Although Japan spends vast amount of money every year on English education and Japanese university students study and are exposed to oral English for several years, there still persists a hesitance to use and speak English. This paper looks at educational policy in Japan and the adoption of the native-speaker model in Japan. Although the…

The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners is their lack of a suprasegmental background. Most of those having oral comprehension and expression difficulties are unaware that their difficulty comes from their negligence of concepts of stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. While remedying stress problems, students should be taught…

This chapter will present a research synthesis of a series of studies, termed here the Ealing research. The studies use the same general framework to conceptualise tasks and task performance, enabling easier comparability. The different studies, although each is self-contained, build into a wider picture of task performance. The major point of…

This study examined the componential structure of second-language (L2) speaking proficiency. Participants--181 L2 and 54 native speakers of Dutch--performed eight speaking tasks and six tasks tapping nine linguistic skills. Performance in the speaking tasks was rated on functional adequacy by a panel of judges and formed the dependent variable in…

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the "second…

The current study lays the groundwork for a model of Mandarin tones based on both native speakers' and non-native speakers' perception and production. It demonstrates that there is variability in non-native speakers' tone productions and that there are differences in the perceptual boundaries in native speakers and non-native speakers. There…

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers ([Boutla, M., Supalla, T., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D.…

Current models of spoken-word recognition describe access to lexical representations in terms of activation and decay. This research investigated an important aspect of activation: the impact of processing time. The results showed a separable impact of time and signal on the activational state of lexical elements. (34 references) (Author/CK)

Children are born with an impressive ability to learn language, therefore the educational process is able to build on a dynamic that is already present. The principles that apply to the development of English language are equally applicable to all language learning. Good nursery education provides a microcosm of effective language development.…