Grammatical gender is one of the most difficult aspects to acquire in a latelearned second language (L2), especially for learners whose first language does not have grammatical gender, e.g. English (Franceschina, 2005). There are two aspects of gender that present challenges to learners: First, learners need to learn the target gender of individual nouns, i.e. they need to assign a noun (e.g. S...

This paper presents an investigation of hesitation strategies of intermediate learners of German as a second or foreign language (L2) when they take part in oral L2 tests. Previous studies of L2 hesitation strategies have focused on beginning and advanced L2 learners. They found that beginners tend to leave their hesitation pauses unfilled making their speech highly disfluent [17], while advanc...

In this study, we present a pronunciation scoring method for second language learners of English (hereafter, L2 learners). This study presents a method using both confidence scoring and classifiers. Classifiers have an advantage over confidence scoring for specialization in the specific phonemes where L2 learners make frequent errors. Classifiers (Landmark-based Support Vector Machines) were tr...

It is axiomatic that L2 teaching and learning is a process that requires dynamic involvement of L2 learners in the acquisition of knowledge and skills. L2 learners need to be assisted in setting individual learning goals. They should also be given the exposure to and guidance in effective language learning strategies (LLSs) in order to build a high level of confidence in the learning process. T...

We examined discrimination of a second-language (L2) vowel duration contrast in English learners of Japanese (JP) with different amounts of experience using the magnetoencephalography mismatch field (MMF) component. Twelve L2 learners were tested before and after a second semester of college-level JP; half attended a regular rate course and half an accelerated course with more hours per week. R...

l2 learners’ multiple intelligences (mi) profile plays a central role in theirperformance on different aspects of language learning, one of which is the use oflanguage learning strategies (llss). gaining insights into the relationship betweenmi and llss makes l2 teachers better understand their learners’ strengths andweaknesses in the use of such strategies and lets them guide the learners bett...

Two perceptions of Korean and English sibilants by two different L2 groups were examined: the identification of Korean (KO) contrast /s-s*/ by American English (AE) learners of Korean and the identification of English (EN) contrast /s-ʃ/ by Korean ESL learners. The results of the first experiment showed that AE beginning learners of Korean poorly identified the Korean contrasts (with chance acc...

Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on initial parsing decision. However, whether prosody functions in the same way in adult second language (L2) sentence processing is not known. In visual world eyetracking experiments, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing locally ambiguous sentences with L1 speakers (native Engli...

The main objective of the current study is to investigate L2 Japanese learners’ ability to segment complex sentences from aural input. Elementaryand early intermediate-level L2 learners in general have not developed the ability to use syntactic cues to interpret the meaning of sentences they hear. In the case of Japanese, recognition of inflectional morphemes is crucial for the accurate segment...