This study was conducted to investigate the effect of debate strategy on developing learners' speaking proficiency at Ibb University and their attitudes towards it. Due nature study, researcher used a quasi-experimental research. Through mixture qualitative quantitative methods in an oral test, checklist observation questionnaire were 32 learners level one, English Department, second semester y...

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...

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...

The present study sought to explain why bilingual speakers are disadvantaged relative to monolingual speakers when it comes to speech understanding in noise. Exemplar models of the mental lexicon hold that each encounter with a word leaves a memory trace in long-term memory. Words that we encounter frequently will be associated with richer phonetic representations in memory and therefore recogn...

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 ...

The present study examined effects of cross-linguistic overlap and language proficiency on bilingual parallel language activation. Recognition of cognates (e.g., English hen, German Henne) was compared to recognition of non-cognates (e.g., English bike, German Fahrrad) in English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals, and monolinguals. In an eye-tracking paradigm, participants identified...

This study attempted to investigate the relationship among learning strategy, autonomy and language proficiency of Chinese university EFL students. To achieve this objective, purposive sampling and cluster sampling methods were used to select 422 non-English major students as participants in three universities, Henan province, China. Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SIL...

Second language learners perform worse than native speakers under adverse listening conditions, such as speech in noise (SPIN). No data are available on heritage language speakers' (early naturalistic interrupted learners') ability to perceive SPIN. The current study fills this gap and investigates the perception of Russian speech in multi-talker babble noise by the matched groups of high- and ...

We report three reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) semantic priming lexical decision experiments that explore the following in relation to L1 activation during L2 processing: (1) the role of L2 proficiency, (2) the role of sentence context, and (3) the locus of L1 activations (orthographic vs. semantic). All experiments used German (L1) homonyms translated into English (L2) ...