This study investigated college Chinese a second language learners' word segmentation error patterns in reading instructional-level Chinese sentences, the relationship between word segmentation errors and reading comprehension, and learners' perspectives on the role of word segmentation in reading comprehension. The results showed that the…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…

This study examines the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 L1 Cantonese-L2 English bilinguals, with the aim of uncovering the possible cross-linguistic influences on L3 pronunciation. Learners' production of 17 onset and 21 coda German consonant clusters were auditorily analysed with respect to accuracy and error…

When inferring the meaning of unknown words in a second language, learners make use of a variety of cues including the cross-linguistic formal similarities of loanwords and cognates. However, because learners do not always recognize these cross-linguistic relationships, cognate strategy training has been recommended. The present study investigated…

This study aims to investigate the improvement of EFL students' English pronunciation skills by using English phonetic alphabet drills. The samples of this study were 35 first-year students of English for International Communication major, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rajamangala University of Technology Tawan-ok. They all registered…

This study is a case study of the effects of tonal L1 on the acquisition of tonal L2, comparing two groups of tonal L1 learners, namely, Chinese Zhuang (C+Z) and Chinese non-Zhuang (C-Z) in the same classroom. The two groups of learners read aloud 60 words from a Thai wordlist, then their tone production was analyzed in two dimensions. The…

English as an International Language (EIL) is grounded in the concept of multiplicity. Such proliferation of non-native varieties of English leads to several controversies including the intelligibility of its speakers to listeners from various language backgrounds. Although this concern has been continuously addressed in EIL research, the focus…

The accurate identification of likely segmental pronunciation errors produced by nonnative speakers of English is a longstanding goal in pronunciation teaching. Most lists of pronunciation errors for speakers of a particular first language (L1) are based on the experience of expert linguists or teachers of English as a second language (ESL) and…

This study investigated the pronunciation problems of Turkish EFL learners in state schools in Girne, TRNC. The researcher collected data through a pronunciation test and school visitations. The performance of thirty participants was video-recorded. In order to increase the validity of the results, two native raters listened to the recordings and…

A body of previous work in second- and foreign language pronunciation instruction (e.g., Lord, 2005; Miller, 2012) has shown that explicit phonetic and pronunciation instruction is beneficial. However, Olson (2014) noted that just a few minutes per week of instruction are devoted to pronunciation in most classrooms. What is the effect of such…

Due to the variety of their local dialects and accents, Arab learners occasionally face some problems when pronouncing English letters and phonemes. These pronunciation errors are caused by the influence of native language interference. Each language in any part of the world has its linguistic characteristics and rules that control their…

Building up on Munro and Derwing, the current study set out to re-examine and generalize the Functional Load (FL) principle (Brown, 1988) as a tool to identify a set of relatively crucial segmental features for successful understanding in L2 communication. In Experiment 1, 40 Japanese learners of English in English-as-Foreign-Language settings…

Previous research on pronunciation errors observed that the most frequently mispronounced English phonemes are word-initial consonants. The findings of the current study invalidate those observations by presenting the data analysis of 40 Turkish EFL learners' speech samples, which illustrates that segmental speech errors are position-independent…

36 Saudi EFL freshmen students, at the College of Languages and Translation, took a listening-spelling test in which they filled out 100 blanks in a dialogue. Results indicated that 63% of the spelling errors were phonemic and 37% were graphemic. It was also found that the subjects had more problems with whole words than problems with graphemes…

This study investigates the English spelling of students in grades 2 through 8 in Mainland China. A review of spelling and cross-linguistic research in spelling is presented. The orthographic development of 273 students was assessed "with validated spelling inventories" (Sterbinsky, 2007) to sample developmental features across three…