Native Norms Research Articles

Exploring the Challenges of L1 Negative Transfer among Vietnamese English Language Learners: A Qualitative Study

The current study aimed to gain insight into the nuanced challenges that Vietnamese learners encountered due to the interference of their native linguistic structures and norms. This qualitative study explored the experiences of Vietnamese learners in acquiring English, focusing on the influence of negative L1 transfer. This study focused on the influence of negative transfer from their first language (L1) by drawing upon in-depth interviews and observational data from a group of Vietnamese university students. The results showed that despite exhibiting high levels of motivation and enthusiasm for learning English, Vietnamese learners struggled with the shadows of L1 interference in areas such as pronunciation, syntax, and idiomatic expressions. The tonal nature of the Vietnamese language led to intonation patterns in English that deviated from native norms. Direct translations also contributed to unidiomatic English, indicating a deep influence of L1 thought patterns. Additionally, cultural contexts embedded within the Vietnamese language presented challenges, as some concepts and expressions lacked direct English equivalents. Although students faced various obstacles, they utilized a variety of adaptive techniques to lessen the impact of negative transfer. These techniques included code-switching, peer correction, and self-reflection. The study emphasized the significance of recognizing and comprehending the significant role of L1 when creating English language educational programs and teaching techniques for Vietnamese students. By illuminating the specific challenges and adaptive strategies of these learners, educators could personalize their approaches, leading to a more comprehensive and efficacious language-learning atmosphere.

More foreign-accented but more comprehensible: Attrition and amelioration of L1 speech in proficient L2 learners.

There is an increasing interest in cross-linguistic influences of the second language (L2) on the first (L1), but its communicative impact remains to be elucidated. This study investigates how L2 learners' L1 pronunciation is perceived as foreign-accented and (in) comprehensible as a function of their L2 learning experience and proficiency levels. Read speech of 154 L1 Japanese learners of L2 English in the J-AESOP corpus was examined, where approximately one-third of them had lived in English-speaking countries and the rest had never lived outside of Japan. Their L1 speech was rated by another group of native Japanese listeners for accentedness and comprehensibility (from October 25, 2022 to August 20, 2023), while their L2 speech was previously rated by native American English listeners for nativelikeness or proficiency. The speakers' vowel acoustics were also examined. More proficient L2 speakers were perceived as more foreign-accented in their L1, but only if they had lived overseas; their length of residence abroad predicted the degree of perceived accentedness. In contrast, more proficient L2 speakers were consistently perceived as more comprehensible in the L1, regardless of prior overseas experience. Acoustic analyses indicated that perceived accentedness is associated with a clockwise chain shift of all vowel categories in the vowel space. It was also revealed that the dispersion, rather than compactness, of vowel production contributed to perceived comprehensibility, although the degree of L1 vowel dispersion did not predict L2 proficiency. The overall results suggest two main conclusions. First, perceptible L1 foreign accent likely results from L1 disuse rather than L2 interference, thereby L1 pronunciation differs from native norms at a system-wide rather than category-specific level. Second, L2 learning has a positive influence on perceived L1 comprehensibility, rather than individuals with clearer and more comprehensible L1 speech being inherently better L2 learners.

The use of technology in teaching ELF pronunciation: a help or a hinderance?

Abstract As the world’s premier lingua franca, English plays an instrumental role in global communication and cultural exchanges. Given that an individual’s English pronunciation is closely tied to their cultural and national identity, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) emphasizes intelligibility as the primary criterion to gauge pronunciation success. This paper investigates the interplay between ELF, globalization, and interculturality, with particular attention on how technology facilitates the teaching of English pronunciation in ELF scenarios. It provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of educators’ perceptions on the role of technology as an enabler or inhibitor in teaching ELF pronunciation. The research affirms that teachers’ beliefs are consistent with the existing literature. The study concludes that state-of-the-art technology should be leveraged in ELF pronunciation instruction, provided it enhances intelligibility and avoids excessively discouraging learners whose pronunciation diverges from native norms.

An Analysis of Lexico-Semantic Variations in Pakistani English Newspaper Corpus

The present study focuses on the corpus-based lexico-semantic analysis of Pakistani English to identify the variations in the language of newspapers. It also investigates how Pakistani English newspapers consider their readers' cultural and social ideals for intelligible contact while selecting language posts. As a result, they often deviate from the native norms of the language adopting many indigenous linguistic features and emerging new varieties of New English to define their tasks easier in order not only to facilitate but to attract people’s attention. Therefore, Moag’s model on New Englishes, Boas’s theory of cultural relativism, and Kachru’s Theory of Nativisation and Acculturation with the conception of the Outer Circle (1986) mainly connected to institutionalize Second Varieties of English have been used for the theoretical analysis within Pakistani context dependent socio-cultural scenario. The usage of these lexical items shows that Pakistani English is derived from the source, namely, Standard British English, for example, shadi hall, Jihadi outfits, etc. These lexical item categories followed in coinage, borrowing, idiomatic collocations, and semantic shift. This study also attempts to create lexicographical entries to represent the diverse Pakistani English and become available to society's educational and global communication. The study purposively compiled the 2 million corpora from the websites of two major Pakistani English Newspapers, The Nation and The News, and then analyzed it by using corpus software tools Antconc 3.5.8w to search for the key terms and to identify these elements of the stance. The study's finding highlights the New English variety of Pakistani English Newspapers and the adapted lexemes used in the local sociolinguistics context. One of the study's most significant findings shows that the New Englishes lexemes are infused with Islamic, historical, and social culture, highlighting the diverse local colours adapted to the Pakistani setting. The New Englishes in Pakistan comprises the amalgamation of Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and English lexemes. The study also broadens the horizon of society's educational and communicational usage while maintaining the endonormative standard.

Pronunciation in EMI

The consolidation of English as a global language has brought with it the need to reconceptualise aspects such as English pronunciation, which seems to be experiencing a detachment from the native norm and the integration of multicultural identities. EMI students have been reported to favour intelligibility over accurate pronunciation, as they represent a community of learners for whom English is a tool rather than a target. As previous research has reported that pronunciation may be an anxiety factor for students in speaking exchanges, this study explored how 126 EMI students envision the learning of pronunciation, their attitudes towards EMI teachers’ pronunciation and their pronunciation anxiety upon interaction with different interlocutors in their EMI context: teachers, local peers, L1 English international peers and L2 English international peers. The data from a questionnaire and focus groups revealed that these EMI learners conceptualize pronunciation as a communication tool rather than a subject to be learnt; they revealed that they do not experience uneasiness during lessons owing to their lecturers’ pronunciation, expressing that fluency is more important than pronunciation accuracy. Finally, they showed more pronunciation anxiety if the interlocutor was the teacher or an L1 English speaker than if it was a local peer or L2 English speaker.

Formulaic Sequences and Discourse Markers in Applied Linguistics Research Papers. A cross-linguistic corpus-based analysis of native and non-native authors published articles

Metadiscourse markers and their importance to academic writing are essential research subjects nowadays. The current corpus-based study aims at identifying interactional and interactive metadiscourse markers in terms of frequency and function in the abstract section of published research articles in applied linguistics developed by Algerian, Saudi, and Native researchers. 20 research articles for each group, with a total of 60 articles have been randomly selected and compiled as the research corpus for this study, then analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using AntConc.3.2.4 relying on Hyland’s classification of metadiscourse markers. As a comparative study, the research considered the abstracts written by natives as a benchmark and attempted to find an answer to the main inquiry related to the frequency of use of metadiscourse devices by Algerian and Saudi researchers in comparison to their Native counterparts. The main research results showed how close were Algerian abstracts to native ones in terms of using endophorics, frame markers, code glosses, hedges, attitude markers, and self-mentions. While Saudi abstracts were close to the benchmark only in two markers that are transitions and engagement markers. The rest of the devices were shown to be far from the native norm in both cases. The findings also revealed that the use of metadiscourse markers is not the only indicator of papers publication rate in indexed journals by comparing the corpus analysis results to the source of the articles (journals), to find that even if Algerian researchers publish less in high indexed journals in comparison to Saudis, they are still closer in using markers to the natives as a benchmark.

The French Reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Belated Consecration

The French Reception of <i>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i>: A Belated Consecration

The pragmatic resistance of Chinese learners of Korean

The ChallengeNative‐speaker norms remain influential in Korean language teaching and assessment, but do Korean language learners choose to emulate native‐speaker norms? This study investigates the choice of resisting the native norms made by Chinese learners of Korean, the largest group of overseas students in Korea.

A Corpus-based Analysis on Distributional Patterns of Collocations in Chinese High School English Textbooks

The paper explores the distributional patterns of collocations identified in Chinese high school textbooks in comparison with collocations found in the native reference corpus. Six series of Chinese high school English textbooks from the six publishers were compiled as the textbook corpus. The British National Corpus (BNC) was selected as the native norm. Three collocation types, adjective + noun collocation (ANC), verb + noun collocation (VNC) and noun + noun collocation (NNC), were investigated in the paper. The distribution of the collocations was compared between the two corpora in terms of four statistical measures: density, diversity, repetition and association strength. The results showed that whereas the diversity of collocations was higher in the native reference corpus than in the textbook corpus, the other measures showed the opposite pattern. This may partly be due to the pedagogical nature of the textbooks. Moreover, the findings revealed that the textbooks represent a comparable number of VNCs, over-represent ANCs and under-represent NNCs in comparison with the native reference corpus. The findings suggest that textbook authors take account of incorporating more diverse collocations and more NNCs to model more native-like texts in the teaching materials targeting higher-grade students.

Loss of Meanings of Cultural Metaphors in Translation: An Analysis of Translated Bulleh Shah’s Punjabi Poetry

Language encompasses the whole native culture and social norms and traditions but the translation from one language to another changes the context and sometimes meanings as well. The translators feel difficulties in finding word equivalences. Sometimes the equivalence of the words of one culture does not exist in the other culture which creates difficulties in translation to convey the complete message. There are so many issues while translating the Punjabi language into English. There are so many metaphors in Punjabi which do not have word equivalence in the English language. The research project aimed to trace out the loss of the meanings and context while translating Punjabi poetry into English. Many Punjabi Sufi writers have projected the colors of Punjabi in different forms and contexts but Bulleh Shah has a very unique style. Two poems of Bulleh Shah translated by Taufiq Rafat were under examination. This was purely qualitative research where data has been collected from books, libraries, and research journals. Textual analysis has been used as a research method to analyze the data. The findings revealed that Punjabi poetry has distinct metaphors that represent Punjabi culture, but when translated into English the original meaning is lost.

Japanese English Learners’ Perceptions of Filipino Teachers’ Online English Lessons: Implications for Global Englishes Research

Situated in the domain of Global Englishes research, this study explores a question of how far the issue of the English model for Japanese learners is complicated by the hierarchical coexistence of regular English courses taught by Anglophone English teachers and extracurricular online English lessons taught by non-Anglophone instructors. A questionnaire survey was administered to 100 Japanese English learners aged 18–34 who have taken such lessons. This study provides both hopeful and challenging suggestions for Global Englishes research and practice, that is, Japanese English learners’ favourable perceptions of Filipino teachers’ affordable and flexible lessons that, they believe, would not interfere with their subsequent or concurrent study of ‘real’ English taught by native Anglophone teachers. This study indicates future directions of research and practice regarding the legitimate positioning of in-class or online English classes taught by Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other non-native English-speaking teachers in East Asian English classrooms that remain bound by native English norms.

The L2 Acquisition of French Interrogatives: Pragmatic Inferences in Clefted wh-Questions

The present study aims to elaborate on the understanding of the second language (L2) acquisition of French interrogatives by focusing on clefted (subject) wh-questions, structures that are largely absent in prior L2 literature. Our research question addresses how L2 learners of French understand two specific properties associated with these interrogatives: existence and exhaustivity. Using two rating tasks, we examined whether a total of 48 L2 learners converge towards the native norm for these properties, which occur at the syntax-discourse interface and may therefore be vulnerable to incomplete acquisition, following the Interface Hypothesis. Our findings suggest that L2 learners at the intermediate level acquire an understanding of the existential inference before an understanding of exhaustivity.

Toward An Understanding of Plurality: A Case Study of Teaching and Learning English as an International Language (EIL) Approach in an Indonesia Senior High School

In this research study, there were 6 English teachers and two classes (Grade 1 and Grade 2, approximately with 60 students) were interviewed designed to gain an understanding of both English teachers and students’ perspectives on English as international language (EIL). There is a hegemony concepts about English perspective impart among the students and the teachers in this research community, that is native norm is the center, the most prestigious, endowed with a sense of authenticity and authority. These issues make them afraid to make any risk, little faith to apply EIL that created two different worlds of English standard and nonstandard English. From the result of the study, there are some pedagogical Implications of EIL Teaching Approach Contribution in Indonesia. They are EIL teaching required change of mind set in terms of understanding EIL model, the history and English today, and empowering Nonnative English teachers and general Public.

One norm to rule them all? Corpus-derived norms in learner corpus research and foreign language teaching

AbstractThis paper considers the issue of the norm in the context of learner corpus research and its implications for foreign language teaching. It seeks to answer three main questions: Does learner corpus research require a native norm? What corpus-derived norms are available and how do we choose? What do we do with these norms in the classroom? The first two questions are more research-oriented, reviewing the types of reference corpora that can be used in the analysis of learner corpora, whereas the third one looks into the pedagogical use of corpus-derived norms. It is shown that, while studies in learner corpus research can dispense with a native norm, they usually rely on one, and that a wide range of native and non-native norms are available, from which choosing the most appropriate one(s) is of crucial importance. This large repertoire of corpus-derived norms is then reconsidered in view of the reality of the foreign language classroom.

Brain potentials reveal differential processing of masculine and feminine grammatical gender in native Spanish speakers.

Studies of Spanish grammatical gender have shown that native speakers exploit gender cues in determiners to facilitate speech processing and are sensitive to gender mismatches. However, past research has not considered attested distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine gender, collapsing performance on trials with one or the other gender into a single analysis. We use event-related potentials to investigate whether masculine and feminine grammatical gender elicit qualitatively different brain responses. Forty monolingual Spanish speakers read sentences that were well-formed or contained determiner-noun gender violations. Half of the nouns were masculine and the other half were feminine. Consistent with previous research, brain responses varied along a continuum between LAN- and P600-dominant effects for both gender categories. However, results showed that individuals' ERP response dominance (LAN/P600) systematically differed across the two genders: participants who showed a LAN-dominant response to masculine-noun violations were more likely to show a P600 effect in response to feminine-noun violations. Correlations with individual difference measures further revealed that responses to masculine-noun violations were modulated by performance on the AX-CPT, a measure of cognitive control, whereas responses to feminine-noun violations were modulated by lexical knowledge, as indexed by verbal fluency. Together, the results demonstrate that even when processing features of language that belong to the same "natural class," native speakers can exhibit patterns of brain activity attuned to distributional patterns of language use. The inherent variability in native speaker processing is, therefore, an important factor when explaining purported deviations from the "native norm" reported in other types of populations.

Teaching and learning about Spanish L2 compliments in short-term study abroad

Abstract The case for pragmatics instruction in second language (L2) learning has been evidenced by empirical research, although investigations within the context of study abroad are more limited. The objective of this article is to detail the impact of a pedagogical intervention which included explicit teaching and ethnographic field work on the learning of Spanish compliments and compliment responses during a four-week study abroad program. Despite their restricted exposure to the target language community, the 20 participants in the study demonstrated approximation to native norms in their complimenting behavior. These results support the positive benefits of exploiting exposure to the TL community to aid pragmatics instruction in the classroom.

Beliefs about English as an International Language (EIL): voices from Persian-speaking English teachers

ABSTRACT The present study sought to investigate how non-native English-speaking teachers in Iran recognize the legitimacy of different emerging varieties of English and how they perceive native speaker language norms and the linguistic diversity of present-day English use. Participants included 210 teachers of English from the Persian-speaking context, falling within expanding circle countries. Questionnaires and interviews were used to explore these teachers’ beliefs about EIL. The findings indicated the teachers’ acknowledgment of the ownership of English by both native and non-native speakers and also the legitimacy of non-native varieties of English as long as they are comprehensible. However, contrary to the great significance attributed to different varieties of English and to intelligibility in the use of EIL, the findings revealed that there was a widely shared aspiration among the teachers for native speakers’ Standard English rather than World Englishes in language classrooms. They maintained that English language learners should acquire Standard English for perfect communication and avoid non-native English varieties. This mismatch between teachers’ recognition of English varieties and their preference for Standard English in classroom instruction evidences the need to assist teachers in re-appraising their prevalent presumptions about native speakerism in their teaching practice and adopting more EIL-aware pedagogy.

The importance of vowel formant frequencies and proximity in vowel space to the perception of foreign accent

This study used speech resynthesis to manipulate vowel formant frequencies in natural speech stimuli to examine the influence of magnitude and direction of spectral deviation from native norms, as well as the proximity of adjacent categories, on foreign-accentedness ratings, comprehensibility ratings and vowel identification. Experiment 1 contrasted the impact of spectral deviation on peripheral and non-peripheral vowels by shifting the first and second formant center frequencies in English vowels /ɔ/, /ʌ/, /ɛ/, /ɑ/, and /æ/ toward the acoustically closest vowel, and either the next-closest vowel, or unoccupied vowel space. To directly compare the impact of different deviation directions and proximity of adjacent categories without being confounded by F1–F2 variability within the individual vowel, formant frequencies in one English vowel, /ɑ/, were manipulated in Experiment 2 toward the four cardinal and four intercardinal directions. Across both experiments, spectral deviation that increased overlap with adjacent categories reduced comprehensibility, and increased both accentedness and misidentification. Neither the direction nor the magnitude of spectral deviations from native norms alone were sufficient to account for task performance. These findings imply that vowel space dispersion, specifically location within vowel space, plays a role in both accentedness judgments and vowel identification.

Third-language learning affects bilinguals’ production in both their native languages: A longitudinal study of dynamic changes in L1, L2 and L3 vowel production

This study examined the impact of a study abroad (SA) English program on English and native vowel production. Basque-Spanish bilingual adolescents were assessed on their vowel production in English, Basque and Spanish before the SA program, the day after the program was completed, and four months later. The results revealed that after the SA program, participants’ English vowels were acoustically closer to English norms, revealing the effectiveness of SA programs in improving English vowel pronunciation. Yet, four months later, these benefits had faded, showing that regular input and active language use are required to maintain accurate pronunciation. SA also had effects on native production: bilingual participants showed assimilatory acoustic drift in both their languages towards the English vowel system; the extent of this drift was negatively correlated with improvements in English pronunciation. However, four months later, participants showed a ‘return’ drift towards their native norms. The results also revealed that usage frequency and switching habits played a ‘protective’ role: Frequent switching in bilinguals made the dominant native language less vulnerable to foreign-language influence. Our results suggest that factors related to the frequency and circumstances of native language use are key to authenticity in native language production.

Loss of Morphology in Alorese (Austronesian): Simplification in Adult Language Contact

This paper discusses historical and ongoing morphological simplification in Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken in eastern Indonesia. From comparative evidence, it is clear that Alorese lost almost all of its morphology over several hundred years as a consequence of language contact (Klamer, 2012, to appear). By providing both linguistic and cultural-historical evidence, this paper shows that Alorese has historically undergone morphological simplification as a result of second language (L2) learning. The first part of the paper presents a case study comparing the use of subject agreement prefixes in Alorese L1 speakers (n=6) and Alorese L2 speakers (n=12). The results show that L2 speakers deviate from the native norm, and tend to use one prefix as default agreement. The variation found among L2 speakers reveals an ongoing change possibly leading to the restructuring of the Alorese agreement system. The second part of the paper applies models of linguistic change (Kusters, 2003; Trudgill, 2011) to the Alorese community and shows that Alorese has been, and still is, spoken in a community with a large number of L2 speakers, where morphological simplification is expected to occur.