Previous research that explores the effect of ethnicity in the perception of speaker accentedness and personality traits often finds that Asian appearance contributes to a more accented and less competent impression. Importantly, most of the work done to date employed only Caucasian first language-speaking listeners; moreover, ethnicity and gender…

Trilingualism is a powerful fact of life in many parts of the world, including most autonomous regions inhabited by minority ethnic groups in China. Although much research has been conducted on the language attitudes of stakeholders from minority ethnic groups, the attitudinal object is usually an individual language (e.g. the ethnic language, the…

In this research, the relationships among social support, including parents', teachers', and peers' support, goal orientation, and reading amount in English were examined directly and indirectly in a sample of Hong Kong senior primary school students (N = 570) using a questionnaire survey. It was assumed that parents', teachers', and peers'…

This paper presents a study on the use of learning strategies in foreign languages, and more specifically Spanish. The study was conducted with 376 Chinese and American students who were studying Spanish in their countries of origin. The results obtained from a latent class cluster analysis identified five groups of participants based on the…

Seventy-eight native English speakers rated the foreign-accented speech (FAS) of 24 international students enrolled in an Intensive English programme at a public university in Texas on degree of accent, comprehensibility and communicative ability. Variables considered to potentially impact listeners' ratings were the sex of the speaker, the first…