Complaining is one of the difficult tasks one has to do because when one complains, one does not only express some displeasure but also expects some form of repair. Hence, it is important for language learners to be taught how to effectively do so. Despite this, the teaching of the speech act of complaint has been taken for granted: either very little is included or it is absent in the language classroom instruction. This study attempts to examine how Filipino ESL learners structure their complaints. Featuring 18 situations calibrated on ...

Although stress patterns in English and Chinese are strikingly different, most English learners in China have overlooked or ignored this difference, resulting in poor speaking performance. In an attempt to approach this issue, this study designs the mobile assisted language learning (MALL) based instruction by integrating stress lessons on the mobile application and adopting song lyric-reading as stress pattern training, aiming to help college students improve their speaking performance in terms of English stress. Two groups of Chin...

Ironically, the single concept that appears to be universal in the field of English pronunciation research and instruction, its common denominator as it were, is diversity. Research theory and classroom practice have both convincingly proven that explicit training may indeed lead to improvements in a learner’s clarity of speech, but it seems that everything else is open for debate. Variability in opinions begins with different interpretations of basic concepts, of individual speech sounds, syllables, phrases and utterances. Correctl...