abstractsince heubner's (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by l2 learners from article-less and article languages the present study investigated how persian l2 learners of english produce and interpret english definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions it was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same centra...

Learning is a level-progressing process. In any field of study, one must master basic concepts to understand more complex ones. Thus, it is important that during the learning process, that learners are presented and challenged with knowledge which they are able to comprehend (not a level below, not a level too high). In this work we focus on language learners. By gradually improving (complicati...

The view “the earlier the better” (e.g., [10]) may be a myth in a foreign language instructional setting (e.g., [1]). To identify successful late learners, this study compares early and late learners studying English as a foreign language in the situation of classroom minimal exposure to English, focusing on the perception of English consonants ([l, r]) produced by different talkers with and wi...

writing projects are socially-situated identities. the rhetorically-loaded aspects of writing, like metadiscourse marking, are more prone to carry such identities. through analyzing metadiscourse strategies employment in persian and english (as the lingua franca of academic discourse community) research articles, this study makes an attempt to find out whether persian native writers take on the...

Recognising continuous speech in a second language is often unexpectedly difficult, as the operation of segmenting speech is so attuned to native-language structure. We report the initial steps in development of a novel training method for secondlanguage listening, focusing on speech segmentation and employing a task designed for studying this: word-spotting. Listeners detect real words in sequ...

this study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in english produced by persian speakers learning english as a foreign language. the four most reliable phonetic correlates of english lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five english disyllabi...

the present research examines the academic listening comprehension strategies (lcs) among a total number of 59 intermediate and upper-intermediate persian learners who were taking pre-university courses in 2011 in persian language centre in imam khomeini international university, qazvin. the study examined nature of lcs, the variety of applying lcs, and finally predictability of strategies as a...

Persian is an Indo-European language written using Arabic script, and is an official language of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Transliteration of Persian to English—that is, the character-bycharacter mapping of a Persian word that is not readily available in a bilingual dictionary—is an unstudied problem. In this paper we make three novel contributions. First, we present performance compar...

Title of dissertation: SIMILARITY IN L2 PHONOLOGY Shannon L. Barrios, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor William J. Idsardi Department of Linguistics Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, str...