Lexical tones are widely believed to be a formidable learning challenge for adult speakers of nontonal languages. While difficulties--as well as rapid improvements--are well documented for beginning second language (L2) learners, research with more advanced learners is needed to understand how tone perception difficulties impact word recognition…

Pronunciation plays a crucial role in oral communication within a second language. Recently, the interest in English language learning among elderly adults has led to increased participation of older learners in lifelong education programs in Korea. However, there is a paucity of empirical studies on this specific learner group. This article…

This paper analyzes a few significant differences between Spanish and English in relation to phonological patterns. First, a short introduction is given about these two languages, and it is briefly explained in what linguistic aspects they are similar or different. Then, each of these linguistic features is analyzed in detail, clearly establishing…

Consequently, the present study sheds light on a very important aspect that is a contrastive analysis of segmental vowel phonemes of both L1 and L2. As one of the problems, that is affecting the teaching/learning process of ELT. Then to clarify the different areas between the segmental vowel phonemes of Arabic and English. It also aims at making a…

This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…

As part of the effort to elevate the oral English proficiency of Thai EFL learners, this paper explores university students' target-deviant English use in conversation, which should be systematically tackled in conversation teaching. Data examined included 41 two-three-minute video-recorded role-play dialogues from two English conversation…

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…

Instruction in second language (L2) English phoneme pronunciation almost invariably includes a focus on improving the learners' use of their articulatory organs to pronounce the relevant sounds. However, the pronunciation of many English sounds also relies on effort from the abdominal region, and under-utilization of this region can often…

This study tests the theoretical predictions regarding effects of increasing task complexity (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2010; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) for second language (L2) pronunciation. Specifically, we examine whether more complex tasks (a) lead to greater incidence of pronunciation-focused language-related episodes (LREs) and (b)…

Mid-20th-century scholars argued that second language (L2) instruction should be rooted in a comparison of the structural characteristics of the first language (L1) and L2. Their enthusiasm for a "scientific" approach to errors reflected the view, based on the contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH), that learners' difficulties could be…

This paper briefly investigates the vowel sounds of English and Bangla language. Keeping the supra-segmental features aside, it mainly focuses on the major segmental similarities and differences of the vowel sound system of these two languages. The paper explores the articulatory system in brief and reviews the vowels sounds of English. An effort…

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…

Knowledge of the target specialized language should be of use to English for specific purposes teachers who teach pronunciation. Knowledge of the target learners' first language (L1) should also be useful when these teachers use contrastive analysis, error analysis or interlanguage theory. However, as far as teaching the pronunciation of the…

While there is a plethora of research on pronunciation problems of EFL learners with different L1 backgrounds, published empirical studies on syllabification errors of Iraqi Kurdish EFL learners are scarce. Therefore, to contribute to this line of research, the present study set out to investigate difficulties of this group of learners in the…

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…