As an overwhelming amount of research has demonstrated that educator preparation programs do not adequately prepare instructors to teach pronunciation, this study aims to help teachers of foreign languages to implement and improve pronunciation instruction (PI) in their classroom by adapting PACE (Presentation, Attention, Co-construction, and…

The Hindi consonant inventory, which includes the cross-linguistically rare retroflex place of articulation and four-way laryngeal contrasts, is known to pose difficulties for native English speakers. Hindi language textbooks address this challenge, in part, by providing various articulatory and acoustic descriptions of Hindi consonants, typically…

This study examines how language attitudes play a role in the adoption of dialectal variants in second language (L2) pronunciation in a study abroad context. Twenty-four North American university students participating in a 6-week program in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were administered pre and posttest questionnaires and a posttest oral production…

Previous research has shown that improving pronunciation in the foreign language classroom is challenging, and there is often little time left over in a dense curriculum for pronunciation practice. In describing a pronunciation profile for all phonemes in Spanish, this study suggests that the principal challenge for native speakers of English who…

Native English speakers experience difficulty acquiring Arabic emphatic consonants. Arabic language textbooks have suggested that learners focus on adjacent vowels for cues to these consonants; however, the utility of such a strategy has not been empirically tested. This study investigated the perception of Arabic emphatic-plain contrasts by means…

It is well established that learners transfer sounds from their first to their second language when speaking (see Major, 2008, and references therein). Recent work also indicates that learners may transfer their perception of sounds from the first to the second language. In some cases, errors in production and perception are explicitly corrected…

This exploratory study investigates the incorporation of dialectal variants in second language (L2) pronunciation and how the learning context intersects with this acquisition. Specifically, this research examines to what extent L2 learners of Spanish acquire the regional phoneme /[theta]/ from north-central Spain in both study abroad (SA) and…

In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds…