The aim of this paper is to expose the potential difficulties encountered by students learning Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) with a focus on sounds production. The research design was descriptive-analytic. The data was obtained using direct recording and interviews. The sample included 27 AFL students at the Arabic Institutes at IMSIU and…

Many foreign language learners encounter difficulties in pronouncing English language sounds, which potentially leads to misunderstanding in oral communication. Sometimes, the Albanian learners find pronunciation quite tricky when learning English language because they have to replicate lots of new strange sounds that are completely unknown to…

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…

A body of previous work in second- and foreign language pronunciation instruction (e.g., Lord, 2005; Miller, 2012) has shown that explicit phonetic and pronunciation instruction is beneficial. However, Olson (2014) noted that just a few minutes per week of instruction are devoted to pronunciation in most classrooms. What is the effect of such…

Over the past decades, various teaching methods adopted from time to time have placed pronunciation teaching in the forefront or in the backend. This has resulted in second language facilitators to completely disregard or relentlessly correct pronunciation depending on their intuition due to the lack of research on pronunciation teaching or proper…

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…