The comparison of different levels of language proficiency showed that language learners increase their use of conventional expressions at higher levels of language proficiency requiring both linguistic and sociopragmatic competence.
Participants of the study were 42 Japanese learners of English as a foreign language at three different levels of language proficiency (low intermediate, intermediate, and high intermediate) at the intensive English program of a university in Japan.
In the IEP where the study was situated, efforts were made to cover the defined construct here through different types of speaking tasks at different levels of English language study.
In one of these studies, Bardovi-Harlig et al. (2008) investigated the production of a specific type of formulaic sequences referred to as conventional expressions by learners of different first language backgrounds at different levels of language proficiency, from low intermediate to low advanced, at the intensive English program of a university in the United States.
In the program, many teachers had some knowledge that ELLs are classified into different levels of language proficiency, but the concept of content specific language proficiency was a new idea even to teachers who had been endorsed as ESL specialists.
The Chi-square test showed no significant difference among learners at different levels of language proficiency.
Nonetheless, the One-way ANOVA test showed no significant difference among learners at different levels of language proficiency.
The participants were at three different levels of language proficiency based on an institutional TOEFL ITP placement test: low intermediate (TOEFL scores of ranging from 451 to 500; 15 participants), intermediate (TOEFL scores of ranging from 501 to 550; 12 participants), and high intermediate (TOEFL scores of ranging from 551 to 600; 15 participants).
By using a distributed architecture, we take advantages of the parallelism in the different levels of the natural language processing system, for modeling a community of conceptually autonomous agents.
Given the complexity of language proficiency and how it develops in learners over time, the effort to distinguish different levels of language proficiency is not without problems.
A statically significant difference (p = .033) was also found in this technique among learners at different levels of language proficiency: despite its popularity, there were different opinions about this technique.
