Learning a spoken language requires learning a phonological inventory and phonotactics, or the sequences of phonemes possible in the language. Laboratory investigations of phonotactic learning include tongue-twister studies that show that speech errors respect artificial phonotactic constraints, for example that /k/ never appears as a syllable…

This article aims to identify common errors made by hearing students learning South African Sign Language (SASL) and enhance the understanding of language acquisition in this context. The researchers formulated three hypotheses, attributing errors to vocabulary gaps, misunderstandings due to improper signing, and the dual impact of spoken and…

Every language has unique phonotactics, general rules about how phonemes combine to make syllables. We know that people can implicitly learn new phonotactic rules in the laboratory, and these rules then affect their speech errors. Some types of rules, however, require a consolidation period before they influence speech errors. Two experiments are…

Developing effective oral business English (OBE) curricula requires clearly understanding student needs. This study evaluated the speaking needs of Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates majoring in business English for specific purposes (ESP), aiming to inform the design of a teaching module that bridges the gap between…

The English past counterfactuality is difficult for non-native learners to learn and understand due to cross-language discrepancies. Oftentimes, individuals unavoidably develop the interlanguage and this language system becomes fossilized regardless of the amount of exposed time and input. The purpose of the study was twofold: (a) to examine 126…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

Three categories of audio recordings, a web service platform, and commercial software were involved in this analysis process. The three categories of audio recordings included eight filtered student recordings, an audio recording provided by a Mandarin instructor from University Malaysia Sabah, and an audio recording generated by Text-to-Speech…

With the advancement of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, ASR-based pronunciation assessment can diagnose learners' pronunciation problems. Meanwhile, ASR-based pronunciation training allows more opportunities for pronunciation practice. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of ASR technology in diagnosing English…

Having hardly learnt any English or having at best learnt wrong English (which is worse than no English) during their junior and secondary school years and having little or no exposure to English outside their classrooms, and partly due to certain weaknesses and shortcomings in what the teachers teach and how they teach, college students in some…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

This study explored the impact of contextualized practice on second language (L2) learners' production of wh-questions in the L2 classroom. It examined the quality of practice (correct vs. incorrect production) and the contribution of declarative knowledge to proceduralization. Thirty-four university-level English as a foreign language learners…

The study aims to explore the grammatical errors in spoken English of Thai University learners in a communicative business English course. The main objectives of the research study are to identify the types and frequency of grammatical errors. Collected data were analyzed according to the surface structure taxonomy to present a general overview.…

Novel phonotactic constraints can be acquired by hearing or speaking syllables that follow a novel constraint. When learned from hearing syllables, these newly learned constraints generalize to syllables that were not experienced during training. However, generalization of phonotactic learning to novel syllables has never been persuasively…

This study reports 15 types of activities that EFL, linguistics and translation instructors at a sample of Saudi universities used in distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples include searching for linguistic and translation key terms and concepts, problem-solving questions, online debates, summarizing a research paper, attending a…

This paper reports on an exploratory study that investigated the effect of extensive speaking practice on the development of L2 speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency in voice blogging. The participants were 30 college EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in Taiwan. As a supplement to the insufficient speaking practice in class, each…