This article provides the results of an investigation of the system of pronunciation faults of English speakers learning French, and describes means of correction based on the verbo-tonal system. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Part 1 of a continued article. (DS)

Discusses why mastering pronunciation in a second language is difficult and gives some errors common to students learning English as a second language. Describes some useful guidelines and techniques for pronunciation instruction. (EKN)

Examples are presented of schwa elisions from the sequence /r/-plus-consonant that are typical of contemporary general British pronunciation of English. This occurs often in lexical pronunciations and very often in syllables in proclitic or enclitic prosodic situations. (SW)

Speakers of many Oriental languages find it difficult to distinguish systematically between the /l/ and /r/ phonemes. Due to the importance of recognizing these contrasts in English, the teaching of these phonemes should be one of the foremost elements in teaching English as a second language to Asian students. (CFM)

Recommends that beginning students of French who have particular difficulty with pronunciation be given an extra hour in which they can help each other, using a correction sheet, and also receive help from the teacher. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

This article examines some phonological explanations for pronunciation difficulties experienced by learners of English and Chinese. Rules of accommodation, rules of distribution and alternation, voicing, and morphophonemic rules are examined. (Contains six references.) (JL)

Native-like pronunciation is necessary for membership into some social groups and to be considered a legitimate speaker of a language. Language immersion education aims to develop bilingual individuals, able to participate in multiple global communities, and while the lexical, syntactic, and sociolinguistic development of immersion learners is…

This paper presents the findings of a study to explore pre-service teachers' beliefs about learning English and the stability of these beliefs over time. Participants were 25 pre-service teachers (11 males, 14 females) enrolled in a Bachelor of Education (TESL) programme. The Horwitz (1987) Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI), a…

Learners of English as a foreign/Second Language (EFL/ESL) can easily learn the correct pronunciation of English words. Linguists have tried to simplify English phonology in general, and English accent in particular, over the past 50 years or so; some scholars have talked about four degrees of primary, secondary, tertiary and weak stress (e.g.,…

Little is known about the effects of listener characteristics or listening conditions on intelligibility scores. This study compared intelligibility scores of dysarthric speech achieved under a standard listening condition with those obtained in non-standard conditions and investigated the effect of listener age, gender and familiarity with…

Two explanations for deficits underlying autism were tested: weak central coherence (WCC) and executive dysfunction. Consistent with WCC, Happe ("British Journal of Developmental Psychology" 15 (1997) 1) found that children with autism failed to use sentence context in pronouncing homographs. In an alternate approach, we investigated whether…

The present study is an attempt to account for current changes taking place in the behaviour of what are commonly taken to be stress-neutral endings in contemporary British English. The methodological framework being that of Lionel Guierre, this study aims for comprehensive coverage, via a survey of Guierre's original database (which was initially…

In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds…

It is generally assumed that second language (L2) learners find it difficult to self-assess their pronunciation skills. In view of the benefits of self-assessment for the language learning process and the need to monitor one's pronunciation in independent learning environments, we investigated the reliability of self-assessments of pronunciation…