Studies have examined various factors that affect pronunciation including phonetic context, style variation, first language transfer, and experience abroad. A plethora of research has also linked motivation to higher levels of proficiency in the second language. The present study uses native speaker ratings and multiple regression analysis to investigate the relationship between motivation, cultural sensitivity, and level of instruction with perceived foreign accent. Participants include adult learners of Spanish as a foreign language from several levels of formal instruction as well as students with extensive experience abroad. Data include a brief oral interview, a questionnaire, and the Intercultural Development Inventory to measure cultural sensitivity.Pronunciation is an often underemphasized area of instruction in the foreign or second language (L2) classroom when compared to other aspects of language development. However, being able to produce the sounds of a language correctly plays a vital role in communication. Arteaga (2000, p. 342) argued that "it [is] ironic that the purpose of learning a language is to communicate, and yet if the pronunciation is too far off, you will not be understood no matter how good the grammar and how correct the words you use." Major,
We present GrammarTagger, an open-source grammar profiler which, given an input text, identifies grammatical features useful for language education. The model architecture enables it to learn from a small amount of texts annotated with spans and their labels, which 1) enables easier and more intuitive annotation, 2) supports overlapping spans, and 3) is less prone to error propagation, compared to complex hand-crafted rules defined on constituency/dependency parses. We show that we can bootstrap a grammar profiler model with F 1 ≈ 0.6 from only a couple hundred sentences both in English and Chinese, which can be further boosted via learning a multilingual model. With GrammarTagger, we also build Octanove Learn, a search engine of language learning materials indexed by their reading difficulty and grammatical features 1 .
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