As sound changes advance across large geographic areas, they progress unevenly across populations. The speakers who lead these changes often share macro-social identities, like place or social class affiliations (e.g. Nesbitt 2018; Wagner et al. 2016). But the features undergoing these macro-level sound changes also hold social meanings related to…

Like many non-native learners, English is a Foreign Language to Omani learners; therefore, Spoken English turns out to be difficult and often problematic. Non-native learners of English face several phonological problems mainly because most languages follow specific, predictable rules of pronunciation, but English does not. There are native 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…

The goal of the present study was to investigate the effect of short Arabic vowels on listening comprehension. It is well documented that short vowels affect reading and reading comprehension in Arabic literacy. Since reading comprehension and listening comprehension share many commonalities, it is assumed that short vowels will positively affect…

Diphthongs are double vowel sounds made by combining two vowels in the same syllable. During their articulation in the oral cavity, the first vowel sound glides onto the next vowel from one position of the mouth to another within the same syllable. That's why they are heard as single-vowel phonemes by listeners. Because of a gliding movement in…

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish native speakers (L1) with German as a second language (L2). Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their…

Proficiency, accuracy and fluency in reading is an essential part of nurturing a disposition towards learning, growth and continued education for any student who wishes to be successful in school. Many studies have assessed the efficiency and success of various reading programs that have been developed to improve these areas of reading…

Most sociolinguistic studies rely on apparent time, cross-sectional methods to analyze language change. On the basis of apparent time data, sociolinguists have hypothesized that cultural processes of lifespan change create predictable cycles of linguistic behavior in which adolescents lead in the use of vernacular variants and advance sound change…

All native speakers of Arabic read in a language variety that is remarkably distant from the one they use in everyday speech. The study tested the impact of this distance on reading accuracy and fluency by comparing reading of Standard Arabic (StA) words, used in StA only, versus Spoken Arabic (SpA) words, used in SpA too, among Arabic native…

Most principles and propositions in the science of reading are derived from research on Latin orthographies, usually, in English while much less is known about Semitic orthographies, namely, Arabic. This study investigated the effect of vowels and type of genre on oral accuracy, oral rate, and oral comprehension in reading Arabic orthography. A…

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate pronunciation teaching with regard to an EFL multi-skills textbook ("English for Palestine 10"). The evaluation was intended to identify the extent to which pronunciation teaching content incorporated in" English for Palestine 10," in addition to the related teachers' competency level match…

Recent research provides evidence that individuals shift in their perception of variants depending on social characteristics attributed to the speaker. This paper reports on a speech perception experiment designed to test the degree to which the age attributed to a speaker influences the perception of vowels undergoing a chain shift. As a result…

Textbooks play a very crucial role in the process of language teaching and learning. The present study carries out an evaluation of two series of ELT textbooks used for teaching English language in Iranian high schools from 1970 to the present. For this purpose, Tucker's (1975) textbook evaluation model is employed. The results suggest that one of…

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school…

This article discusses the strategies used by Cantonese ESL learners to cope with their problems in pronouncing English initial consonant clusters. A small-scale research study was carried out with six secondary and six university students in Hong Kong, who were asked to perform four speech tasks: the reading of a word list, the description of a…