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Full-Text Articles in Education
Second-Language English Fluency Change In Native-Speaker Context, John Zehnder
Second-Language English Fluency Change In Native-Speaker Context, John Zehnder
Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato
This study examines the influence of social context on oral proficiency change among English language learners on the campus of an American university. Speech samples were taken from 2 rounds of interviews with 9 East Asian women. These were analyzed using the phonetic analysis program Praat in order to determine each speaker’s rate of stressed syllables at the beginning and end of the study. The change in these rates was used as a proxy for fluency change. This was then compared with each speaker’s social context. The results suggested that English language learners improve their fluency when they have at …
Some Complexities In English Article Use And Acquisition, Victoria Somogyi
Some Complexities In English Article Use And Acquisition, Victoria Somogyi
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Along with preposition use, native-like article use is one of the greatest difficulties for learners of English, particularly for those learners whose first languages do not have articles. And unlike many other areas involved in the mastery of the language, articles continue to present a challenge for advanced learners. A significant number of article usages are complex in that they are neither simple to explain (in that the does not encode definiteness or contextual uniqueness) nor strictly idiomatic. This paper a) provides an overview and critique of the scholarship on articles and their acquisition, b) takes a detailed look at …