Speakers vary in their pronunciations of the sounds in their native language. Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their phonetic categories to speakers' idiosyncratic pronunciations. Lexical information can, however, be inconclusive or become available too late to guide this phonetic retuning. Sentence context is known to affect lexical…

Despite the fact that pronunciation is a vital aspect of language learning, previous research has shown that its instruction is limited in the classroom in terms of time and attention, due in part to the time constraints inherent in any curriculum. It then becomes essential for instructors to be strategic about the pronunciation features they…

To explore email request patterns in the institutional context of university settings, this study combines speech act research with conversation analysis methods to examine how native speakers of American English and native speakers of Chinese formulate email requests to faculty. 100 authentic email requests sent by Chinese and American students…

Recent studies indicate that many foreign students now choose to go to the Philippines for university and language education. In this paper, we examine how Filipino Teachers' English (FTE) is represented on English language schools' webpages to market the Philippines as an alternative destination for acquiring "good" English among…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and…

The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine the (in)effectiveness of the Usage-based grammar approach through explicit instruction of adverbials in the US educational context. One area that can complicate the question of native speakers' grammar knowledge is their awareness of grammatical terms and their functions. Along with exploring…

This study investigated the extent to which racialisation shapes EFL learners' conceptualizations of the 'native speaker' construct through an experimental design. Three hundred and fourteen university students studying at English-medium universities in Turkey were invited to take an online matched guise test. They were assigned to either the…

The present dissertation explores the effect of exposure to non-native speech via foreign film on non-native speech production and perception. In order to explore potential effects, two main experiments were developed, which examined French production and perception by monolingual native speakers of English before and after exposure to French…

This study explored perceptions of university English language teachers in Thailand regarding Thai English. Using purposive-convenience sampling, 60 teachers of English from two Thai universities answered a survey; 11 of which participated in in-depth semi-structured interviews. An analysis of the survey and interview responses indicated that…

Prior work demonstrated that toddlers can learn words from a speaker with a foreign accent and generalize that learning to the native accent when the accented variation does not cross phoneme boundaries. The current study explores the situation in which a vowel in the foreign accent is produced such that it could be confused with a different…

This paper addressed the under-investigated question whether speech act moves can be identified and classified in conversation by examining the content, positioning, and strategic role of utterances in turns and turn sequences. To this end, offering exchanges were analysed in the transcripts of 31 open role-plays. These were elicited from American…

This study evaluates the development of L2 collocational competence in texts written by learners of differing proficiency levels, compared to native speaker collocation patterns from a reference corpus. We address: (1) whether learners develop their collocation competence as their proficiency grows; and (2) How is this development mediated by…

This study addresses the lack of comprehension data in second language acquisition research by focusing on English existential "there"-constructions (ETCs) with a locative extension (e.g., "there is an X on the Y"). The post-copular noun X used in the present study consisted of two types: actual and nonsense. Participants…

The research investigated pragmatic transfer in responses to English tag questions by L1 Thai learners based on Interlanguage Pragmatics, specifically pragmatic transfer (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). The L1 Thai learners were categorized into two groups according to their English proficiency levels: advanced and intermediate. Oral and written…