In the realm of language skills, speaking holds a pivotal position, making it imperative for classroom instruction to place a strong emphasis on its development. Teaching English speaking skills to Nepali EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students poses a unique set of challenges owing to English's non-native status in Nepal. To tackle these challenges and enhance the speaking abilities of Nepali students, English teachers in Nepal must adopt innovative strategies due to the limited daily use of English in their environment. This classroom action research endeavors to enhance the English speaking proficiency of EFL students in Nepal through the implementation of various communicative activities. These activities include role play, impromptu speaking exercises, language games such as "who is telling the truth", video tapping, and discussions. The interventions were applied to a group of 60 undergraduate students at a university who were learning English as a foreign language. The data gathered from participant classroom observations and unstructured interviews underwent thematic analysis, resulting in the identification of six distinct themes. The results demonstrated a noteworthy improvement in students' English speaking skills, attributing this progress to the implementation of communicative activities. The findings underscore the effectiveness of communicative activities as interventions for enhancing the English speaking abilities of university-level EFL undergraduates. In light of these results, it is recommended that both students and teachers remain cognizant of the contextual and appropriate use of communicative activities as a means to further improve English speaking skills among EFL students.

Despite the continued widespread use of the academic word list, there is a paucity of comprehensive and easily replicable tests which measure learners’ depth of knowledge of academic word list items. This paper outlines the development and initial validation of a test which measures multiple aspects of learners’ knowledge of academic vocabulary. The test comprises four sections – one productive knowledge section (sentence writing), and three receptive knowledge sections (collocations, synonyms, and L1 meaning). Each section includes 30 items selected from the academic word list, 10 of which are derived forms containing one or more affixes. The test was administered to 193 Japanese students studying at a public medical university in Japan. All four sections of the test showed a high level of internal consistency. In addition, the inter-rater reliability between the two different markers for the productive use (sentence writing) section was also moderately high. Furthermore, Rasch item analysis showed that the test items were well fitted to comprehensively measure learners’ knowledge of academic vocabulary. These encouraging initial results suggest that there may be merit in the test being used, evaluated, and possibly adapted in other EAP teaching and learning contexts.