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...

This is a semantic pilot study which concentrates on how people in Taiwan process the temporal metaphors, ego-moving metaphor and time-moving metaphor. Motivated by the research of Gentner, Imai, and Boroditsky (2002) in which the English native speakers comprehend ego-moving metaphors faster than time-moving metaphors, the present study attempts to reexamine whether the faster reaction to ego-...

This study aims at investigating the perception and production of the English nasals /m/ and /n/ in syllable-final position by 20 Brazilian EFL learners and 3 native speakers of American English. Perception was assessed by means of both a discrimination and an identification test. Production data was collected by means of a Sentence Reading Test. The results from the perception tests revealed t...

This paper presents research on building a model of grammatical error correction, for preposition errors in particular, in English text produced by language learners. Unlike most previous work which trains a statistical classifier exclusively on well-formed text written by native speakers, we train a classifier on a large-scale, error-tagged corpus of English essays written by EFL learners, rel...

The present study examined how native English speakers in Canada assessed the degree of foreign accent in nonnative speech when they were required to focus on the content of an utterance. The native English listeners were asked to listen to English sentences produced by speakers of Japanese, Mandarin, and Tamil, and to rate their foreign accent on a 9-point scale in two different rating tasks. ...

The study examines interactions associated with foreignerdirected speech (FDS) within EFL triadic conversation exam where learners differ in outspokenness. The results showed that learners’ outspokenness affected foreign examiners’ vowel articulation. More vowels underwent distinct change across learners’ positive-coded utterances in F2, whereas in F1 the vowel change in the high-communicative ...

In future, the uses of English by non-native speakers will predominantly be online, using English language digital resources, and in computermediated communication with other non-native speakers of English. Thus for Korea to be competitive in the global economy, its EFL should develop L2 Digital Literacy in English. With its fast Internet connections, Korea is the most wired nation on Earth; bu...

The expanding role of English as the language of international communication has important implications for English language pedagogy. Statistics show that speakers of English as a second and foreign language worldwide largely outnumber the speakers of English as a first language, so that International English can no longer be considered the ‘exclusive property’ of its native speakers (Ferguson...

This study explores the perception of English monophthongs by native speakers of Mandarin (hereafter NSMs). The data were collected at the phonetics laboratory at Jiangsu University of Science and Technology (hereafter JUST), China. The results reveal that the overall percentage of correct vowel perception is 81.2%, that the phonetic contexts affect the subjects’ vowel perception, and that the ...

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...