The focus of the classroom karaoke study was to determine if singing could help Japanese EFL students improve their English pronunciation skills. Five students from a private English language school in Japan were the main participants. They ranged in age (from 20-50) as well as in English proficiency level (from beginning to advanced). After the…

Oral communication is one of the main reasons language learners attend language classes. As pronunciation is among the most significant aspects of oral communication, this study attempted to see how learning-oriented assessment (LOA) could affect pronunciation learning of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 64 language learners in a private…

This paper investigates the effect of foreignization and Englishization on business naming practices in Turkey. The question that is addressed is in what new ways foreign elements and English lexical items influence the naming of store signs in the language. In previous work, it was argued that there are roughly three main ways in which…

This study aimed to investigate how instructors teach pronunciation based on the pronunciation training they received. This study involved instructors from King Abdul Aziz University, who were teaching at the English Language Institute (ELI). The data were collected through a questionnaire given to (50) instructors at (ELI). The data were analyzed…

This study had purposes of exploring the factors inhibiting the students in speaking English and knowing teacher's perception toward the factors inhibiting the students in speaking English as a foreign language. It was done to overcome students' problems in learning the target language and solve students' problems in learning to speak. Descriptive…

There is a change in the status of English from a foreign language to a common language of communication among people with different mother languages. While the new profile of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has important implications for language teaching, it is not yet clear how far language teachers in different learning contexts have embraced…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

This study investigated U.S. undergraduates' perceptions of non-native speakers' (NNS) speech which had received 100% proficiency scores on the TOEFL iBT test. Fifty-five U.S. undergraduates rated 20 speech samples for comprehensibility, accentedness, and acceptability. The speech samples were also analyzed for acoustic fluency. Descriptively,…

Listeners can access information about a speaker such as age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background upon hearing their speech. However, it is still not clear if listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual (matched-guise) test is used to measure whether listeners' accentedness…

This article is based on texts recorded during field studies carried out in Daugavpils in the summer of 2019. It compares the language of two representatives of older-generation intelligentsia and juxtaposes the findings with materials from an unpublished doctoral thesis by Malgorzata Ostrówka "Wspólczesna polszczyzna mówiona na Lotwie"…

The problem of cognitive overload is particularly pertinent in multimedia L2 classroom corrective feedback (CF), which involves rich communicative tools to help the class to notice the mismatch between the target input and learners' pronunciation. Based on multimedia design principles, this study developed a new multimodal CF model through…

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalization process. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2) acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as their first language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

The general consensus in second language (L2) acquisition research that instruction facilitates L2 development has been confirmed in a growing number of meta-analyses and research syntheses conducted in an increasingly wide range of L2 areas, including, recently, pronunciation instruction. Yet, little research has been done on the…

This paper sets out to peruse the role of various theories or more precisely, hypotheses invoked in second language acquisition (SLA) research by surveying three empirical studies pertaining to the critical period hypothesis in the SLA of phonetics and phonology. In particular, the three studies reviewed are titled in chronological order as (1)…