The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between arts students’ English proficiency level and their self-efficacy. Many studies have proved that self-efficacy is a significant predictor of learning and achievement (Multon, Brown, & Lent, 1991; Pajares, 1996, 1997; Schunk & Pajares, 2005). Does this apply to arts students? Arts students spend most of their time practicing sk...

S-MINDS is a speech translation system, which allows an English speaker to communicate with a limited English proficiency speaker easily within a question-and-answer, interview-style format. It can handle dialogs in specific settings such as nurse-patient interaction, or medical triage. We have built and tested an English-Spanish system for enabling nurse-patient interaction in a number of doma...

This study investigated how vowel epenthesis, a typical suprasegmental error produced by Japanese learners of English, is realized in their speech production of L2 English. We investigated two aspects: (i) whether loanword epenthesis phonology in Japanese transfers to English speech production, and (ii) how learners’ English proficiency level affects vowel epenthesis. In Japanese loanword phono...