Songs and chants in EFL education are both artistic and pedagogical acts belonging to the same family of musical expressions, whose practical use in the classroom is not unfamiliar among teachers. Nevertheless, little effort has been made to distinguish between each other. In this sense, the popularity of songs in the context of EFL/ESL education…

This dissertation investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of lexical stress in Mandarin second language (L2) learners of English, as well as in first language (L1) speakers. The present study used a minimal pair respective to stress location (e.g., OBject versus obJECT) obtained from a publicly available Mandarin Accented English…

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…

The article deals with teaching Russian intonation of declarative sentences to foreign students. The emphasis is placed on the way teaching materials are presented. In particular, the variable rows for intonation patterns in declarative sentences have been developed, as well as the teaching of syntagmatic segmentation and intonation patterns in…

Foreign language teachers may develop an additional identity besides their own cultural identity. This may lead to a risk of identity clashes for some teachers. In this paper, the L1 identity of the non-native teachers of English in Turkey, and the reflections of it on their professional identity was handled concerning the linguistic components of…

This article reviews research findings involving visual input in speech processing in the form of facial cues and co-speech gestures for second-language (L2) learners, and provides pedagogical implications for the teaching of listening and speaking. It traces the foundations of auditory-visual speech research and explores the role of a speaker's…

Lexical tone languages like Mandarin Chinese require listeners to discriminate among different pitch patterns. A syllable spoken with a rising pitch (e.g. "b[i-acute]" 'nose') carries a different meaning than the same syllable spoken with a falling pitch (e.g. "b[i with grave]" 'arm'). For native speakers (L1) of a non-tonal…

In many English language teaching contexts, listening activities resemble listening comprehension tests. Scholars have argued that this product-oriented approach is not particularly effective in helping learners improve their listening skills and have advocated for the inclusion of instruction that targets specific features of spoken language. The…

Twenty adult ESL students at a community college participated in a semester reading intervention. Participants received a modified extensive reading treatment, and some participants received an additional repeated reading direct instruction reading intervention. The author examined the impact of the reading interventions on ESL students' reading…

In this study, 118 native speakers of Japanese watched 48 separate video clips in which a teacher provided recasts on phonological or lexical errors to students in Portuguese, a language with which the participants were unfamiliar. In the video clips, six recast characteristics were manipulated: length, segmentation (segmented/whole), prosodic…

This study compared holistic and analytic marking methods for their effects on parameter estimation (of examinees, raters, and items) and rater cognition in assessing speech act production in L2 Chinese. Seventy American learners of Chinese completed an oral Discourse Completion Test assessing requests and refusals. Four first-language (L1)…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied…

This article explores how multiple linguistic cues interact in predictive processing among second language (L2) learners. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether learners of German use case and prosody cues together to assign thematic roles and predict post-verbal arguments. During the experiment, participants listened…

Intonation plays an important role in understanding the intended meaning of speech since neglecting the study of intonation in the discourse leads to a misunderstanding of some pragmatic meaning. This study attempts to answer these two questions: what is the pragmatic function of the information tone types that are employed in Obama's speech…