This study is concerned with problems in language learners' intonation of English. Ten intonation problems were found in the learner speech of two adult Spanish-speaking males: (1) range of pitch, (2) initial rise, (3) final fall, (4) rise to final stressed syllable, (5) placement of prominence, (6) final rise for questions, (7) total question…

This bulletin points out the differences between the sound systems of Vietnamese and English that will be likely to cause difficulties for the Vietnamese student of English, and outlines the most effective ways of helping the student overcome these difficulties. The guide also includes a section on how to adapt existing ESL materials and a listing…

Contrastive analysis of Spanish and English reveals the importance of giving as much attention to suprasegmentals as to segmentals in the teaching of pronunciation. (CFM)

This quarterly publication is designed to share information of practical, theoretical, administrative, and general interest. It provides linguistic fieldworkers with news, reviews, announcements, and articles that will stimulate interest in linguistics and help them to stay current with the field. Articles in this volume include the following: "Is…

Focuses on the roles of text-structuring metadiscourse and intonation in signalling in larger-scale organization of academic talks. Compares the occurrence of metadiscoursal and intonational signals of organization in authentic undergraduate lectures and in talks in English for academic purposes listening materials. (Author/VWL)

An analysis of the English word stress placement of six native Arabic speakers and six native English speakers studying Arabic revealed that, while most of the native English subjects produced the expected word stress, the Arab subjects placed stress on English words in conformity with Arabic stress patterns. (CB)

English as spoken as a second language in India has developed distinct sound patterns in terms of both segmental and prosodic characteristics. We investigate the differences between two groups varying in native language (Gujarati, Tamil) to evaluate to what extent Indian English (IE) accents are based on a single target phonological-phonetic…

This pronunciation manual for the study of English as a foreign/second language can be used with beginning as well as intermediate or advanced students. The text is organized in three parts or cycles. Part One is an introduction to selected features of pitch and stress and an inventory of the vowels and consonants, with contextual illustrations of…

DESIGNED AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION FOR PROFESSIONALS PREPARING INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS, PLANNING COURSES, OR DEVELOPING CLASSROOM TECHNIQUES FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAMS, A SERIES OF STUDIES HAS BEEN PREPARED THAT CONTRASTS, IN TWO VOLUMES FOR EACH OF THE FIVE MOST COMMONLY TAUGHT FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE UNITED STATES, THE SOUND AND GRAMMATICAL…

If the non-native teacher of English as a foreign language hopes to approach a high standard of oral competence in the language, he must cultivate some conscious perception and control of intonation. He can achieve this objective in various ways. Situations in which natural speech occurs would be ideal but few teachers have the opportunity for…

This study examines the reliability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) software used to teach English pronunciation, focusing on one particular piece of software, "FluSpeak, as a typical example." Thirty-six Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students participated in an experiment in which they listened to 15 sentences…

Question development in English as a second language in four native Spanish-speaking children is described. The English questions initiated by four children differing in English proficiency (two limited English speaking and two fluent English speaking) were examined at two points in time to determine how question use changes in the syntactic,…

In an analysis of stress and intonation, stress is shown to distinguish semantic and grammatical meaning on every level of language. It is suggested that the distinction between stress and intonation is particularly important in teaching English as a second language. Written texts and fabricated examples of dialogue are used, with a focus on…

Since 1971 the approach adopted in the teaching of English phonetics in Denmark has been a contrastive one. In this paper it is argued that although the original contrastive hypothesis (Lado 1957) has to be modified and weakened, a contrastive approach is highly useful in learning and teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language. Selected…

This document is a copy of a talk regularly given to new volunteers of English in Action, a community-based organization that provides conversation practice to non-native English speakers. The volunteer tutors typically have no formal English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) training. This packet is designed to help these volunteers be effective ESL…