This study investigated how English learners of Korean weigh multiple acoustic cues, namely VOT and f0, in perceiving the Korean stop laryngeal contrast. This question is of interest because VOT is more central to this contrast in English relative to Korean. Our goal was to examine whether L2 cueweighting strategies were influenced by individual differences in cue-weighting strategies in L1 and...

The latency of the brain response to semantic anomalies (N400 effect) has been found to be longer in a bilingual's second language (L2) than in their first language (L1) and/or to that seen in monolinguals. This has been explained in terms of late exposure to L2, although age of exposure and language proficiency are often highly correlated. We thus examined the relative contributions of these f...

The present study examined the impact of visualization and graphic organizers as pre-listening strategies on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement and their listening comprehension. To do so, this study was carried out in three listening classes at Islamic Azad University of Mashhad. The participants included 80 junior EFL university stude...

The present study investigates the effect of e-mail on Iranian learners of English and focuses on teaching thewriting skillvia e-mail. More specifically, the study investigates (a) whether using e-mail has any statistically significant effect on improving high school students' writing skill, and (b) whether the proficiency level has any relation with students’ writing improvement through using ...

This paper presents an analysis of differences in human transcriptions of non-native spontaneous speech on a word level, collected in the context of an English Proficiency Test. While transcribers of native speech typically agree at a very high level (5% word error rate or less), this study finds substantially higher disagreement rates between transcribers of non-native speech (10%-34% word

Since the late 70s, investigations into the language learning strategies used by successful learners in the field of second and foreign language learning attracted attention with the studies of Rubin (1975), Stern (1975), and Naiman et al. (1978), which aimed to figure out what good language learning strategies might be and to share those strategies with unsuccessful language learners. Previous...

In this chapter, the authors examined reading evaluation methods for foreign language learners based on learners' reading processes. The goal of this chapter is twofold. The first is to evaluate text reading, and the other is to evaluate sentence reading. First, the authors assessed a text reading test to evaluate reading proficiency based on reading process, that is, effective reading speed, w...