Although the ethnography of speaking is one of the approaches used to analyze discourse (Schiffrin, 1994; Cameron, 2012), its benefits and uses can be applied in the field of language assessment when designing a drug-dispensing, classroom-based test task. In this article, pharmacy specialists and students functioning as members of the…

Traditional techniques used in English pronunciation courses such as minimal-pair drills, reading out loud, and practicing isolated sounds slowly with a monotone voice have questionable effectiveness due to limited time and students' ability. This article describes a project to overcome such limitations by requiring learners to dub a short movie…

Pronunciation is challenging for many international students, but particularly important for those going onto college and university level studies where they need to do professional presentations. According to the Institute of International Education [IIE] (2020), California hosted 160,592 students in 2019/2020, and is one of the top destinations…

Speaking in public involves three parts: an act, a process, and art; however, stage fright is a common dilemma for students across all proficiency levels and cultural orientations. In this paper, some critical factors of successful public speaking affecting both students' self-scoring and the professor's grading of in-class presentations were…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

Prosody communicates pragmatic meaning far beyond that which is evident at the surface level of an utterance and can pose challenges to learners' pragmatic comprehension. The current study investigated how second language (L2) English learners made decisions about speaker intent when communicated through prosody. Seventeen English L2 learners took…

Though research has shown that rhythmic training is beneficial for phonological speech processing, little empirical work has been carried out to assess whether rhythmic training in the classroom can help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French…

This study explores the most perceivable phonological features of Hong Kong (HK) L2 English speakers and how they affect the perception of HK L2 English speech from the perspective of both native and non-native English listeners. Conversational interviews were conducted to collect speech data from 20 HK speakers of English and 10 native speakers…

This article reports a study that aimed to find out whether F0 patterns of L2 English produced by Vietnamese speakers are different to those of native English speakers, whether the non-native F0 patterns are transferred from Vietnamese, and to what extent English and Vietnamese F0 profiles differ. Ten native/L1 Australian English speakers, 20…