This study examined contributions of lexical factors to native-speaking raters' assessments of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Extemporaneous oral narratives elicited from 40 French speakers of L2 English were transcribed and evaluated for comprehensibility by 10 raters. Subsequently, the samples were…

The study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between components of aptitude and the fluency, lexical variety, syntactic complexity, and accuracy of performance in two types of written and spoken narrative tasks. We also addressed the question of how narrative performance varies in tasks of different cognitive complexity in the…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…

The study investigates whether the informal interactive written discourse in instant messaging (IM) is permeating the more formal writing of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) college students, and how students' identities are constructed in terms of English multiliteracies in Taiwan. The study is designed as a qualitative case study. The…