This study investigated factors that could affect inter-examiner reliability in the pronunciation assessment component of speaking tests. We hypothesized that the rating of pronunciation is susceptible to variation in assessment due to the amount of exposure examiners have to nonnative English accents. An inter-rater variability analysis was…

Corrective feedback (CF), the implicit or explicit information learners receive indicating a gap between their current, compared to the desired, performance, has been an area of interest for EFL researchers during the last few decades. This study, conducted on 139 English-major prospective EFL teachers, assessed the impact of two CF types…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

This paper looked at students' perceived level of English proficiency among Dodoma secondary schools in Tanzania. Factors like attitude, anxiety, classroom activities, motivation, and learning resources were considered as influencing English learning. The study was guided by three theories: Input Hypothesis, Inter-language and Vygotsky's theory of…

This study examines L1-L2 interaction in semantic categorization in early and late L2 learners. Word categories that overlapped but were not identical in Arabic and English were tested. Words always showed a "wider" range of application in one language, "narrower" in the other. Three types of categories--"classical", "radial", and…

The present paper generally reviews the history of second language (L2) researchers' efforts in an attempt to find such an index and the possible reasons for the difficulties in establishing the developmental index from both the theoretical and the empirical viewpoints. Two contradictory views--interlanguage theory and emergentism--can finally be…

Analyzing errors committed by second language learners during their first year of study at the University of Taif, can offer insights and knowledge of the learners' difficulties in acquiring technical English communication. With reference to the errors analyzed, the researcher found that the learners' failure to understand basic English grammar…

Research into complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as basic dimensions of second language performance, proficiency and development has received increased attention in SLA. However, the larger picture in this field of research is often obscured by the breadth of scope, multiple objectives and lack of clarity as to how complexity, accuracy and…

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of morphological variability in the production of Italian determiners, descriptive adjectives, and direct object pronouns by adult English learners of Italian to determine whether morphological errors are the result of computational or representational difficulties. Second language acquisitionists do…

Testing of second language pragmatic competence is an underexplored but growing area of second language assessment. Tests have focused on assessing learners' sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities but the speech act framework informing most current productive testing instruments in interlanguage pragmatics has been criticized for…

Building on previous studies of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) on SLA, and principled criteria for confirming its existence in L2 data, an empirical study was run on 74 Arab learners of English (ALEs). A detailed analysis was made of interlanguage stages of the simple past tense forms in 222 written texts produced by ALEs in the classroom…

This study investigates the Iranian EFL learners' Knowledge of Lexical Collocation at three academic levels: freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. The participants were forty three English majors doing their B.A. in English Translation studies in Chabahar Maritime University. They took a 50-item fill-in-the-blank test of lexical collocations. The…

A high variability phonetic training technique was employed to train 26 Mandarin speakers to better perceive ten English vowels. In eight short training sessions, learners identified 200 English vowel tokens, produced in a post bilabial stop context by 20 native speakers. Learners' ability to identify English vowels significantly improved in the…

Up to now, most researchers have been paying attention to the negative transfer of mother tongue to second language writing. Few studies, if any, have touched upon the positive transfer. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the positive transfer of Chinese to 26 first-year university students' English writing holistically and…

In many English language classrooms, teaching pronunciation is granted the least attention. When ESL teachers defend the poor pronunciation skills of their students, their arguments could either be described as a cop-out with respect to their inability to teach their students proper pronunciation or they could be regarded as taking a stand against…