Nonnative speakers of a language are often at a disadvantage in producing extended speech, as they have differing native (L1) phonological systems and rhetorical traditions or little experience in giving talks. Prosody in the form of stress, rhythm, and intonation is a difficult but crucial area needed to master extended speech because prosody…

This paper offers an instructional unit on the response token "achja" in everyday German conversation. The paper first provides a description of "achja" and its distinctive prosodic features based on empirical research in conversation analysis. The goal of the paper is to provide instructors of German with information and…

The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners is their lack of a suprasegmental background. Most of those having oral comprehension and expression difficulties are unaware that their difficulty comes from their negligence of concepts of stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. While remedying stress problems, students should be taught…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives is the absence of short vowels. The correlation of 28 consonants with sounds poses no great difficulty. In Arabic, there are six vowel phonemes which are voiced only by three letters with help of some relevant diacritical marks (?arakat). As the bulk of Arabic publications is written…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives has long been considered as the absence of short vowels, however there is more to be dealt with. While the correlation of 28 Arabic consonants pose no great difficulty in deciphering the script, the six vowel phonemes voiced only by three letters even with help of some relevant…

Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

Junctures are pauses used in speech separating thought-groups from one another in order to give the listener time to digest the utterance to signal the end. Where junctures are present, hearers find it easier to understand what is said as they are able to discern the individual words between such verbal breaks. Junctures being universal…

With the ever increasing number of studies on formulaic language, we are beginning to learn more about the processing of formulaic language (e.g. Ellis et al. 2008; Siyanova et al. 2011), its use in speech (e.g. Aijmer 1996; Wood 2012) and writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a, 2008b) and its application in natural language processing (e.g. Tschichold 2000).…

In this article we discuss the specifics of reading fluency and provide suggestions for identifying when reading is fluent and when it is not. We then discuss the important role that reading fluency plays in the attainment of literacy achievement and briefly review research results that highlight the relationship between fluency and comprehension.…

For years, phoneticians have tried to simplify pronunciation for EFL/ESL learners. Some have identified four degrees of primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak stress, and others only three degrees: primary, secondary, and weak. Still others have concentrated on two stress levels: accented versus unaccented, or stressed versus unstressed (Bowen,…

This article aims at absorbing the pronunciation teachers task and how much phonology should teachers know. Teachers and future teachers need a well-rounded concept of the phonology of the language they are going to teach and the native language of learners. Emphasis must be placed on the understanding of language as a system of rules and as a…

The Acquisition of L2 Phonology is a wide-ranging new collection which focuses on various aspects of the acquisition of an L2 phonological system. The authors are researchers and practitioners from five different countries. The volume has been divided into three major sections. Phonetic Analysis presents five studies of language learners in both…

This paper addresses additional language learning as rooted in participation in the social activity of collaborative game-play. Building on a social-interactional view of learning, it analyses some of the detailed practices through which players attend to a video game as the material and semiotic structure that shapes play and creates affordances…

In second language learning, to possess a perfect pronunciation, the importance of stress and rhythm should not be ignored. This articles explores the nature of sentence and word stress as well as rhythm, thus putting forward some feasible ways of training and acquiring a good English stress and rhythm in EFLT (English as Foreign Language…

China has become an exporter of material goods to the world, particularly to the United States. It is time for the exploration of a mutually beneficial relationship in a strikingly different realm, that of human capital in higher education and its contributions to the quality of university teaching. To faculty members and students at U.S.…