This book examines key issues in theories of what language is and what happens in the mind during second language acquisition (SLA), inspiring readers to think in new and exciting ways about language learning and teaching. Chapters, written by both established and rising star scholars, provide cutting-edge insights and new empirical findings on…

Second language (L2) learners of tone languages do not perceive and produce the different tones of the target language with equal ease. The most common explanation for these asymmetries is that acoustically salient tones are the easiest to learn. An alternative explanation is that tones are easiest to learn when they are highly frequent in the…

This paper reports on an investigation about the relation between a student's conscious awareness of the structure of a sentence and the degree of his/her intonation accuracy as well as his/her reading comprehension. The research was done based on the hypothesis that: "if the students are made conscious of the infrastructure of lengthy…

A literature review pertaining to the teaching and learning of stress and intonation in native and second languages considers the functional movement, conversational English, the difficulty of learning stress/intonation, stress within words and sentences, difficulties for speakers of tone and syllable-timed languages, and tests of stress and…

English as a second language for the non-academically oriented adult can be facilitated bY structuring their early linguistic input in a way similar to the way a parent structures input for a child learning a first language. The four components through which children learn their native language and which also concern adult learning are: (1)…