Examines several aspects of functional load in English that may be relevant for assessing the relative importance of segmental features of learners' speech. Implications for the use of functional load in pronunciation drill books are discussed. (Author/CB)

The pronunciation of final -s clusters is not uniformly treated by dictionaries, phoneticians, and writers of ESL texts. Four reasons for treating the pairs of clusters as homophonous in ESL instruction are: linguistic observation, linguistic patterning, linguistic history, and linguistic and pedagogical simplicity. This explicit treatment may…

Describes a million-word corpus for English-Italian translation students. Outlines the design, which makes multiple types of comparisons possible among originals and translations and illustrates how to use the corpus to teach sociocultural insights, discourse-structuring expressions, and lexical patterns. (Author/VWL)