Second/foreign language (L2) classrooms do not always provide opportunities for input and output practice [Lightbown, P. M. (2000). Classroom SLA research and second language teaching. Applied Linguistics, 21(4), 431-462]. The use of smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and its associated voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant (IPA) Alexa…

Canada's growing population of international students brings ethnolinguistic diversity and socioeconomic benefits to their host communities. However, students often experience social exclusion and lack of belonging, reporting little communication with local community members for many cultural, ethnic, and religious reasons. The present study,…

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners' perception is affected by two factors: the listeners' experience with the target dialect -- North American English (NAE) vs. Standard Southern British English (SSBE) -- and talkers' language background: native vs. non-native talkers; i.e. interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit…

Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…

Purpose: This study examines the degree to which adolescents in Iceland are judged by native Icelandic speakers to have a foreign accent both in Icelandic and in English, two languages that are learned under different conditions, as the community and school language, and through school and incidental exposure. Method: Fifty-eight adolescents, 27…

The current study compared five free Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems, selected based on characteristics such as availability and capabilities. Tasks were completed by 37 English learners to evaluate these systems in terms of their comprehensibility, naturalness, and intelligibility. Our findings indicate that IBM Watson and Google Translate are the…

There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intelligibility and attitude towards four English varieties to Korean-speaking learners (KSLs) of English, who have been exposed mainly to General American (or Korean-accented English) in their English language learning classrooms throughout the primary and secondary schools. A total of 105 Korean…

Owing to its economic growth and social changes in the past two decades, China has become a popular destination for tourists, investors, and diverse communities of migrants. When foreign-language-speaking migrants interact with Chinese criminal justice system, they rely on interpreters to participate in the proceedings. Based on four-month trial…

The recorded text test (RTT) is commonly used to test dialect intelligibility, often to inform language development decisions. More than 25 papers using the RTT method were published on www.sil.org/silesr from January 2009 to March 2013. As introduced by Casad [1974. "Dialect Intelligibility Testing." Summer Institute of Linguistics…

To study the success of an international event handling in Thailand with a focus on the area of mutual communication, this paper aimed to shed light on how English is used as a lingua franca among the local Thai working team and the organizer team who are non-native speakers from different language backgrounds to achieve their mutual understanding…

The mass media has a fundamental role to sustain an informed citizenry as a prerequisite for democratic politics. It is, therefore, vital that an evidence-based approach is used when reporting on climate change. Yet, multiple and arguably irreconcilable tensions exist between science and mass media. For example, as media workers are trained to…

Effective speaking exists in a group when the speakers' messages are so clear that the listeners respond as desired (Klopf, 1981, p. 76). In other words, the speakers' messages turn out to be exactly what they want and the listeners hear and understand exactly what the speakers said, and then act accordingly. This is in line with one of Confucius'…

By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans…

Azerbaijani and Turkish are two closely-related languages from Oguz branch of Turkic languages, which are said to be mutually intelligible. Regarding this background, we designed an experiment within the framework of receptive multilingualism to investigate the role of linguistic factors in intelligibility of the Turkish language to Iranian…