This study investigates the relative impact of verbal expression and tone of voice when native speakers of English form an impression of non-native speech. Four expressions of inquiry uttered in two tones by non-native speakers were judged by native listeners and analyzed using an ordinal Probit model. Plain expressions received lower scores than…

The 2018 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (CSCTFL), meeting with the Wisconsin Association for Language Teachers, was held in downtown Milwaukee at the Hilton City Center, March 8-10, 2018. Fifty years of annual conferences were celebrated, each one designed "to support language teachers and to advance the study…

In this article, the authors argue that collaborating with campus partners engaged in ePortfolio work can position Communication Centers as a leading resource for faculty and students and further the connections between oral communication, critical thinking, and student learning (Atkins-Sayre, 2012; Carpenter, Apostel, & Hyndman, 2012). To do…

This research aims at finding out students' personal initiative towards their achievement in speaking English. This research was conducted in an English department at a university in North Sulawesi Indonesia. The data were obtained from the sixth semester students in English Language and Literature study program of academic year 2015/2016…

This study uses a mixed-effects model to examine the acquisition of targetlike patterns of phonological variation by 17 English-speaking learners of French during study abroad in France. Naturalistic speech data provide evidence for the incipient acquisition of a phonological variable showing sociostylistic variation in native speaker speech: the…

We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ("give the book to library"/"give the library the book"), while excluding negative exceptions ("donate the…

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children's word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was…

Teaching speaking is one of the challenging dimensions of teaching English as a foreign language. In the Turkish educational setting, students are exposed to English from second grade at the primary level until the first grade at tertiary level. Although the exposure to English is intensive, it is observed that students are unable to solve…

Little research has focused on extended concurrent speech, unexpected floor taking, or topic switching, since it has been deemed rare (Schegloff 2000. "Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation." "Language in Society" 29(1). 1-63.) or inappropriate (Goldberg 1990." Interrupting the discourse on…

There is a growing tendency among the researchers about how to assess and improve the ability of speaking. In spite of its complex nature, speaking is generally considered to be the most essential skill to acquire. With the onset of communicative language teaching, this inclination has encouraged researchers to carry out research and make…

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether bilingual university/ college students may have speaking test anxiety. Additionally, it was examined whether there were differences in anxiety levels among bilingual students according to gender. To collect data, 140 bilingual university students were given a GEP-TAS (General English…

Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this…

Purpose: The present study was designed to evaluate use of spectral and temporal cues under conditions in which both types of cues were available. Method: Participants included adults with normal hearing and hearing loss. We focused on 3 categories of speech cues: static spectral (spectral shape), dynamic spectral (formant change), and temporal…

In 2005, Klaus P. Schneider published a fascinating article with the title "'No problem, you're welcome, anytime': Responding to thanks in Ireland, England, and the U.S.A." Adopting the then emerging and now established framework of variational pragmatics, Schneider's pioneering paper presents the results of a study on differences…

As part of the research on motivation, causal attribution studies have an important role in predicting and improving academic performance since controllable and uncontrollable attributions have an effect on learners' future actions. Following this path, the present qualitative study investigates the attributions of students in an English Language…