While language dominance has been crucial in the study of bilingualism, recent research has called for more detailed measures to systematically account for the observation that bilinguals use different languages in different domains, a phenomenon formalized in the Complementary Principle. Few studies have systematically measured these…

Persuasiveness in oral communication in English can be expressed with various vocal phonetic cues that may not be readily accessible to English second language (L2) learners whose native language may employ a different set of cues. With a goal to increase L2 learners' perceived spoken confidence and persuasiveness, and obtain empirical evidence…

This article examines the use of prompt-based lexical collocations in opinion essays by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. Fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote 100 opinion essays on two topics as progress tests. The AntConc programme (Anthony, 2020) was employed to identify the frequencies of use…

In this work, based on an oral corpus of semi-directed interviews conducted in French with 40 L1 Chinese speakers learning French in France and in English with 29 L1 Chinese speakers learning English in the United States, I investigated the quotative system in non-native speech of English and French as it is used in the Chinese diaspora in Paris…

Linguistic ideologies are informed by social stereotyping to maintain the "standard" variety which is often interpreted as morally superior to "nonstandard" varieties. Consequently, these ideologies racialize "nonstandard" varieties, leading to even more negative stereotypes. One outlet of such stereotypes can be…

This book is relevant for language testers, listening researchers, and oral proficiency teachers, in that it explores four broad themes related to the assessment of L2 listening ability: the use of authentic, real-world spoken texts; the effects of different speech varieties of listening inputs; the use of audio-visual texts; and assessing…

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10…

Over the past few decades, there has been considerable effort to find the mechanisms through which adult listeners can accommodate the rampant phonetic variation in natural speech. My dissertation concerns one source of variability: phonetic variation in speech produced by individuals with foreign accents. Mounting evidence shows that listeners…

The current study addresses an aspect of second language (L2) phonological acquisition that has received little attention to date--namely, the acquisition of allophonic variation as a word boundary cue. The role of subphonemic variation in the segmentation of speech by native speakers has been indisputably demonstrated; however, the acquisition of…

This variational pragmatics (VP) study investigates the similarities and differences of compliment responses (CR) between Thai and Punjabi speakers of English in Thailand, focusing on the strategies used in CR when the microsociolinguistic variables are integrated into the Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The participants were 20 Thai and 20…

Non-native speakers of English often experience problems in pronunciation as they are learning English, many such problems persisting even when the speaker has achieved a high degree of fluency. Research has shown that for a non-native speaker to sound most natural and intelligible in his or her second language, the speaker must acquire proper…

The linguistic classification of English speakers from outer-circle countries, such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore, is often ambiguous because the Englishes they speak are considered different from interlanguages yet are not considered native varieties. This study investigates whether outer-circle speakers can be viewed as equivalent to…