In his well-known paper, Bley-Vroman (1983) discusses the potentially harmful effect of the comparative fallacy, in which " the linguistic description of learners' language may be seriously hindered or sidetracked by a concern with the target language " (p. 2). In order to avoid the problem, he urges researchers to focus on linguistic descriptions of learners' languages with respect to their ow...

This study investigated the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. The word-final voicing contrast was considered (as in minimal pairs such as `cub' and `cup') in a forced-choice word identification task. For these particular talkers and listeners, there was evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for ...

Pragmatic competence, generally defined as the study of language in its social context, has been part and parcel learning teaching. Oftentimes, second learners tend to fall short expressing themselves spite their linguistic competence. Second pragmatic research shown that greater difference between cultures, likelihood failure among non-native speakers English. With this mind, aims at comparing...