This paper reports a pretest-posttest experimental study of the acquisition of English tones by Mandarin EFL learners in a Chinese university. The target tones are high fall, high rise, fall-rise and complex level tones embedded in non-English words, one/two-syllable English words and short English sentences. The subjects are 31 Mandarin EFL learners majoring in English, who have learnt English...

Although learner-centeredness has been widely applied in instruction in the world, this approach has only been cautiously adopted in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching at some institutions in Vietnam. Taking a social constructivist view, this case study explores how a learner-centred perspective is employed in EFL teaching at a teacher training college in Vietnam. The study is based o...

This paper took an experimental approach and investigated how Korean EFL learners process the English island constructions. Since there are some controversies on the existence of the island effects in Korean, the L1 transfer effect may make it difficult for the Korean EFL learners to learn island constructions in English. To examine if the difference between English and Korean affects the acqui...

Although is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners’ although output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’ although employment in Chinese EFL learners’ writing. The study is a corpus-based analysis launched under the analytical framework of contrasti...

Writing patterns of a Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learner were analyzed as a case study from linguistic, pragmatic, and psycholinguistic perspectives. Alternative assessments were used by American pre-service teachers and a Taiwanese EFL instructor for rating linguistic developmental problems referring to format, style, syntax, and grammar. In addition, researchers conducted dee...

BACKGROUND Although it is useful for COPD patients to relieve their dyspnea by bracing their arms, the relationships between the arm bracing posture and expiratory flow limitation (EFL) and lung volume are unknown. Whether arm bracing affects dyspnea, EFL, and lung volume in elderly COPD patients was investigated. METHODS Sixteen elderly subjects (median [interquartile range] age 81 [77-85] y...

This paper reports on the effectiveness of Interactive Reading Comprehension Teaching (IRCT) in improving oral English communication ability Prince Songkla University (PSU) undergraduates. It is based a pre- and post-test quasi-experimental study employing IRCT, composed self–study reading assignments structured peer-teaching project. The participants who were purposively sampled to partake inc...

Research on sources of language anxiety (LA) undergraduates specifically when they engage in speaking activities has generated a plethora discrete findings. An apparent gap is that these findings have not been used to inform coherent framework where various LA are identified and properly grouped. Such important for developing proper interventions manage effectively English as Second Language (E...