The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of the listener's education and occupation on intelligibility, comprehensibility (ease of understanding), and accentedness in speakers of Russian-accented American English (RA), Southern-accented American English (SA), and General American English (GAE). Native English listeners (N=126) rated…

The present study investigated six experienced English as a second language (ESL) teachers' metalinguistic knowledge of the English intonation system through analysis of their metalanguage. Participants' metalanguage related to intonation was collected while completing three tasks: (1) a semi-structured interview, (2) a simulated teaching…

The current study aimed to gain insight into the nuanced challenges that Vietnamese learners encountered due to the interference of their native linguistic structures and norms. This qualitative study explored the experiences of Vietnamese learners in acquiring English, focusing on the influence of negative L1 transfer. This study focused on the…

This article discusses whether digital visual and audio feedback in learners' own voices improves their perception and production of lexical tones in Chinese as a foreign language. Forty-four beginners participated in a four-week training focused on the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese tones at the word level. Half received digital feedback…

The present qualitative study with an action research orientation focuses on the strengthening of students' oral fluency in English through the implementation of six theme-based teaching workshops. The participants were students of an EFL pre-intermediate English language course in the institute of foreign languages at the Technological University…

This study aimed to identify teacher perceptions of the causes of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) through feedback, and what feedback strategies teachers use to reduce FLCA. Feedback can be both a cause of FLCA and help to reduce FLCA. It is therefore important for teachers to understand how their feedback can affect FLCA. In the present…

Traditional techniques used in English pronunciation courses such as minimal-pair drills, reading out loud, and practicing isolated sounds slowly with a monotone voice have questionable effectiveness due to limited time and students' ability. This article describes a project to overcome such limitations by requiring learners to dub a short movie…

Although the ethnography of speaking is one of the approaches used to analyze discourse (Schiffrin, 1994; Cameron, 2012), its benefits and uses can be applied in the field of language assessment when designing a drug-dispensing, classroom-based test task. In this article, pharmacy specialists and students functioning as members of the…

This study explores collaborative and individual computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT) through a quasi-experimental design. Eighteen adult Algerian EFL learners were recruited and randomly assigned into a control group receiving no treatment and two experimental groups, a collaborative CAPT group where the participants practiced in pairs, and…

Pronunciation instruction is still underemphasized in many language programs as well as in teacher-training curricula despite reports of significant improvement from many studies. Three factors may account for this resistance and for the difficulty of making pronunciation instruction an integral part of language teaching: the time obstacle, the…

Pronunciation is challenging for many international students, but particularly important for those going onto college and university level studies where they need to do professional presentations. According to the Institute of International Education [IIE] (2020), California hosted 160,592 students in 2019/2020, and is one of the top destinations…

Speaking in public involves three parts: an act, a process, and art; however, stage fright is a common dilemma for students across all proficiency levels and cultural orientations. In this paper, some critical factors of successful public speaking affecting both students' self-scoring and the professor's grading of in-class presentations were…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

This paper examines whether a web-based training on English discourse intonation leads to better spontaneous speech quality for Mandarin Chinese speakers who reside in the U.S. and in China. The four-week fully online training consisted of meta-instruction videos as well as listening and speaking activities, including instant visual pitch contour…

Prosody communicates pragmatic meaning far beyond that which is evident at the surface level of an utterance and can pose challenges to learners' pragmatic comprehension. The current study investigated how second language (L2) English learners made decisions about speaker intent when communicated through prosody. Seventeen English L2 learners took…