Two perceptions of Korean and English sibilants by two different L2 groups were examined: the identification of Korean (KO) contrast /s-s*/ by American English (AE) learners of Korean and the identification of English (EN) contrast /s-ʃ/ by Korean ESL learners. The results of the first experiment showed that AE beginning learners of Korean poorly identified the Korean contrasts (with chance acc...

By means of the metaphoric language used by parents and young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to describe the English learning process, this study aims to reveal the perceptions of 109 young EFL learners in the 8th grade of secondary school and 66 parents in Turkey about learning English. To elicit these participants’ metaphors, they were asked to complete the gaps in the sentence ...

The study sought to explain remedial learners’ attitude towards English language using three variables: gender, age and locus of control. Three properly validated instruments were used to collect data on the relevant variables from 385 remedial English learners randomly selected from 5 remedial education centers in Ibadan, Nigeria. Data analysis involved the use of multiple regression to explai...

The present research is to analyze the production of English lax and tense vowels by early learners of English and late learners of English (namely, Early Bilinguals and Late Bilinguals). According to Flege, Munro, and McKay’s research in 1995, they discovered that Italian speakers who arrived in Canada late tended to have a noticeable foreign accent in English, whereas early Italian arrivals i...

English main-clause wh-questions form complementiser phrases with wh-words preposed to spec-C position. This is because English wh-words, as verb-complements originally, are strong enough to trigger wh-movement and auxiliary inversion. Persian EFL learners encounter an over-differentiation problem regarding the acquisition of auxiliary inversion rule in English standard questions. Once they hav...

This study examines the potential connections among learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in English, their perceptions of autonomy-supportive teaching and two individual difference variables, i.e. motivation and English speaking self-efficacy. Two hundred and five Iranian EFL learners responded to four questionnaires. The data obtained from the collected instruments were...

In this study, we present a pronunciation scoring method for second language learners of English (hereafter, L2 learners). This study presents a method using both confidence scoring and classifiers. Classifiers have an advantage over confidence scoring for specialization in the specific phonemes where L2 learners make frequent errors. Classifiers (Landmark-based Support Vector Machines) were tr...

This paper aims to introduce the process used to create a “Parallel Learners’ Corpus of Spanish and English” (CPATEI) by integrating the theories and techniques of Corpus Linguistics, and to investigate the conjunctions used by the Spanish learners in Taiwan. The collected data in CPATEI are contributed by learners of Spanish from two universities in Taiwan, including Spanish compositions and t...