Can you identify a single colleague who has not had a manuscript returned with the comment ‘‘needs to be reviewed by a native English speaker’’? Many researchers receive this response even after translation or revision by an official translator or a native English-speaking coauthor. Over the past four years, while conducting my doctoral, and now my postdoctoral, work here in Brazil, I have been...

As language learners scale up in terms of speaking proficiency, they expand the volume of expressions in the target language that they can use in a robust fashion, combining vocabulary and syntactic structures into novel constructions and transferring them to new contexts. In the ISLET Project, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), we have developed a strategy for allowing a dialog-r...

This paper reports on the continued activities to develop a computer-aided phonetic learning system for German learners of Mandarin. In the current study we used a corpus which consists of disyllables and sentences that were produced by first-year German students and native speakers of Mandarin. Half of the German group had attended an additional phonetic seminar. The first experiment was a ton...

This study accounts for the acquisition of the consonant clusters of English syllable structures both in onset and coda positions by Persian EFL learners. Persian syllable structure is "CV(CC)", composed of one consonant at the initial position and two optional consonants at the final position; whereas English syllable structure is "(CCC)V(CCCC)". Therefore, Persian EFL learners need to resolve...

Over the last few years, role of computers has become a controversial issue in language learning. This study was designed to examine the impact of computer anxiety and computer self-efficacy on the speaking section of the TOEFL iBT test taken by Intermediate EFL learners. The researchers intended to find out, which var- iable i.e. computer anxiety and/or self-efficacy would result in better per...

The present paper examines phonetic characteristics of the initial stop consonants of English uttered by ESL learners whose native tongues are Korean, Thai, and Mandarin Chinese. It examines VOT (voice onset time) values of initial stops in the three languages and compares them with those of English stops produced by ESL learners of the three languages. From the acoustic analysis, it can be sai...

the present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native english speaking students’ (nness) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native english speaking students (ness) and compared learners ...

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...