Correct pronunciation of English words is of vital significance for mutual intelligibility in the EFL context. Despite its prominence in L2 learning, teachers of English cannot decide whether and how to implement pronunciation practice into their teaching practices. For this reason, pronunciation training is widely neglected in language classes or learners of English might learn incorrect pronunciation of segmental units causing fossilization in L2 setting. The importance of pronunciation training has been highlighted in the related literature. Keeping this fact in mind, this study aims to explore whether explicit pronunciation instruction has a superiority over implicit instruction in extensive reading classes. To reach this purpose, two groups of successive B1-level Intensive English Program (IEP) students were chosen through convenience sampling technique. Before training, both groups were given a pre-test of segmental unit pronunciation consisting of the most frequented words in the book used for the extensive reading classes at B1 level. Then the participants in the control group received implicit pronunciation training in which the language instructor did not directly focus on phonemic properties of English sounds. However, explicit pronunciation training was implemented into the teaching practices in the experimental group. The teaching period lasted eight weeks, and following this period both groups were given a post-test to unravel the level of improvement in each group. The results of this study revealed that explicit pronunciation training is more advantageous for B1 level students than the implicit one due to various reasons.
Based on contrastive interlanguage analysis, this study explores the usage of lexical bundles occurring in doctoral dissertations produced in the English language related studies in the USA by L1 American English speakers and in Turkey by Turkish speakers of English in the last ten years between 2010-2019. In our analysis of the data, we identified a significant number of types of 4-word bundles from both corpora from a structural and functional perspective. The findings regarding the types of lexical bundles and their structural and functional dispersions revealed significant differences between the two corpora. While L1 English writers refrained from heavily utilizing formulaic sequences, the opposite could be observed in the works of L2 English authors. This study has significant implications for academic writers producing work in the English language since corpus-informed lists and concordances might be of great help to L2 speakers of English in identifying appropriate lexical bundles that are specific to their disciplines.
Language learners employ communication strategies (CSs) to avoid communication breakdowns in times of difficulty, and such strategies develop within strategic competence thanks to exposure to a target language. This research is designed as a developmental study aiming to investigate the possible effects of exposure to English as a foreign language on the use of CSs in the interlanguage of Turkish speakers of English. To attain this aim, we chose 20 Turkish learners of English from the beginner level, and they designated the topics they would speak and write about. Their oral and written performances on the topics were tested at the beginning prior to instruction, in the middle, and at the end of the academic year to observe whether CS usage altered over time. The findings revealed that participants resorted to different types of CSs in their speaking and writing tasks. The comparison of CS employment in each test showed that learners’ CS preferences, as well as L1 and L2-based CSs, changed over time in both speaking and writing. Therefore, it is concluded that exposure to the target language may have a significant effect on the preference of CSs. The results of this study are significant as they suggested that CSs in interlanguage evolves from L1-based to L2-based strategies. The findings of this study have important implications for teaching English as a foreign language in reference to the effects of language exposure on the use of CSs in both oral and written performances of L2 learners.
In order for an academic text to be considered appropriate in the community, it needs to exhibit disciplinary and cultural-based linguistic conventions. With the advances in corpus linguistics, scholars have been able to reveal the employment of these conventions in academic genres, one of which is lexical bundles. Simply defined as recurrent word combinations, lexical bundles reflect prominent functions in academic genres, as they deal with discourse organization, writer-reader negotiation, and stance construction, all of which achieve academic persuasion. Although the previous research has established the importance of lexical bundles, there is much less information about the disciplinary variations in the use of lexical bundles in academic genres. Adopting an automated frequency-driven approach, this research attempted to identify lexical bundles in research articles in the social sciences. Based on the investigation of 4-word lexical bundles in a corpus of research articles written between 2010 and 2019 in applied linguistics, marketing, and political sciences, we observed an impact of disciplinary variation on the overall lexical bundle usages. Concerning the structural and functional distributions of word strings, we observed differences across the disciplines, indicating that the academic communities might have a decisive role in text construction, yielding divergence across the disciplines in the social sciences. Despite differences, we also observed some similarities regarding the structural and functional sequences of bundles across the disciplines, indicating that the social sciences, an umbrella field in academia, has its own merits resulting in convergence across different disciplines.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.