BACKGROUND The PA skills of phonological blending and segmentation and auditory word discrimination relate directly to literacy and may be weak in English second language (EL2) learners. In South Africa, literacy skills have been found to be poor in especially EL2 learners. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of vowel perception and production intervention on phon...

This study addresses the acquisition of the English open front vowel by Czech learners of English, who are known to experience difficulties in both its production and perception. Secondary school students and university students of English judged the acceptability of the open front vowel as pronounced by other Czech learners of English. Their evaluations were plotted against acoustic measuremen...

Native speakers of English who are good readers can “sound out” words or names from printed text, even if they have never seen them before, although they may not be conscious of the strategies they use. No tools are available today that can convey that knowledge to learners, showing them the rules that apply in English text. We have adapted the letter-to-phoneme component of a text-to-speech sy...

Two experiments explore how Korean-speaking L2 learners of English process English lexical stress during spoken word recognition. Korean doesn't employ lexical-level prosodic distinctions like English lexical stress, but it has phrase-level prosodic structure ((T) HLH), with the initial tone determined by the phonation type of phrase-initial sound. Results from eye-tracking and gating experimen...

English learning has become a vital educational strategy in many non-English-speaking countries. Vocabulary is a critical element for language learners. Therefore, developing sufficient vocabulary knowledge enables effective communication. However, learning a foreign language is difficult and stressful. In addition, memorizing English vocabulary is often considered boring, and learners may lack...

As Internet technologies evolve, learners of English have more informal opportunities to listen to spoken English and interact with English speakers. This article reports on a study carried out at the University of Strasbourg into the informal contacts students have with English on the Internet. The participants in the study are not English majors, but take some English classes as the language ...

The current study was designed to investigate the timing and nature of interaction between the two languages of bilinguals. For this purpose, we compared discrimination of Canadian French and Canadian English coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual, monolingual and advanced early L2 learners of French and English. French /d/ is phonetically described as dental whereas English /d/ is described a...

The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between spelling knowledge and reading skills among a group of 16 intermediate-level Arab learners of English as a second language (ESL) and a corresponding comparison group of 21 intermediate-level ESL learners in an English for academic purposes (EAP) program. A spelling task was used to assess the English orthographic or spelling k...

The paper finds out poor engagement in business English training program prevents adult learners at College of Continuing Education of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies from improving their communication skills. PBL (Project –Based Learning) is proposed to motivate adult learners to get involved with learning a lot. Based on the perspective of psychology, learners’ needs may produce motiv...

Mandarin has a much more limited segmental inventory than English, and permits only nasals in coda position, presenting a challenge for learners of English. However, previous studies have mainly explored this issue using perceptual transcription. This study provides an acoustic analysis of coda consonant productions by Mandarin L2 learners of Australian English. The results indicate that they p...