The aim of this study is to investigate which pronunciations of English are difficult or different from one’s first language, as well as to explore which factors are crucial for communication with people from other cultures when English is used as one of the World Englishes. Ninety-one undergraduate students (85 females and 6 males) from two different Korean universities participated in this st...

This study investigatesvariability in English yes/no questions as well as the commonalities among yes/no question variants produced by members of two different varieties of English: Canadian English native speakers and Iranian EFL learners.Further, it probes the role of gender in theEnglish yes/no question variants produced by Canadian English native speakers and those produced by Iranian EFL l...

many among us. practitioners as well as theoreticians, deep down share the feeling that though oc.jds against us are many. the devil itself that causes most of our iailure in leaching english to the speakers of other languages is none hut the insufficient exposure of our students to real language use. those of us with efl experience arc deeply sympathetic with this verdict amt find it quite jus...

This paper investigates Taiwanese EFL learners’ identification and discrimination of English word stress when the cue of pitch is manipulated. Forty Taiwanese EFL learners and twenty English controls participated in two perceptual experiments. In Experiment 1, the participants were asked to identify a perceived non-word when its stressed syllable was realized phonetically either (a) in higher p...

Silbert & de Jong (2007) investigated correlations between response bias and segment frequency in a number of previously published segment identification data sets. In general, bias tends to be positively correlated with frequency. When applied to second language (L2) learning, this pattern predicts biases toward identifying novel L2 categories as L1 categories, since the number of instances of...

the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of language use vary across different situations, languages, and cultures. the separation of these two facets of language use can help to map out the socio-cultural norms and conventions as well as the linguistic forms and strategies that underlie the pragmatic performance of different language speakers in a variety of target language use situatio...

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

Although studies on L2 learning strategies are a major strand of second-language research, recent research interest has focussed on language learners’ metacognitive knowledge or awareness of strategies. Previous research has shed important light on the amelioration in L2 educational practices,but little researchis focused on EFL learners in input-poor environments. This paper reports on a study...