Millions of Foreign Language (FL) learners spend many years learning English in the classroom. Most FL learners learn English in their countries with local teachers, with little or no native L2 input. The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1995, 1999) and Speech Learning Model (SLM) (Flege, 1995) are the most widely used L2 models in L2 speech analysis. However, ...

L2 studies demonstrate that learners differ in their speech perception patterns. Recent explanations attribute this variation to the different initial stages with which learners start their L2 development. Spanish listeners' categorization of Standard Southern British English and American English vowels is compared. The results show that, on the basis of steady-state F1 and F2 values, listeners...

Yu-Feng (Diana) Yang, National Sun Yat-Sen University This qualitative study aims to understand how English learners interpret shared space in an online multilateral English blogging context and how their interpretations of shared space contribute to their multilateral exchange experience. Twenty-four Asian learners of English from two different universities—one in Japan and one in Taiwan—parti...

In order to better teach pronunciation to students, it is necessary to gain a better appreciation of the types of pronunciation patterns and issues that Japanese speakers encounter when attempting to speak in English. To highlight some of these issues, a sample dialogue between two Japanese learners was recorded and analyzed for segmental and suprasegmental features. The analysis revealed that ...

We investigated the perception of developmental changes in timing patterns that happen in the course of second language (L2) acquisition, provided that the native and the target languages of the learner are rhythmically similar (German and English). It was found that speech rhythm in L2 English produced by German learners becomes increasingly stress-timed as acquisition progresses. This develop...

All three properties are not instantiated in Bulgarian. Only the first two properties are explicitly taught in English classrooms in Bulgaria, while the third is not. A Truth Value Judgement Task, a guided composition task and a proficiency test were administered to 112 Bulgarian learners of English and 24 native speaker controls. Results indicate that L2 learners at all proficiency levels are ...

This corpus-based study compares the use of the alternating ditransitive verb TELL by native speakers and Chinese learners of English. The corpora used are the written sub-corpus of ICE-GB (the British component of International Corpus of English) and CLEC (the Chinese Learner English Corpus). CLEC consists of both lowand high-proficiency L2 learners’ writing. By incorporating corpus contrastiv...