From November 2015 to October 2020, Canada had welcomed 44,620 Syrian refugees to more than 350 communities across the country. In 2019, it further surpassed the United States and Australia in the number of refugees settled. Lacking the necessary language skills for living and working in a new country is one of the most critical barriers refugees…

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 review article evaluates the intersection of the content of two recent anthologies in second language (L2) phonology. One of the books lays out both the methodological context and theoretical underpinnings of the field, whereas the other volume reports 11 empirical studies on the L2 acquisition of several aspects of pronunciation by adult…

Standard English has long been the unquestioned choice of a model for all language instruction, whether in native or non-native speaker countries. Fanned by the recent interest in new varieties of English, especially those in the Third World, there have been increasing claims that it is best in such English-as-a-Second-Language countries to set up…

A discussion of the nature and function of interlanguage in second language acquisition draws on research on interlanguage and experiences in teaching German to Finnish secondary students. The theories giving rise to the concept of interlanguage are outlined and compared, and the characteristics of interlanguage are discussed. Special attention is…

Analysis of the phonological influence of English on Yoruba found such influences as violation of phonotactic constraints, assimilation of English sounds with those of Yoruba sounds, irregular phoneme correspondences, and resistance to new syllable types. (19 references) (Author/CB)

Analysis of the speech of the people of Santa Maria Lachixio, a Zapotec town in Mexico shows they use a high voice to show respect toward others, and that variability in the height of pitch is unimportant. No other voice quality changes occur, such as laryngealization or breathiness. Kinship, age, and authority are important determiners of high…

This introduction to second language learning is intended to provide language teachers with basic information on relevant principles and processes. After an introductory chapter, the second chapter looks at traditional beliefs about language learning, including those concerning transfer of first-language knowledge to the second language, the role…

Summaries of five language-related research projects are presented from Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Topics include teaching/learning Bahasa Malaysia; English-language programs in Malaysian teacher education colleges; interlanguage variability in verbs; reading/writing theories; and cross-cultural strategies and English in written business…

A study tested hypotheses concerning thinking in a foreign language. Specifically, it looked at whether (1) inferencing in a foreign language relies on mental models and propositional thinking; (2) the three stages of the theory of comprehension apply to understanding foreign-language discourse; and (3) propositional thinking manifests native…