this qualitative study analyzes the reasons of college students for learning english as a foreign language (efl) in costa rica and the reasons of high school students for learning german as a foreign language (gfl) in the us. it asks to what extent the learners’ reasons align with or deviate from neoliberal discourses that commodify foreign languages. the analysis of 27 interviews in a us high ...

We examined the perception of Japanese consonant length contrasts (singleton vs geminate) in four groups of listeners: two groups of non-native learners of Japanese, three each at highly-advanced (NNJ1) and upper-intermediate (NNJ2) levels, native speakers of Italian (IT) (n=10) and Australian English (OZ) (n=8) with no knowledge of Japanese. Because Italian, like Japanese, uses consonant lengt...

The proliferation of assisted technology has been widely used in language learning, but this should be able to accommodate inclusive learning which become an important issue today’s English teaching and the higher education landscape Indonesia. This study examined perception EFL slow learners terms integration with authentic multimedia (AMALL). It discovered impact on their speaking performance...

once severely rejected, first language (l1) use is no more considered to be inherently detrimental in foreign language pedagogy. recent research within sociocultural framework has come up with numerous facilitative roles for l1 use (anton and dicamilla, 1999; swain and lapkin, 2000; storch and wigglesworth, 2003). also, studies from humanistic perspectives that deal with the teachers’ and learn...

willingness to communicate and motivation can be two important affective variables to cause success in language achievement. the current study aimed to investigate the role of willingness to communicate (wtc) and second language motivational self-system (l2mss) in relation to learners’ language achieve- ment. to this end, 100 homogeneous learners both male and female aged from 16 to 20 were cho...

Many cross-language perceptual models consider allophonic distributions in predicting the pattern of cross-language perception. Allophonic processes, however, are related to not only the existence of particular phonetic events but also to their linkage to the particular context in which such phonetic events occur. This study investigated how the determination of context and allophonic variation...

The present study examined how non-native speakers produce and perceive a voicing contrast that does not exist in their native language, and which is importantly signaled by an acoustic cue which has a very different function in the native language. Danish has no fricative voicing contrasts, which in English occur in initial, medial, and final position. An important acoustic cue for the final v...

Aiming at effective perceptual training of second language learning, we carried out training experiments on Japanese geminate consonants. Native Korean learners were trained to identify geminate and singleton stop of Japanese. Since Korean language has no phonemic contrast between long and short consonants, learners have tried to learn their differences based on their categorical perception thr...