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Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

First and Second Language Acquisition

2014

English as a Second Language

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education

Second-Language English Fluency Change In Native-Speaker Context, John Zehnder Aug 2014

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 …

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A Study Of Refusal Strategies By American And International Students At An American University, Hiroko Tsuiki Moaveni Jan 2014

A Study Of Refusal Strategies By American And International Students At An American University, Hiroko Tsuiki Moaveni

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Refusals are delicate speech acts for non-native speakers to negotiate because they require negative responses to an interlocutor's invitation or request. In addition to cultural variation, variables such as gender and modes of communication (e.g., emails) add dimensions to the complexity when performing refusals. The main objective of this study is to investigate the difference in refusal strategies between American and international college students as well as gender variation. Using a written Discourse Completion Task, six situations were developed and grouped in two stimulus types eliciting refusals to an invitation and a request. Each stimulus type involved an email refusal …

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