Parroting exercises in a foreign language are designed to make a student’s speech more native-like through imitation of specific native speech templates. In this paper we describe novel template-based methods for automatically estimating subjective scores for both intonation and rhythm in nonnative English. In terms of accuracy when automatically classifying a parroting speaker as a native or a...

Teachers’ beliefs are important for understanding and improving educational process. They closely guide language teachers to adopt their teaching strategies for coping with their daily language teaching challenges, influence their general well-being, and in turn, shape language learners’ learning environment, their motivation and their language achievement and ability. This essay studies some p...

The present study is an investigation into the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ degree of creativity and language learners’ academic achievement. To this end, six female English teachers and 81 male and female advanced English learners from a private language institute were asked to take part in the study. Data were collected through Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and stude...

Abstract The changing culture toward multimodality enforces acquiring visual literacy in every aspect of today’s modern life. One of the fields intermingled with using various modes in different variations is language teaching and learning, especially for and by young learners. Young language learners’ (5-12 years old) lack of world experience forces them to make the most use of non-verbal mode...

The notion of phonetic convergence covers all adaptations in articulatory and acoustic features towards those of a communicative partner, or in other terms an increase in segmental and suprasegmental similarity between them (Pardo 2006). Up until now most of the experiments on convergence were designed for monolingual dyads, with very few investigations of convergence in native-nonnative intera...

Demotivating factors can negatively influence the learners’ attitudes in learning English language. In the present study, demotivating factors and the strategies used to reduce demotivation among Iranian EFL learners were explored through both qualitative and quantitative research methods. İn the qualitative part of the study, semi-structured interviews including two main open-ended questions w...

In cross-language speech production, nonnative consonant clusters are often modified by epenthetic or transitional vocoids. Focusing on English speakers’ productions of nonnative stop-initial clusters (e.g., /bn/, /bd/), the present study identified several acoustic characteristics that distinguish cases of epenthesis from accurate cluster realizations. Both modified and accurate productions co...

To test the hypothesis that native language (L1) phonology can affect the lexical representations of nonnative words, a visual semantic-relatedness decision task in English was given to native speakers and nonnative speakers whose L1 was Japanese or Arabic. In the critical conditions, the word pair contained a homophone or near-homophone of a semantically associated word, where a near-homophone...