From Spanish paintings to murder:topic transitions in casual conversations between native and non-native speakers of English

This article explores some of the strategies used by international students of English to manage topic shifts in casual conversations with English-speaking peers. It therefore covers aspects of discourse which have been comparatively under-researched, and where research has also tended to focus on the problems rather than the communicative achievements of non-native speakers. A detailed analysis of the conversations under discussion, which were recorded by the participants themselves, showed that they all flowed smoothly, and this was in large measure due to the ways in which topic shifts were managed. The paper will focus on a very distinct type of topic shift, namely that of topic transitions, which enable a smooth flow from one topic to another, but which do not explicitly signal that a shift is taking place. It will examine how the non-native speakers achieved coherence in the topic transitions which they initiated, which strategies or procedures they employed, and show how their initiations were effective in enabling the proposed topic to be understood, taken up and developed. It therefore adds to our understanding of the interactional achievements of international speakers in informal, social contexts. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Negotiating topic changes:native and non-native speakers of English in conversation

There is a tendency to view conversations involving non-native speakers (NNSs) as inevitably fraught with problems, including an inability to handle topic management. This article, in contrast, will focus on effective topic changes made by non-native speakers during informal conversations with native speakers of English. A micro-analysis of ten conversations revealed several ways of shifting conversational topics; however, the article concentrates on those strategies which the participants used to effect a particular type of topic move, namely 'marked topic changes', where there is no connection at all with previous talk. The findings show how these topic changes were jointly negotiated, and that the non-native speakers' contributions to initiating new topics were competently managed.

What secondary English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) teachers know about social and academic language and instructional strategies for limited English proficient students

The purpose of this study was to examine what secondary English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers understand about social and academic language, what instructional strategies they use for Limited English Proficient (LEP) students, and how these concepts are operationalized in their daily practice. ^ This was a mixed method study incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data collection and interpretation. Written questionnaires and individual interviews addressed the questions on teachers' definitions of social and academic language and their strategy use. Classroom observations provided verification of their definitions and their descriptions of instruction for academic language. ^ Findings indicated that teachers' definitions of social and academic language were still developing and that there were ambiguities in identifying examples of social and academic language. The use of graphic organizers or visual supports, groups or peer partners, role play or drama, and modeling were the strategies teachers consistently listed for beginner, intermediate, advanced and multiple level classes. Additionally, teachers' descriptions of their instruction were congruent with what was observed in their classroom practice. ^ It appeared that this population of secondary ESOL teachers was in the process of evolving their definitions of social and academic language and were at different stages in this evolution. Teachers' definitions of language influenced their instruction. Furthermore, those who had clear constructs of language were able to operationalize them in their classroom instruction. ^

The Pronunciation of the Aspirated Consonants P, T, and K in English by Native Speakers of Spanish and French

This study examines whether explicit phonetic instruction helps Spanish and French speakers more closely approximate native pronunciation of the aspirated variants of the English consonants p, t, and k. The study results indicate that phonetic instruction clearly benefited the subjects, and the findings warrant further investigation.

Anti-war protesters stand in rain at Bryant Park listening to speakers

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

A Theory and Test of How Speakers with Nonnative Accents are Evaluated in Entrepreneurial Settings

An abundance of research in the social sciences has demonstrated a persistent bias against nonnative English speakers (Giles & Billings, 2004; Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010). Yet, organizational scholars have only begun to investigate the underlying mechanisms that drive the bias against nonnative speakers and subsequently design interventions to mitigate these biases. In this dissertation, I offer an integrative model to organize past explanations for accent-based bias into a coherent framework, and posit that nonnative accents elicit social perceptions that have implications at the personal, relational, and group level. I also seek to complement the existing emphasis on main effects of accents, which focuses on the general tendency to discriminate against those with accents, by examining moderators that shed light on the conditions under which accent-based bias is most likely to occur. Specifically, I explore the idea that people’s beliefs about the controllability of accents can moderate their evaluations toward nonnative speakers, such that those who believe that accents can be controlled are more likely to demonstrate a bias against nonnative speakers. I empirically test my theoretical model in three studies in the context of entrepreneurial funding decisions. Results generally supported the proposed model. By examining the micro foundations of accent-based bias, the ideas explored in this dissertation set the stage for future research in an increasingly multilingual world.

Training Finnish and English Speakers to Produce Non-native Vowels

The subject of this thesis was the acquisition of difficult non-native vowels by speakers of two different languages. In order to study the subject, a group of Finnish speakers and another group of American English speakers were recruited and they underwent a short listen-and-repeat training that included as stimuli the semisynthetically created pseudowords /ty:ti/ and /tʉ:ti/. The aim was to study the effect of the training method on the subjects as well as the possible influence of the speakers’ native language on the process of acquisition. The selection of the target vowels /y/ and /ʉ/ was made according to the Speech Learning Model and Perceptual Assimilation Model, both of which predict that second language speech sounds that share similar features with sounds of a person’s native language are most difficult for the person to learn. The vowel /ʉ/ is similar to Finnish vowels as well as to vowels of English, whereas /y/ exists in Finnish but not in English, although it is similar to other English vowels. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that /ʉ/ is a difficult vowel for both groups to learn and /y/ is difficult for English speakers. The effect of training was tested with a pretest-training-posttest protocol in which the stimuli were played alternately and the subjects’ task was to repeat the heard stimuli. The training method was thought to improve the production of non-native sounds by engaging different feedback mechanisms, such as auditory and somatosensory. These, according to Template Theory, modify the production of speech by altering the motor commands from the internal speech system or the feedforward signal which translates the motoric commands into articulatory movements. The subjects’ productions during the test phases were recorded and an acoustic analysis was performed in which the formant values of the target vowels were extracted. Statistical analyses showed a statistically significant difference between groups in the first formant, signaling a possible effect of native motor commands. Furthermore, a statistically significant difference between groups was observed in the standard deviation of the formants in the production of /y/, showing the uniformity of native production. The training had no observable effect, possibly due to the short nature of the training protocol.

Preposition Stranding in Heritage Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

Influential bodies of work in language acquisition studies single out heritage bilingualism as a discrete acquisition process within the bilingualism continuum. In regards to the acquisition of WH-/QU- interrogatives containing prepositional phrases (PP), the present study examined whether heritage speakers (HS) of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) produce preposition stranding (P-stranding) constructions in their heritage language, in contrast to monolingual and adult speakers of BP, where prepositions are pied-piped to form the interrogative. Participants were HS of BP born in the USA and in Brazil, monolinguals, and late bilingual adults. The experiment consisted of an elicited production task and a grammaticality judgment task, both carried out in BP and then in English. Results showed that HS born in the USA use P-stranding in QU- interrogatives productively and systematically, in contrast to the other three groups. Moreover, no evidence of protracted acquisition was found in this group. No signs of attrition were detected among bilinguals.

Comparative study of the lexicon of speakers of different religious

This work is part of the studies of Lexical Semantics and aims to compare the speakers lexicon of four different religions in four different types of texts. It starts from the assumption that religious speaker tends to keep its religious lexicon as a way of maintaining belief and block new doctrines. Thus, in addition to make use of a specific lexicon, the speaker tends to spreads it to other contexts of use. This shows how lexical and social reality are closely linked. For this research, were adopted as theoretical assumptions Structural Semantics, with an emphasis on Lexical Field Theory, Social Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics. The analyzed data confirmed the initial hypothesis that these speakers go beyond the religious context and make use of the religious lexicon in nonreligious contexts, specifically in not overtly religious texts. In addition, they showed that there is an approximation between churches of similar doctrines in some contexts, but, surprisingly, also doctrinally distinct churches in other contexts.

Initial training of Portuguese teachers for Speakers of Other Languages at UTFPR-CT: integrating theory and classroom practice

The purpose of this article is to analyze the initial training of foreign language teachers within an extension project, whose goal is to promote teaching Portuguese for Speakers of Other Languages ​​(PFOL) in the Federal  University of Technology- Paraná ( UTFPR), Curitiba Campus. Thus, a brief history about the activities developed in the program  will be presented as well as its relevance within the university. Also, an analysis of the program and its current status within the Language and Literature undergraduate course - UTFPR will be discussed. Finally, concepts of reflective teaching  (Perrenoud, 2002) and  teaching based on the indissociation between practice and theory (GIMENEZ, 2005) will be brought up.

Speaker identification using higher order spectral phase features and their effectiveness vis-a-vis Mel-Cepstral features

The effectiveness of higher-order spectral (HOS) phase features in speaker recognition is investigated by comparison with Mel Cepstral features on the same speech data. HOS phase features retain phase information from the Fourier spectrum unlikeMel–frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC). Gaussian mixture models are constructed from Mel– Cepstral features and HOS features, respectively, for the same data from various speakers in the Switchboard telephone Speech Corpus. Feature clusters, model parameters and classification performance are analyzed. HOS phase features on their own provide a correct identification rate of about 97% on the chosen subset of the corpus. This is the same level of accuracy as provided by MFCCs. Cluster plots and model parameters are compared to show that HOS phase features can provide complementary information to better discriminate between speakers.

Art for architecture's sake?

The Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts symposium was organised by the Architecture. Theory, Criticism and History (ATCH) research group at the University of Queensland, run by John Macarthur and Antony Moulis, together with Andrew Leach who joined them last year and organised much of the symposium. The symposium ran for three days in a small room at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane (generously donated by director Robert Leonard), with about 40 people in attendance. Together with a long question time of an hour after every three speakers, the size of the room and the small number of people made it very different from most architecture or design conferences. The intellectual level of the symposium was high, without the speed dating aspect that one often sees at the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) meetings, where endless parallel sessions of short papers create an occasionally disorientating cacophony of words. The symposium was deliberately, unapologetically academic and the intimate nature of the forum made the discussion rich and collaborative, with an active audience. The title of the symposium, 'Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts', reflects the connection that already exists between the art history and the architectural history community in Brisbane, with both groups regularly attending each other's functions.

Presentations in English : find your voice as a presenter

With estimates of more than thirty million given each day, presentations have become an integral part of modern society. They can signify the difference between gaining or losing a job, or being successful or unsuccessful at university and a future career. Presentations in English, combining a 128-page book and DVD, is an innovative and complete course aimed specifically at non-native speakers of English.

Creative Industries

We are experiencing a period of profound social and economic transformation. This is a shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy (or a “creative economy”; or an “economy of the imagination”.) This new, emerging economic system is fundamentally organised around people (not machines or buildings); and around place. We heard Richard Florida argue that creative, talented people won’t go to where the job is, but vice versa, the job will come to them. So according to Florida, where we live is becoming the primary factor in global economic development. (Incidentally, it is worth contrasting this idea with the alternative proposition - put by speakers at this Forum - of “new nomadism”, that is, that creativity is nomadic and not bound by place.)

Robust speech recognition using speech enhancement

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has matured into a technology which is becoming more common in our everyday lives, and is emerging as a necessity to minimise driver distraction when operating in-car systems such as navigation and infotainment. In “noise-free” environments, word recognition performance of these systems has been shown to approach 100%, however this performance degrades rapidly as the level of background noise is increased. Speech enhancement is a popular method for making ASR systems more ro- bust. Single-channel spectral subtraction was originally designed to improve hu- man speech intelligibility and many attempts have been made to optimise this algorithm in terms of signal-based metrics such as maximised Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) or minimised speech distortion. Such metrics are used to assess en- hancement performance for intelligibility not speech recognition, therefore mak- ing them sub-optimal ASR applications. This research investigates two methods for closely coupling subtractive-type enhancement algorithms with ASR: (a) a computationally-efficient Mel-filterbank noise subtraction technique based on likelihood-maximisation (LIMA), and (b) in- troducing phase spectrum information to enable spectral subtraction in the com- plex frequency domain. Likelihood-maximisation uses gradient-descent to optimise parameters of the enhancement algorithm to best fit the acoustic speech model given a word se- quence known a priori. Whilst this technique is shown to improve the ASR word accuracy performance, it is also identified to be particularly sensitive to non-noise mismatches between the training and testing data. Phase information has long been ignored in spectral subtraction as it is deemed to have little effect on human intelligibility. In this work it is shown that phase information is important in obtaining highly accurate estimates of clean speech magnitudes which are typically used in ASR feature extraction. Phase Estimation via Delay Projection is proposed based on the stationarity of sinusoidal signals, and demonstrates the potential to produce improvements in ASR word accuracy in a wide range of SNR. Throughout the dissertation, consideration is given to practical implemen- tation in vehicular environments which resulted in two novel contributions – a LIMA framework which takes advantage of the grounding procedure common to speech dialogue systems, and a resource-saving formulation of frequency-domain spectral subtraction for realisation in field-programmable gate array hardware. The techniques proposed in this dissertation were evaluated using the Aus- tralian English In-Car Speech Corpus which was collected as part of this work. This database is the first of its kind within Australia and captures real in-car speech of 50 native Australian speakers in seven driving conditions common to Australian environments.