Speaker's good pronunciation makes his/her listener comfortable, and confident to participate in the conversation and his/her mispronunciations bring implications to the listener's awareness and involvement with the message spoken. The research was aimed at detecting the mispronunciations produced by 70 nonnative (L2) post-graduate students who…

This empirical study examined error performance in Hausa vowel production by Yoru`ba´ speakers, using a quantitative approach. The aim was to compare two groups in the final-year National Certificate in Education in producing Hausa shared and unshared vowels, and to assess gender and institutional differences across five colleges (ABK, ACE, IKR,…

According to the speech learning model [Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In W. Strange (Ed.), "Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research" (pp. 233-277). York Press], learners whose first language (L1) is a tonal language (e.g. Cantonese) can be…

This study investigated the relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of second language learners of Spanish of varying proficiency in instructed contexts. It conceptually replicated studies by Munro and Derwing (1995a) and Derwing and Munro (1997), who found partial independence among the three speech…

Analysis of a corpus of errors in pronouncing Proper Nouns used in English collected from the spontaneous speech of a sample of Arab informants showed that Arabic speakers have the following problems: (i) mispronouncing English vowels in "Google," "Moodle," "Uber," "Nixon," "London;" (ii) replacing…

This study examines Korean L2 learners' production of English phonological contrasts (e.g., consonant-final versus vowel-final forms) that are absent in their L1. Twenty university students divided into high- and low-proficiency groups participated in the study. Their productions were analyzed for segmental accuracy and error patterns. Results…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…

This study examines the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 L1 Cantonese-L2 English bilinguals, with the aim of uncovering the possible cross-linguistic influences on L3 pronunciation. Learners' production of 17 onset and 21 coda German consonant clusters were auditorily analysed with respect to accuracy and error…

This study aimed to develop the pronunciation skills of students who learned Turkish as a foreign language and determine the extent of the instruction given for that purpose by observing its cognitive effects. It was designed as an in-class action research and carried out with nine students speaking different languages. Of those, five were…

This study aims to investigate the improvement of EFL students' English pronunciation skills by using English phonetic alphabet drills. The samples of this study were 35 first-year students of English for International Communication major, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rajamangala University of Technology Tawan-ok. They all registered…

The English language pronunciation is a sub-skill of speaking modules during the learning process of a second language. Accurate pronunciation is not followed enough by Bangladesh students in speaking English It was found that the participants face barriers while pronouncing English. However, it is ignored and even provided the least attention by…

The aim of the study was to identify the factors that contribute to speaking anxiety in Thai adult EFL learners working in an online media company and enrolled in an English course provided by the company, as well as to discover the anxiety reduction techniques used by these learners. The results showed that significant contributors to speaking…

Many foreign language learners encounter difficulties in pronouncing English language sounds, which potentially leads to misunderstanding in oral communication. Sometimes, the Albanian learners find pronunciation quite tricky when learning English language because they have to replicate lots of new strange sounds that are completely unknown to…

Previous event-related potentials (ERP) research has investigated how foreign accent modulates listeners' neural responses to lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic errors. We extended this line of research to consider whether pronunciation errors in Mandarin Chinese are processed differently when a foreign-accented speaker makes them relative to…

An explorative case study has been conducted at a small rural school in the north east of Thailand to investigate the pronunciation errors that primary school students make when reading English aloud. This paper illustrates the opportunities and challenges of employing speech recognition software in rural classrooms by using it with specifically…