The articulation of the consonant sounds /[voiceless dental fricative]/ and /[voiced dental fricative]/ of the English language is a serious pronunciation problem for the Bechari students in general and EFL students at Tahri Mohamed University (UTMB) in particular. It was noticed that EFL students at UTMB manage to use the /t/ and /d/ sounds…

This theoretical study aims at raising awareness of the existence of lexical false friends (FFs) in English and Arabic as genetically unrelated languages. It also provides a general categorization for FFs from a semantic point of view. A sample of more than fifty FF pairs is examined by contrasting their form, pronunciation and meaning. The…

In phonetics research, language alternation--including code switching (speaker-initiated) and cued switching (researcher-prompted)--can be used as a tool to investigate various aspects of speech production and perception in bilingual or multilingual speakers (Bullock & Toribio, 2009a). Studies on the production of voice onset time (VOT) during…

This article explores the issues of pronunciation and comprehension in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) context of pilot--air traffic controller radiotelephony communication, and how these are handled in the proficiency rating scale globally used to assess pilots and air traffic controllers engaging in international flight and air traffic…

Because language, as a method of communication, is a two-way channel involving both speakers and listeners, a methodical study of linguistic variation should involve an analysis of both, how it is expressed and how it is interpreted. Furthermore, because language is known to vary between individuals (inter-speaker variation) as well as at the…

Native speakers of Egyptian Arabic make errors in their pronunciation of English that cannot always be accounted for by a contrastive analysis of Egyptian analysis of Egyptain Arabic and English. This study focuses on three types of errors in the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless "th" made by fluent speakers of English. These errors were noted…

A study examined patterns of English usage in 52 Japanese university freshmen's written compositions, particularly in the use of the subordinating conjunction "because." It was found that students often fragmented sentences when "because" was involved, or used a comma to separate a trailing dependent "because" clause…

Examples of the spontaneous speech in French of native English speakers, average age 7.6 years, were collected at the end of their second year in a French immersion program. Results show that the native language strongly influences second language speech production. While vocabulary and pronunciation are of course predominantly French, the…