Earticle

Nuclear stress placement is a complex issue involving grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and information structure. This study examined the nuclear stress placement patterns in reading recordings produced by lower-intermediate and advanced adult EFL learners in China, and assessed the effects of explicit training on controlled production of nuclear stress. It was found that different types of nuclear stress presented asymmetrical difficulties to EFL learners. Production of some types showed more resistance to improvement, while others seemed more susceptible to explicit training, but with only short-term effects. Thus, EFL pronunciation teachers should give priority to those types of nuclear stress that are sensitive to explicit training and spend less time on those types that are either resistant to explicit training or that can be implicitly picked up by learners in the long run.

This study examines Korean L2 learners’ production of English sound contrast not attested in their L1, focusing on word-final // and /i/. L2 pronunciation error patterns such as vowel deletion and epenthesis were more frequently found in the low group than in the high group. Acoustic properties of lexical and epenthetic vowels were also different according to learners’ proficiency levels. The low group’s epenthetic and lexical vowels showed similar acoustic properties with respect to friction and vowel ratio and F1 and F2 midpoint values. On the other hand, the high group’s epenthetic vowels exhibited longer friction ratio, shorter vowel ratio, higher F1 and lower F2 than lexical vowels. While the low group did not distinguish epenthetic vowels from lexical vowels, the high group pronounced epenthetic vowels differently from lexical vowels, possibly as transitional vowels. As for word-final [] from // or /i/, both groups showed longer friction ratio for [] from /i/ than for [] from //. The findings suggest the use of production strategies by L2 learners is different from native speakers and is mediated by their proficiency levels.

This study investigates the effects of a four-week study abroad teacher training program for Korean teachers of English for their language development. To assess linguistic development, pretest and posttest listening, reading, grammar, speaking, and writing were assessed. The participants completed self-assessment questionnaires that asked them to assess the extent to which their language had improved after the program. The participants’ daily journal entries were collected and some of the participants were interviewed to examine their perceptions of their language development. The pretest and posttest scores were compared with a MANOVA and follow-up ANOVA tests. The results showed that, except for their reading scores, their skills had significantly improved. On the selfassessment questionnaire, most participants considered a few items as improved after the program, and a few believed that their listening and speaking skills had declined after they experienced communicative failures during the study abroad. This study provides significant insight into the implementation of English teacher training programs, how they can be improved, and their extension to other types of foreign language teachers.

Noun phrase (NP) centered structures are distinctive syntactic devices in academic discourse. The commonly employed subordination-based complexity measures cannot adequately capture the development of syntactic complexity of noun phrases expected of advanced student academic writing (Biber, Gray, & Poonpon, 2011). Following the call for more research in this area (e.g. Lu, 2011, p. 57), the current study compared noun phrase complexity in two corpora: one is a corpus of MA dissertations written by Chinese EFL students and the other comprises published research articles in applied linguistics journals. The study examined overall noun phrase complexity using an automatic syntactic complexity analyzer and specifically identified features of one aspect of NP complexity: NP postmodification. The quantitative results were further contextualized in a textual analysis of excerpts from the two corpora for demonstrating the significance of NP complexity to the establishment of discourse coherence. Results of the analyses showed significant underdevelopment of NP postmodification complexity in student writing relative to published texts, meanwhile explicating the circumstances under which the difference is meaningful. Implications of the findings for the teaching of EFL academic writing were also discussed.