Data from Princeton University’s New Immigrant Survey were analyzed to examine the associations between immigrants’ media use and 3 indicators of acculturation—current English proficiency, preference to use English in interactions, and American political knowledge. Findings show that pre-immigration uses of English language TV, radio, and print media and post-immigration use of English language...

Few would dispute the need for students of scientific disciplines to learn English. The teaching of English to scientists whose first language is not English is essentially utilitarian. The learners need English as a means of doing their work efficiently and of furthering their specialist education, and the language is not taught with a general educational aim in mind, as a cultural or social e...

In this paper, we propose a statistical method of evaluating the pronunciation proficiency for presentation in English. We statistically analyze the utterances to find a combination that has a high correlation between an English teacher’s score and some acoustic features. We found that ratio of the likelihoods of free phoneme recognition by using native English HMMs and nonnative English HMMs w...

The present study explores the impact of acculturation on health status and use of health and community aged care services among elderly Iranian-born immigrants to Australia. Three hundred two Iranian immigrants aged 65 years and over who had lived in the Sydney Metropolitan area for at least six months participated. Data were collected using a written survey instrument, face-to-face interviews...

This paper examines whether workers with limited English skills suffer adverse effects in the labor market when states declare English the official language. Official English laws may harm individuals who do not speak English very well if employers view the laws as allowing or requiring them to adopt workplace Englishonly rules that lower the demand for limited-English-proficient workers. Using...

Accounts of bilingual cognitive advantages suggest an associative link between cross-linguistic competition and inhibitory control. We investigate this link by examining English-Spanish bilinguals' parallel language activation during auditory word recognition and nonlinguistic Stroop performance. Thirty-one English-Spanish bilinguals and 30 English monolinguals participated in an eye-tracking s...

This article reports the results of a small-scale study examining role English language proficiency in adaptation Ukrainian immigrant children and youth to life Saskatchewan, Canada. The main objective was describe issues related as Second Language (ESL) they are perceived by their parents. second explore following factors process: age, gender, duration stay Canada, age upon arrival ESL class a...

This paper proposes the automatic generation of Fill-in-the-Blank Questions (FBQs) together with testing based on Item Response Theory (IRT) to measure English proficiency. First, the proposal generates an FBQ from a given sentence in English. The position of a blank in the sentence is determined, and the word at that position is considered as the correct choice. The candidates for incorrect ch...

This study investigated the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. The word-final voicing contrast was considered (as in minimal pairs such as `cub' and `cup') in a forced-choice word identification task. For these particular talkers and listeners, there was evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for ...