Speaker's good pronunciation makes his/her listener comfortable, and confident to participate in the conversation and his/her mispronunciations bring implications to the listener's awareness and involvement with the message spoken. The research was aimed at detecting the mispronunciations produced by 70 nonnative (L2) post-graduate students who…

Although the existing research on educational robots has exhibited the assistance for EFL learners' English skills, the evidence which shows robot-assisted systems' effect on adult learners' English read-aloud is still rare. Nevertheless, read-aloud is still treated as a useful approach in English classes for speech pronunciations in particular in…

Intelligibility is a critically important aspect for effective oral communication. This study explored salient (important) pronunciation errors and their relative roles in the intelligibility of nonnative speech based on listener judgments. Speech samples, collected from speakers with a Turkish as a native language (L1) background, were presented…

Analysis of a corpus of errors in pronouncing Proper Nouns used in English collected from the spontaneous speech of a sample of Arab informants showed that Arabic speakers have the following problems: (i) mispronouncing English vowels in "Google," "Moodle," "Uber," "Nixon," "London;" (ii) replacing…

This study examined effects of pronunciation training using automatic speech recognition technology on common pronunciation errors of Korean English learners. Participants were divided into two groups. One group was given instruction and training about the use of automatic speech recognition for pronunciation practice. The other group was not…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…

This study examines the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 L1 Cantonese-L2 English bilinguals, with the aim of uncovering the possible cross-linguistic influences on L3 pronunciation. Learners' production of 17 onset and 21 coda German consonant clusters were auditorily analysed with respect to accuracy and error…

This study aims to investigate the improvement of EFL students' English pronunciation skills by using English phonetic alphabet drills. The samples of this study were 35 first-year students of English for International Communication major, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rajamangala University of Technology Tawan-ok. They all registered…

The English language pronunciation is a sub-skill of speaking modules during the learning process of a second language. Accurate pronunciation is not followed enough by Bangladesh students in speaking English It was found that the participants face barriers while pronouncing English. However, it is ignored and even provided the least attention by…

The aim of the study was to identify the factors that contribute to speaking anxiety in Thai adult EFL learners working in an online media company and enrolled in an English course provided by the company, as well as to discover the anxiety reduction techniques used by these learners. The results showed that significant contributors to speaking…

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…

English as an International Language (EIL) is grounded in the concept of multiplicity. Such proliferation of non-native varieties of English leads to several controversies including the intelligibility of its speakers to listeners from various language backgrounds. Although this concern has been continuously addressed in EIL research, the focus…

An explorative case study has been conducted at a small rural school in the north east of Thailand to investigate the pronunciation errors that primary school students make when reading English aloud. This paper illustrates the opportunities and challenges of employing speech recognition software in rural classrooms by using it with specifically…

The study aimed to investigate the influence of 24 Hong Kong learners' first and second languages (L1 and L2 -- Cantonese and English, respectively) on the acquisition of Mandarin as a third language (L3) and to discuss how multilingual learners acquire L3 pronunciation features. The most frequent phonological features in L2 English and L3…

The articulation of the consonant sounds /[voiceless dental fricative]/ and /[voiced dental fricative]/ of the English language is a serious pronunciation problem for the Bechari students in general and EFL students at Tahri Mohamed University (UTMB) in particular. It was noticed that EFL students at UTMB manage to use the /t/ and /d/ sounds…