Lexical stress is an important contributor to foreign accent as well as intelligibility of second language (L2) speech. The present study intends to find out to what extent Chinese-speaking learners whose native language has less evident stress can acquire English lexical stress. A production test was administered to nine advanced Chinese learners…

This study compares how the native speakers of Thai (TTs) and American (AEs) as well as the Thai learners of English as a foreign language with high exposure to English (TEHs) and those with the low exposure (TELs) perform the speech acts of compliments (Cs) by taking the context of age into their consideration. The data were collected by means of…

As Tarone (1998) stated, an understanding of interlanguage variation in relation to contextual changes has been a key issue in both second language acquisition (SLA) and language assessment (LA) research. Research on interlanguage variation has shown that systematic variation is often evidenced when different phonological and syntactic forms are…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

Teaching L2 pragmatics is often not covered in teacher education programs, and is an excellent area for continuing professional development. As part of a larger project on instructed interlanguage pragmatics, volunteer instructor participants were asked to teach a series of lessons on pragmatics to university-aged (19-23) ESL learners in ESL and…