The traditional focus of English phonetic teaching in China has consistently been on the segmental acquisition, which is mainly highlighting the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, while its suprasegmental knowledge in speech naturalness, coherence and understanding is relatively insufficient. In addition, Chinese students have a serious…

This article presents the methodology adopted for transcribing and quantifying temporal fluency phenomena in a spoken L2 corpus (L2 English, French, and Italian by learners of different proficiency levels). The CHILDES suite is being used for transcription and analysis, and we have adapted the CHAT format in order to code disfluencies as precisely…

A study investigated the effect of pausing, a component of speech speed, on the listening comprehension of second language learners. Groups of subjects at two ability levels listened to taped versions of two brief lectures recorded with four different combinations of speed and pausing conditions. Comprehension was measured by means of cloze tests…