Much of what is communicated in the classroom is through nonverbal means. Sending appropriate nonverbal signals, as well as recognizing and interpreting the nonverbal signals of others, are essential features of the learning process. Students' abilities to encode and decode nonverbal communication have the potential to affect all aspects of their…

What determines consonant doubling in English? This question is pursued by using a large lexical database to establish systematic correlations between spelling, phonology and morphology. The main insights are: Consonant doubling is most regular at morpheme boundaries. It can be described in graphemic terms alone, i.e. without reference to…

Nonnative speakers of a language are often at a disadvantage in producing extended speech, as they have differing native (L1) phonological systems and rhetorical traditions or little experience in giving talks. Prosody in the form of stress, rhythm, and intonation is a difficult but crucial area needed to master extended speech because prosody…

The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners is their lack of a suprasegmental background. Most of those having oral comprehension and expression difficulties are unaware that their difficulty comes from their negligence of concepts of stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. While remedying stress problems, students should be taught…

An ability for a speaker to unite (link) words or to separate (break, juncture) them with a pause in his utterance gives him a special advantage to convey his intended meaning to his audience. If he knows where to unite his words and where to pause between them in speech he is better able to communicate with his listeners, and his words are…

This manuscript describes an approach to critical qualitative data analysis that combines (1) Carspecken's critical qualitative methodological framework with (2) the conceptual resources of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as framed by Fairclough and colleagues. Carspecken's methodological theory illuminates the connection between sociopolitical…

This engaging text clearly presents essential concepts that teachers need to guide their students toward clearly intelligible pronunciation and more effective communication skills. Based on a sound theoretical background, the book presents practical, imaginative ways to teach and practice pronunciation that go beyond simple "Repeat after…

Learning a foreign language is a critical skill in the current context of globalization and multicultural communication. Present secondary and post-secondary foreign language classes admit increasing numbers of students with learning disabilities (LD). Given the particular challenges faced by these students in the area of language processing,…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives has long been considered as the absence of short vowels, however there is more to be dealt with. While the correlation of 28 Arabic consonants pose no great difficulty in deciphering the script, the six vowel phonemes voiced only by three letters even with help of some relevant…

Testing Spanish speakers presents certain challenges common to all testing circumstances involving test takers whose first language is not English. In addition, some unique challenges arise because there are many subpopulations of Spanish speakers both inside and outside of the United States. Spanish as spoken in Spain differs from that spoken in…

This paper presents specific reference tools to provide institutional language integrated support with a specific language plan for a bilingual programme at the University of Malaga. This follows experts' opinions that claim the need of such a plan. While studies show the importance of language support in bilingual instruction, they rarely address…

Investigating a tone language involves careful transcription of tone on words and phrases. This is challenging when the phonological categories--the tones or melodies--have not been identified. Effects such as coarticulation, sandhi, and phrase-level prosody appear as obstacles to early elicitation and classification of tone. This article presents…

Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

This article offers an interactional account of turn continuations in Chinese conversation, which are characterized as (a) being effected by latching/rush-through, (b) being clauses with predicates, either main or adverbial, and (c) taking a retrospective orientation in the kind of interactional work they do. Close examination reveals that while,…

Junctures are pauses used in speech separating thought-groups from one another in order to give the listener time to digest the utterance to signal the end. Where junctures are present, hearers find it easier to understand what is said as they are able to discern the individual words between such verbal breaks. Junctures being universal…