abstract reading is a cognitive activity involving skills, strategies, attentional resources, knowledge resources and their integration. the reader’s role is to decode the written symbols to allow for the recovery of information from long-term memory to construct a plausible interpretation of the writer’s message. various number of reading models have been proposed by researchers among which so...

computer-assisted language learning (call) is reaching an up most position in the pedagogical field of english as a second or foreign language (esl/efl). the present study was carried out to study the effect of using phonetic websites on iranian efl students’ pronunciation and knowledge of phonemic symbols. participants of the study included 30 efl female pre-intermediate students studying in k...

This study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate cortical effects of learning Mandarin tones by native speakers of American English. Six American learners were scanned while listening to Mandarin tones. The learners then participated in a two-week Mandarin tone training program, after which they were scanned again. Regions of brain activation in the perception of ...

A number of previous studies on the English pronunciation of native speakers of Mandarin have discovered many sound features distinct from Standard English, yet none of these analyse how frequently each of these features occurred in learners with different English proficiency levels (Chang, 1991; Chen, 1975; Chung, 2006; Gao, 1995; Lee, 1986). This study focuses on the frequency of such pronunc...

This study investigates whether adult L2 learners’ experience with lexical tones and pitch accent in their first language facilitates the acquisition of L2 lexical tones. Three groups of beginning learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic experience: native Hmong (a tone language), native Japanese (a pitch and accent language), and native English (a non-tone, non-pitch accent language) sp...

Computer learner corpora have been widely used by SLA/EFL specialists since mid 1990s to gain better insights into authentic learner language. The work presented in this paper examines the inter-language of Taiwanese learners of English from a part-of-speech sequence perspective. Two pre-tagged corpora (one learner corpus and one native corpus) are involved in this work. The experimental result...

This study takes teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL) into a gaming environment. Students fundamentally engaged in a mythological context in a 3D online virtual space called Quest Atlantis. Such an environment was in sharp contrast with how English is taught in a typical Chinese classroom in Mainland China. Preliminary findings reveal that co-questing is promising for impro...

This paper describes a competitive language translation game aimed at improving students vocabulary and writing skills. An automated agent is employed as an opponent in order to improve the user’s motivation and maintain the user focused. The agent’s actions are based on statistical machine translation outputs. An evaluation that was performed with 20 Portuguese learners of Mandarin suggested t...

This study investigated the effects of partial dictation on the listening comprehension (LC) ability of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Two homogeneous groups of intermediate EFL learners at the Abrar Language Institute in Qa’emshahr were chosen. Each group consisted of 30 female intermediate EFL students. One of the groups was chosen as the experimental group (EG), and the other as the cont...