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No description available.

The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in the pronunciation and intelligibility of instructed and uninstructed second language (L2) learners over time, and to identify instructional, environmental, and methodological factors playing a role in pronunciation and intelligibility. / Seventeen L2 graduate students at an English-medium university recorded three personal anecdotes over five months. The students also regularly logged their exposure to and use of English. Nine of the students (instructed group) were concurrently taking an oral communication course focussing on suprasegmental pronunciation. Classroom instruction was regularly observed and recorded. All 17 students were interviewed at the end of the study. / L1 listeners heard anecdotes from three instructed and three uninstructed students, matched for length of residence and first language (L1). Listeners also heard anecdotes from four L1 English speakers. One group of listeners retold each anecdote after hearing it (discourse-level task). The other group paused the recording of each anecdote whenever a word was unclear (word-level task). Each group of listeners also rated excerpts for accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency. / Results of quantitative and qualitative analyses showed that: (a) no unambiguous changes in the pronunciation or intelligibility of either L2 learner group occurred over time; (b) word-level intelligibility measures more consistently differentiated L1 and L2 groups, and the instructed and uninstructed L2 groups; (c) compared to the instructed group, the uninstructed group logged relatively more English exposure/use for academic activities and relatively less for interactive social activities; (d) many instructed L2 learners did not believe that their pronunciation had noticeably improved, but almost all expressed satisfaction with their ability to communicate in English; (e) at the end of the study, many uninstructed learners reported persistent difficulties in communicating in English. / The results suggest that instruction in suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation sometimes may not lead to improved intelligibility or pronunciation. In addition, some L2 learners can be as intelligible as L1 speakers, depending on the listening task. Finally, results suggest that L2 learners' perceptions of their communicative ability and their patterns of L2 exposure/use are related. Implications for university preparation and support programs for L2 graduate students are discussed.

Educating language minority children in Canada is becoming increasingly challenging as our population becomes more and more diverse. Determining the best educational policy to help immigrant children learn English or French, while furthering their knowledge of core subject material has long been a difficult task for educators in the public system. This novel is a fictional account of an immigrant girl's first year in an Ontario elementary school. Through her experience, I describe a language policy whereby children have access to bilingual primary education no matter what their first language is. Two-way immersion is offered for language minority groups with significant numbers of students within a district. And, in collaboration with the community, first language support in school is given to students of all language backgrounds. I propose a teacher training programme that better prepares teachers for the linguistic diversity in their classrooms and promotes foreign language learning in teachers themselves. Children under this system are able to acquire the dominant language of society, learn the subject material, and continue to develop literacy skills in their first language. With such policies in place, I argue, Canada could be a world leader in bilingual education for diverse populations.

There has been some research in recent years which has attempted to demonstrate the effect of needs, attitudes and stereotyped beliefs on social judgements and perception (see, for instance , Secord,1959). One type of experimental design that highlights the role that such factors play in perception consists of observing and comparing the reactions of a subject when presented with the same stimulus under different labelling conditions .

There is an urgent necessity for good ESP textbooks. There are not too many around, and the few in existence appear very inadequate. Most of the time, ESL textbook writers feel that they should provide a basic framework and expect the classroom teacher to build lesson plans around it while adapting the material to suit the needs of a particular class. Writing a good textbook is a formidable and time consuming task. This creative project is a descrption of an ESP textbook. It sets out to provide a set of methodological guidelines and a number of teaching techniques to be used by the classroom teacher in dealing with a lesson. It discusses the four basic activities of language learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing and how to approach them as a way to stress oral and written communication in the target language. Communicative competence is taken to be the objective of language teaching: the preparation of speakers competent to communicate in the target language. Communicative competence includes not only the linguistic forms of a language, but also the knowledge of when, how and to whom it is appropriate to use these forms. With this premise in mind this work sets out to discuss how to teach dialogues, structural patterns, pronunciation, reading and writing, all basic components of a typical language lesson. To wrap up the project, a typical ESP lesson on Tourism is included. Its organization is consistent with the methodological guidelines discusses earlier, it uses the techniques discussed in the main body of the work and represents a sensible approach to language learning.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This exploratory, mixed-design study investigates whether intelligibility is "enough," that is, a suitable goal and an adequate assessment criterion, for evaluating proficiency in the pronunciation of non-native English speaking graduate students in the academic domain. The study also seeks to identify those pronunciation features which are most crucial for intelligible speech. / Speech samples of 19 non-native English speaking graduate students in the Faculty of Education at McGill University were elicited using the Test of Spoken English (TSE), a standardized test of spoken proficiency which is often used by institutions of higher learning to screen international teaching assistants (ITAs). Results of a fined-grained phonological analysis of the speech samples coupled with intelligibility ratings of 18 undergraduate science students suggest that intelligibility, though an adequate assessment criterion, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for graduate students to instruct undergraduate courses as teaching assistants, and that there is a threshold level (i.e., minimum acceptable level) of intelligibility that needs to be identified more precisely. While insights about the features of pronunciation that are most critical for intelligibility are inconclusive, it is clear that intelligibility can be compromised for different reasons and is often the result of a combination of "problem areas" that interact together. / The study has some important implications for ITA training and assessment, for the design of graduate student pronunciation courses, and for future intelligibility research. It also presents a first step in validating theoretical intelligibility models which lack empirical backing (e.g., Morley, 1994).

The purpose of this study was to determine the implication for learning for learners whose home language is different from the medium of instruction at school.The study is focused on a group of Afrikaans learners for whom English is not a foreign language. Rather, English is a language that they are in contact with on a daily level through the media, their peers and in the classroom. The study looked at why these learners find themselves in English classes when the language policy of the country makes provision for their specific home language in the classroom. It also tried to determine whether these learners experience problems in their learning as they shift from Afrikaans as a home language to an English medium of instruction in class.

In recent years, advances in computer technology have motivated Chinese teachers to reassess computer use and consider it as a valuable part of daily foreign language learning and teaching. Software programmes, USB (Universal Serial Bus) technology, and computer networks are providing teachers with new methods of incorporating culture, grammar, and real language use in the classroom. Students gain access to audio, visual and textual information about the language through the use of computers. The aim of this study was to investigate vocational school English students and teachers concerns and behaviours about integrating information technology into English instruction.