The Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) approach plays an essential role in English as a lingua franca. Previous GELT studies only examined the influence of Global English exposure on learners' attitudes in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles. This study added explicit instruction on phonological features in addition to a variety of…

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

This research sought to investigate EFL nursing students' use of vocabulary learning strategies to learn medical terminology and further assess strategies used in relation to learning outcomes measured by two types of vocabulary knowledge: meaning recall (passive recall) and meaning recognition (passive recognition). The participants, 138 EFL…

In two artificial grammar learning experiments, we tested the learnability of tonal phonotactics forbidding non-domain-final rising tones (*NonFinalR) against the phonotactics banning non-domain-final high-level tones (*NonFinalH). We propose that a firm phonetic ground drives a presumably innate inductive bias favoring *NonFinalR and against…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

L2 test developers often use scripted spoken texts in their L2 listening tests, because it is efficient and practical to create scripted spoken texts that meet predetermined test specifications. But because scripted spoken texts differ in a number of fundamental ways from unscripted spoken language, there are potential threats to validity when…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that…

Perhaps it is inevitable that non-native speakers' English articulations are displayed with their local accents, which are usually based on their mother tongues or dominant languages. However, fluency in English pronunciation and communication is still achievable by these groups of speakers in outer and expanding circles. In these two circles,…

This paper includes two interrelated studies. The first production study investigates the timing patterns of English as spoken by Chinese learners with different dialect backgrounds. The second comprehension study explores native and non-native speakers' assessments of the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English, and examines the effects of…

This study was to explore whether college students could perceive and produce five English front vowels well or not. It also examined the relationship between English speaking and listening. To be more specific, the study attempted to probe which vowels that learners could be confused easily in speaking and listening. The results revealed that…

Virtual reality (VR) has brought about numerous alternative learning opportunities in the last decade, and with modern products such as Oculus Rift and other wearable Virtual Reality technologies being introduced into society, VR will promisingly continue to provide yet unseen opportunities in the next few decades and therefore is a technology…

In an attempt to compare how orthography and phonology interact in EFL learners with different reading abilities, online measures were administered in this study to two groups of university learners, indexed by their reading scores on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). In terms of "accuracy," the less-skilled…

The present study examined the influence of the features of Chinese characters, such as frequency, regularity and consistency, on the accuracy with which they were read by two groups of adult Chinese learners. Twenty-two English-speakers and 31 Japanese-speakers studying Chinese at a Taiwanese University read 130 Chinese characters that varied…

This dissertation studies the realization of the rhythm of Taiwan Mandarin and focuses on the quality of its unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables. Taiwan Mandarin (TM) is often described as more syllable-timed than Standard Mandarin (SM). In TM, the unstressed syllables occur less frequently. The quality of the unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables…