ES skill” was the highest, accounting for 3.43%. The remaining keywords with a frequency greater than 10 were “speech recognition” (32), “College English” (26), “e-learning” (22), “computer-aided instruction” (19), “learning system” (14), “native-English speaking teachers” (13), anxiety (13), “oral communication” (12), “virtual reality” (11), and “artificial intelligence” (10). Obviously, the gap in frequency among keywords is not very large.

Table 5. The top 10 most frequently occurring keywords on English-speaking (ES) education in Scopus (2010–2021).

The bibliometric co-occurrence analysis of keywords provided a convenient way to assess the state of the research field and spot hot issues ( Chen, 2016 ; Mutira et al., 2021 ; Sun and Lan, 2021 ). Meanwhile, importantly, keyword co-occurrence analysis can reflect the viewpoints of core academic articles and may be beneficial for researchers trying to keep up with research trends in a certain area ( Li et al., 2016 ; Shoaib et al., 2021 ). Figure 6 shows the density of keywords that appeared more than 10 times; the brightness of the color represents the heat color of the keyword studied. The more studies, the brighter the color ( Van Eck and Waltman, 2020 ). The colors of the keywords “English speaking skill,” “college English,” “computer-aided learning instruction,” and “speech recognition” were brighter than others. The other keywords, such as “speaking anxiety” and “e-learning,” were also brighter. To some extent, these brighter keywords reflected the research hotspots in the field of ES education from 2010 to 2021 in Scopus.

Keyword cluster analysis reflected the topics to some extent ( Yang et al., 2017 ). After combining synonyms (e.g., oral English and spoken English; computer-aided learning and computer-aided instruction; and native and non-native ES teacher) and the deletion of non-sense words (e.g., human, priority journal, and education), the keywords except the retrieval terms “English speaking,” “oral English,” “English-speaking,” “spoken English,” “EFL,” “TESOL,” and “ESL” were categorized into seven clusters with three main topics, as seen in Figure 7 . The keywords with red color dealt with the application of ICT in ES education, including items such as artificial intelligence, automatic speech recognition, computer-aided instruction, correlation methods, deep learning, information science, learning system, machine learning, quality control, correlation methods, corrective feedback, ES learning, oral communication, etc. Cluster 2 dealt with the cognitive factors influencing students’ ES skills or performance, such as attitude, EFL, English speaking performance, ES skill, the flipped classroom, motivation, speaking anxiety, and teaching methods, of which flipped classroom as a teaching method had the highest frequency of occurrence. Clusters 3 and 4 dealt with the application of ICT in college ES education, covering topics such as e-learning, engineering education, English speaking, learning, virtual reality, big data, college English, and educational computing. Cluster 7 dealt with the assessment of pronunciation or others.

Figure 7. The network visualization map of co-occurrence of keywords.

Keyword Changes and the Enlightenment to Research Topics

Figure 8 reveals a change in the time distribution of topics. It was obvious that most of the light-colored nodes were close to the keyword “college English,” while there were only a few around the keywords “child,” “preschool,” and “adolescent” after 2016. This shows that college students had become the main subjects of ES education studies instead of young learners.

Figure 8. The overlay visualization map of keywords according to year.

Meanwhile, studies with keywords related to the application of ICT, such as “big data,” “artificial intelligence,” “flipped classroom,” “speech recognition system,” and “virtual reality” in ES education, were emerging as a focus of research. Academic ES also began to attract researchers’ attention. Some researchers started to consider the development of twenty first-century skills during ES education. In addition, light-colored nodes of the keywords concerning teaching and learning modes (“continuous development,” “teaching method,” “EMI,” “error correction,” etc.), cognitive factors (“students’ interests,” “anxiety,” “motivation,” etc.), language skills (“ES performance,” “communicative skills,” “accuracy,” “fluency,” etc.), and language knowledge (“pronunciation,” “grammar,” etc.) remained the focus of research.

Limitations

The interpretation of the review should be very cautious due to some limitations. First, bibliometric analysis is a literature review method based on big data technology rather than synthesized thematic analysis. The data were collected and analyzed through the software. Thus, the accuracy of this analysis method is highly dependent on that of the software. The second limitation refers to the database. Though Scopus has covered the majority of the publications on ES teaching and learning worldwide, there are still some publications that were not included in the research.

This historical review and bibliometric analysis sought to better understand the current state of the research field, trends, and emerging research topics on ES education from 2010 to 2021. The results show that there was an increasing trend in the number of publications in this area from 2010 to 2021 in Scopus, indicating that ES education studies remained a necessary research topic, although the research population was not large. Countries with an ESL or EFL context, such as China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, paid more attention to the development of learners’ ES abilities and contributed more to ES education studies. However, the citation analysis revealed that native ES countries such as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada, were the major authorities or origins of ES education studies, which can also be seen by author contributions. Country collaboration analysis showed that the United States, China, India, and Malaysia acted as hubs of contact, establishing overall relationships within the collaboration network. In addition, the analysis of author distribution and collaboration revealed that there were constantly new researchers entering this field, but the lack of authors focusing on ES education over the long term and sustained research was still a problem. Further exploration of keywords revealed that the hot research issues encompass communicative skills, language knowledge, assessment, teaching or learning methods, ICT-related applications, and cognitive factors. Rather than focusing on ES education for young and adolescent learners, researchers showed a preference for investigating ES education for college students, catering to the increasing requirements of oral international communication. Meanwhile, topics on ICT application, autonomous learning, academic ES ability, and twenty first-century learning skills are gradually becoming hot areas for the improvement of ES teaching and learning worldwide.

JW was the research designer and executor of this study, participated in and completed the data analysis, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. RA and L-ML gave suggestions when necessary. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

JW would like to express their gratitude to RA and L-ML who participated in this project.

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Keywords : English-speaking skills, bibliometric analysis, research trends, enlightenment, research state

Citation: Wang J, Abdullah R and Leong L-M (2022) Studies of Teaching and Learning English-Speaking Skills: A Review and Bibliometric Analysis. Front. Educ. 7:880990. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.880990

Received: 22 February 2022; Accepted: 01 June 2022; Published: 06 July 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Wang, Abdullah and Leong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Rohaya Abdullah, [email protected]

Systematic Literature Review: Investigating Speaking Challenges Among ESL Learners During the Covid-19 Pandemic

• Evelyn Rita Adickalam Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
• Melor Md Yunus Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Effective verbal communication in the English language poses many challenges for Malaysian students. As English is not their first language, the average Malaysian finds it difficult to attain the required speaking proficiency. COVID has only exacerbated this problem. Moving from a traditional classroom setting to an online one limits cohesive and effective verbal communication between the spreader and listener (s). Both students and teachers had to switch from traditional classroom instruction to online classroom instruction with various devices and technologies as their main means of communication. As a result, this study provides a systematic review of pertinent existing research into Investigating Speaking Challenges among English Language Learners (ESL) in Online Classrooms. We concentrated on 51 articles from the year 2006 to the year 2021, from a few databases. Google Scholar, ERIC, Microsoft Academic, and ResearchGate were referred to. The review begins with a search and scanning of suitable articles related to this study before selection. Most of these articles disclosed speaking challenges and provided positive solutions to overcome them during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both students and teachers dealt effectively with psychological issues such as shyness, lack of confidence, and anxiety, as well as technological aspects. Overall, this review gave some insights into the difficulties that ESL students have when they speak, as well as many ways to deal with them when learning online.

Author Biographies

Evelyn rita adickalam, universiti kebangsaan malaysia.

Faculty of Education

Melor Md Yunus, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

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When English is not your mother tongue

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Science as a career attracts people from across the world. But whether researchers come from Beijing, Berlin or Buenos Aires, they have to express most of their ideas and findings in English. Having a dominant language can streamline the process of science, but it also creates extra barriers and the potential for conflict. In January, for example, a biostatistics professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, chastised students from China for speaking in their native language on campus.

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Research Article on English speeking problem

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Edu-Ling: Journal of English Education and Linguistics

Nofrina Eka Putri

This research is intended to reveal the problems faced by students in mastering English. This research is categorized into a quantitative study. The sample of this research was 75 students taking MKU Bahasa Inggris (English for General Purposes) class in the second semester of Academic Year 2018/2019. The data were obtained by using the questionnaire, and they then were analyzed quantitatively. The findings showed that to master English, the students get problems related to the limited stock of vocabulary, inability to construct sentences, inability to provide appropriate responses, and lack of opportunities to practice English beyond the class. Based on the findings, it is concluded that the students’ less competence in using English has resulted from their basic English capability and environmental supports.

European Online Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

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Alexander Decker

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This study was a comparative investigation into the nature of difficulties in learning English by the secondary school students of Provincial and Federal government schools in N.W.F.P (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa). The objectives of the study were (1)To find out the level of difficulties of secondary school students of Provincial and Federal government schools of N.W.F.P (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa) in tenses, active and passives voices, direct and indirect narrations, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, construction of sentences and reading with comprehension ;and (2)To compare the level of difficulties in learning English as a second language at secondary level of Provincial and Federal government schools in N.W.F.P (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa). The sample of the study was comprised of 654 randomly selected students from twenty four Provincial government schools and twenty two Federal government schools located in twenty four districts of N.W.F.P. (Khyber Pukhtunkhwa). An English language achievement test for secondary classes was administered to the sample students of the study. The data obtained were tabulated and analysed through SPSS 17.0 software to compute mean, standard deviation, t-value and p-value (significance) level. The main findings of the study were; the students of Provincial government schools faced more difficulties in learning of verb forms, narration, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, sentence arrangements and reading comprehension. The students of both types of schools systems faced same difficulties in learning voices

NAAR ( north american academic research )

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English language speaking is considered one of the most difficult and challenging task for language learners. This is a case study, investigating the speaking difficulties of the students at University of Sindh, Jamshoro. Also highlights the factors that affect student’s practical and communicational aspect of English language. Hopefully the study will be fruitful for the L2 learners in Sindh university context and will lead to possible solutions to enhance the speaking performance of students. To analyze and interpret data, simple percentage tables and graphs were used. The study shows that students were facing number of English speaking problem including lack of vocabulary, grammar illiteracy, shyness, connecting ideas, lack of practice, inappropriate environment, pronunciation and accent. Based on the findings of study, it was recommended that there is need of extra classes on communication practice activities. However, teachers should play their active role to encourage students and to overcome shyness. Teachers should expose Students in front of class by providing maximum opportunities in practical activities. Moreover, vocabulary also plays main role, teacher should engage students in vocabulary building exercises.

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The students have to face lot of problems in speaking English as a second language (ESL). This study investigates the problems, fears and hindrances in using English language as a speaking tool in and outside class room. The population consists of the students of Intermediate/HSSC level from age group of 16 to 19 years. The study determines the causes of poor communication in English language among higher secondary school students. The descriptive survey design was used and questionnaire was used as a tool in collection of data. Responses were obtained from students and teachers in two higher secondary schools. The study sample was 60, in which 30 were students and 30 were teachers. Frequency and simple percentage were used in the analysis of data. The findings of the study led to the conclusion that the dominance of mother tongue, less qualified teachers of English language, negative attitudes of students toward speaking English language, improper use of method in enhancing English language speaking and no access to instructional media, A.V aids and other facilities, are the reasons behind the poor English language communication of the students. The study also found out that provision of qualified teachers of English language, using the right approach to the spoken ability of English language, engaging of students in debating and listening to English programs are some of the ways that can improve secondary school students' performance in spoken English communication.

IJELTAL (Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics)

Gambhir Chand

Speaking is regarded as an indicator of language proficiency in general. It is believed that a learner who can speak a particular language fluently is regarded as a proficient learner of that language. In the context of Nepal, the English language is taken as a foreign language and taught from elementary level to university level as a compulsory subject but Nepalese students in general and university students in particular, face a lot of difficulties in speaking English fluently. Even after completing their graduate degree, some of them could not speak a little bit of English. This present study tried to explore the difficulties faced by undergraduate level students and the possible causes of their difficulties in speaking skills. This is an empirical qualitative study in which the researcher adopted a questionnaire and semi-structured interview to collect data from 15 undergraduate level students studying at the University. The collected data were thematized and analyzed in terms ...

Research Proposal

Besse Utami Khaerunnisa

The problem in this research is what are the students’ problems in speaking English in the Speaking for beginner class by the second semester ? This research aims to to find out the students’ problems in speaking English in the Speaking for beginner class by the second semester.. This research will be used a qualitative method in the type of descriptive. The subject in this research is the second semester students of English Education Department. The total subject is 10 students which have low score in speaking subject. The purposive sampling technique will be applied in this research. In collecting data will be used interview and field notes. Keywords: Speaking, Speaking problems.

senthilkumar senthilkumar

iJSRED Journal

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‘A Unique Challenge’: What English Learners With Disabilities Need

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Students with disabilities face a gamut of challenges when it comes to accessing high-quality K-12 education, including a shortage of specialized teachers. The nation’s growing English-learner population faces outsized needs as their English-language proficiency scores remain lower than pre-COVID-19-pandemic averages , and immigrant English learners in particular require more trauma-informed instruction.

English learners who also have disabilities face their own intersectional issues, researchers and advocates say. They range from schools locking students out of dual-language programs in favor of English-only special education programs, language barriers between schools and families, and teachers ill-equipped to serve their students’ needs.

“It’s a complex issue. If it was easy, we would have probably figured out a better way forward by now,” said Sarah Salinas, an assistant professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato’s department of special education. “[This group] includes students that are at the intersection potentially of cultural differences, linguistic differences, and disability differences.”

According to federal data from the school year 2020-21 , nearly 14 percent of all students ages 5 through 21 enrolled in public schools were served under IDEA Part B. Of those students, 11.7 percent were English learners.

As this dual-identified population continues to grow, researchers and advocates offer some potential systemic solutions to many of the prevailing challenges these students and their families face.

A lack of access to bilingual education

One of the top concerns researchers and parents alike shared in interviews with Education Week when it comes to English learners with disabilities is a lack of access to bilingual education or dual-language programs.

Parents are encouraged to speak only English with dual-identified students, in part because of a flawed assumption that bilingualism will confuse them or hinder their academic progress or language progress, said Nikkia Borowski, a Ph.D. candidate in inclusive education at Syracuse University who studies access to bilingualism among such students.

She added that there is also the idea that dual-language programs are enrichment programs designed for academically gifted students, locking dual-identified students out in the process.

This preference for English-only instruction for English learners with disabilities plays out in smaller contexts as well, such as speech-generating devices students use that are programmed only in English.

“As a result, the students are missing access to a bilingual identity and missing access to really important cultural aspects as well,” Borowski said.

There is also the matter of how federal policy works for these dual-identified students.

Both the Equal Education Act of 1968 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act apply to this student population.

The IDEA, in its 2004 reauthorization, defines a least restrictive environment as the premise of providing services to a student with the greatest access to the general education curriculum, without any explicit mention of what these services look like for multilingual students, Salinas said. The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 focuses on language access for students whose first language is not English without explicit mention of education access for students with disabilities.

So while dual-identified students stand at the intersection of distinct federal policies and laws, the policies and laws are not intersectional themselves.

And even though an English-learner tool kit from the U.S. Department of Education’s office of English-language acquisition reminds educators that a student’s English learner and disability-related educational needs must be met, what ultimately ends up happening is special education and IDEA are consistently prioritized over bilingual education services, Salinas said.

Policymakers have talked about reauthorizing IDEA with more explicit mentions of the needs of dual-identified students, though such a move remains hypothetical, Salinas added.

But even before policies and practices can better align to the linguistic, cultural, and disability-related needs of students, another challenge is at play that presents a quicker potential solution.

The need to reassess communication between schools and families

Navigating IDEA and individual education programs, or IEPs, can already be a daunting task for families. Doing so while English is not the family’s home language is all the more complicated.

Under IDEA, districts must ensure that a student’s parents understand the proceedings of the IEP team meeting, including taking steps such as providing a translator.

In an April survey by the EdWeek Research Center, 65 percent of participating district and school leaders said they offered translation services for special education programming for students whose first language is not English. 37 percent said they did so for all relevant languages spoken by students and families.

Meanwhile, 6 percent of leaders said they do not offer such a service although they have special education students with that need.

Even when considering that 37 percent said their school or districts covered all relevant languages in translation needs, there’s a question of whether the translators involved were trained professionals who understand things like IEPs, or if Spanish-language teachers and bilingual receptionists were called in instead, said Christy Moreno, the chief community advocacy and impact officer of the Missouri-based family-advocacy group Revolucion Educativa.

Moreno, a trained interpreter and translator herself, said offering translation services is the minimum schools and districts must offer families. High-quality translation is key to ensuring families are fully informed of their rights, she added.

“I’ve seen IEPs that are done by Google Translate,” Moreno said.

In addition to investing in proper translation and interpretation, Moreno said educators need to proactively ensure that parents understand how to ask questions about their children’s education. That includes taking into account cultural barriers at play such as stigma within the Latino community over the experiences of students in special education.

Lizdelia Piñón, an emergent bilingual education associate for the Texas-based advocacy nonprofit Intercultural Development Research Association, or IDRA, knows all too well how important it is for families to advocate for their children. Her Spanish-speaking 11-year-old triplets require several accommodations for their autism, cerebral palsy, ADHD, and more.

On several occasions, Piñón said she had to file formal complaints against her local school district to ensure her children’s linguistic and special education needs were met—including pushing back against an attempt to reduce the time her triplets spent with their special education teacher.

However, one systemic issue she sees is a lack of proper training among educators on how to best work with dual-identified students.

The need for better teacher preparation

Piñón worked as a bilingual teacher for about 10 years. She knows that existing bilingual teachers can get their certification in special education as well. But there is a gap of information in both programs, she said, leaving teachers without full context on how to best work with dual-identified students.

“I think that educating English learners with disabilities is a unique challenge for our teachers,” Piñón said.

Overall, there aren’t many teacher-preparation programs that train teachers on what to do in bilingual special education classrooms, said Salinas of Minnesota State University.

Recognizing that knowledge gap, Piñón worked on legislation signed into law in 2021 in Texas to create a bilingual special education certification. However, approval of the new certificate program remains stalled within the state board of education.

Yet, a temporary solution to such knowledge gaps in teacher preparation lies in strategic collaboration among educators, Salinas said.

Such work isn’t always possible between special education and bilingual education teachers on account of tight school schedules and other barriers, she added.

Still, it’s a strategy researchers focusing on English learners say can mitigate not only a lack of bilingual and special education teachers but also address how little training general education teachers have when it comes to working with English learners and special education students overall.

Coverage of students with learning differences and issues of race, opportunity, and equity is supported in part by a grant from the Oak Foundation, at www.oakfnd.org . Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage. A version of this article appeared in the May 22, 2024 edition of Education Week as ‘A Unique Challenge’: What English Learners With Disabilities Need

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Study traces an infectious language epidemic

"Sticks and stones may break my bones," the old adage goes. "But words will never hurt me."

Tell that to Eugenia Rho, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and she will show you extensive data that prove otherwise.

Her Society + AI & Language Lab has shown that

• Police language is an accurate predictor of violent interactions with Black motorists.
• Broadcast media bias and social media echo chambers have put American democracy at risk.

Now, Rho's research team in the College of Engineering has turned to another question: what effects did social media rhetoric have on COVID-19 infection and death rates across the United States, and what can policymakers and public health officials learn from that?

"A lot of studies just describe what's happening online. Often they do not show a direct link with offline behaviors," Rho said. "But there is a tangible way to connect online behavior with offline decision making."

Cause and effect

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media became a mass gathering place for opposition to public health guidance, such as mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccines. Escalating misinformation encouraged widespread disregard for preventive measures and led to soaring infection rates, overwhelmed hospitals, health care worker shortages, preventable deaths, and economic losses.

During a one-month period between November and December 2021, more than 692,000 preventable hospitalizations were reported among unvaccinated patients, according to a 2022 study published in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. Those hospitalizations alone cost a staggering $13.8 billion.

In the study, Rho's team, including Ph.D. student Xiaohan Ding, developed a technique that trained the chatbot GPT-4 to analyze posts in several banned subreddit discussion groups that opposed COVID-19 prevention measures. The team focused on Reddit because its data was available, Rho said. Many other social media platforms have barred outside researchers from using their data.

Rho's work is grounded in a social science framework called Fuzzy Trace Theory that was pioneered by Valerie Reyna, a Cornell University professor of psychology and a collaborator on this Virginia Tech project. Reyna has shown that individuals learn and recall information better when it is expressed in a cause and effect relationship, and not just as rote information. This holds true even if the information is inaccurate or the implied connection is weak. Reyna calls this cause-and-effect construction a "gist."

The researchers worked to answer four fundamental questions related to gists on social media:

• How can we efficiently predict gists across social media discourse at a national scale?
• What kind of gists characterize how and why people oppose COVID-19 public health practices, and how do these gists evolve over time across key events?
• Do gist patterns significantly predict patterns in online engagement across users in banned subreddits that oppose COVID-19 health practices?
• Do gist patterns significantly predict trends in national health outcomes?

The missing link

Rho's team used prompting techniques in large language models (LLMs) -- a type of artificial intelligence (AI) program -- along with advanced statistics to search for and then track these gists across banned subreddit groups. The model then compared them to COVID-19 milestones, such as infection rates, hospitalizations, deaths, and related public policy announcements.

The results show that, indeed, social media posts that linked a cause, such as "I got the COVID vaccine," with an effect, such as "I've felt like death ever since," quickly showed up in people's beliefs and affected their offline health decisions. In fact, the total and new daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. could be significantly predicted by the volume of gists on banned subreddit groups.

This is the first AI research to empirically link social media linguistic patterns to real-world public health trends, highlighting the potential of these large language models to identify critical online discussion patterns and point to more effective public health communication strategies.

"This study solves a daunting problem: how to connect the cognitive building blocks of meaning that people actually use to the flow of information across social media and into the world of health outcomes," Reyna said. "This prompt-based LLM framework that identifies gists at scale has many potential applications that can promote better health and wellbeing."

Big data, big impact

Rho said she hopes this study will encourage other researchers to bring these methods to bear on important questions. To that end, the code used in this project will be made freely available when the paper publishes in the Proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The paper also compares the cost of various ways researchers can analyze big datasets and extract meaningful conclusions at lower cost. The team will present its findings May 11-16 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Outside of academia, Rho said she hopes this work will encourage social media platforms and other stakeholders to find alternatives to deleting or banning groups that discuss controversial topics.

"Simply banning people in online communities altogether, especially in spaces where they are already exchanging and learning health information, can risk driving them deeper into conspiracy theories and force them onto platforms that don't moderate content at all," Rho said. "I hope this study can inform how social media companies work hand-in-hand with public health officials and organizations to better engage and understand what's going on in the public's mind during public health crises."

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Virginia Tech . Original written by Tonia Moxley. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Xiaohan Ding, Buse Carik, Uma Sushmitha Gunturi, Valerie Reyna, Eugenia H. Rho. Leveraging Prompt-Based Large Language Models: Predicting Pandemic Health Decisions and Outcomes Through Social Media Language . Submitted to arXiv , 2024 DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.00994

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Assessing DxGPT: Diagnosing Rare Diseases with Various Large Language Models

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Diagnosing rare diseases is a significant challenge in healthcare, with patients often experiencing long delays and misdiagnoses. The large number of rare diseases and the difficulty for doctors to be familiar with all of them contribute to this problem. Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), has shown promise in improving the diagnostic process by leveraging their extensive knowledge to help doctors navigate the complexities of diagnosing rare diseases.

Foundation 29 presents a comprehensive evaluation of DxGPT, a web-based platform designed to assist healthcare professionals in the diagnostic process for rare diseases. The platform currently utilizes GPT-4, but this study also compares its performance with other large language models, including Claude 3, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama, Mistral, Mixtral, and Cohere Command R+. It is crucial to emphasize that DxGPT is not a medical device but rather a decision support tool that aims to aid in clinical reasoning.

This study extends beyond initial synthetic patient cases, incorporating real-world data from the RAMEDIS and Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH) datasets. The analysis followed two main metrics: Strict Accuracy (P1), how often the first diagnostic suggestion agreed with the real diagnosis, and Top-5 Accuracy (P1 + P5), how often the right diagnosis was in the top five suggestions. The results show a complex picture of diagnostic accuracy, with performance varying significantly across models and datasets:

On the synthetic dataset, closed models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini exhibited relatively high accuracy. Open models like Llama 3 and Mixtral performed reasonably well, though lagging behind.

On the RAMEDIS rare disease cases, Claude 3 Opus model demonstrated 55% Strict Accuracy and 70% Top-5 Accuracy, outperforming other closed models. Open models like Llama 3 and Mixtral showed moderate accuracy.

The PUMCH dataset proved challenging for all models, with the highest Strict Accuracy at 59.46% (GPT-4 Turbo 1106) and Top-5 Accuracy at 64.86%.

These findings demonstrate the potential of DxGPT and LLMs in improving diagnostic methods for rare diseases. However, they also emphasize the need for further validation, particularly in real-world clinical settings, and comparison with human expert diagnoses. Successful integration of AI into medical diagnostics will require collaboration between researchers, clinicians, and regulatory bodies to ensure safety, efficacy, and ethical deployment.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Funding Statement

Foundation 29 received a grant from Takeda to develop pilot #1 for Global Rare Disease Commission https://www.globalrarediseasecommission.com/Report/ . Pilot #1 is about exploring how to use artificial intelligence for RD diagnosis. Produced work is publically available at www.dx29.ai . Foundation 29 received a grant from GW Pharma to develop www.dx29.ai . This an open source tool and free of charge tool for physicians to accelerate time to diagnosis for patients with rare diseses. Produced work is publically available at www.dx29.ai . Foundation 29 received a grant from UCB Pharma to develop https://dxgpt.app/ . This an open source tool based on GPT-4 Azure OpenAI model and is free of charge tool for physicians and patients to accelerate time to diagnosis for patients with rare diseses. Produced work is publically available at https://dxgpt.app/ and https://github.com/foundation29org/dxgpt_testing . Foundation 29 received a grant from Italfarmaco to develop https://dxgpt.app/ . This an open source tool based on GPT-4 Azure OpenAI model and is free of charge tool for physicians and patients to accelerate time to diagnosis for patients with rare diseses. Produced work is publically available at https://dxgpt.app/ and https://github.com/foundation29org/dxgpt_testing . These grants are not related to any of these pharma's products. This study was funded by all these 4 grants as part of DxGPT development.

Author Declarations

I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/chenxz/RareBench

I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals.

I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable.

juanjodoolmo{at}foundation29.org

Data Availability

All data produced are available online at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/chenxz/RareBench and https://github.com/foundation29org/dxgpt_testing

https://github.com/foundation29org/dxgpt_testing

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