This paper provides an experimental study of interlanguage phonological characteristics of Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language and the accentedness perceived by native Thai speakers. Both production and perception experiments were designed to see how Chinese students acoustically produced Thai final nasal consonants and how Thai…

While listeners tend to downgrade speakers' accent and comprehensibility when they perceive them to be from a different language community--a process known as reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS)--research has generally relied solely on quantitative data such as Likert scale ratings. The current study sought to extend the analysis further by…

Because many theorists propose a connection between accent and identity, some theorists have justifiably been concerned about the ethical ramifications of L2 pronunciation teaching. However, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students often state a desire to sound like native speakers. With little research into ESL students' perceptions of links…

There is still a preference for native speaker teachers in the language teaching profession, which is supposed to influence the self-perceptions of native and nonnative teachers. However, the status of English as a globalized language is changing the legitimacy of native/nonnative teacher dichotomy. This study sought to investigate native and…

The project aimed to examine the effect of raters' familiarity with accents on their judgments of non-native speech. Participants included three groups of raters who were either from Spanish Heritage, Spanish Non-Heritage, or Chinese Heritage backgrounds (n = 16 in each group) using Winke & Gass's (2013) definition of a heritage learner as…

This study explores which features of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) pronunciation most impact raters' evaluations. Native Spanish speakers (NSSs) from regions with different pronunciation norms were polled: 147 evaluators from northern Mexico and 99 evaluators from central Argentina. These evaluations were contrasted with ratings from…

The amount of second language (L2) use has significant influence on native speakers' comprehension of L2 learners' speech. Nonetheless, few empirical studies examine how differences in the amount of language use affect the intelligibility and comprehensibility of nonnative speakers' reading and spontaneous speech. This study aims to contribute to…

This study is aimed at investigating the rating and intelligibility of different non-native varieties of English, namely French English, Japanese English and Jordanian English by native English speakers and their attitudes towards these foreign accents. To achieve the goals of this study, the researchers used a web-based questionnaire which…

Within the communicative approach to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, the aims of instruction are primarily to enable learners to communicate; hence, functional and communicative intelligibility has become the goal of pronunciation training. On the other hand, contemporary approaches to EFL teaching leave sufficient room for…

This study investigates students' attitudes toward native and nonnative speaking instructors of Spanish. A quantitative questionnaire was administered to 292 students enrolled in three different levels of undergraduate Spanish courses at a U.S. university. Participants were asked to rate Likert scale items related to native versus nonnative…