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摘要：The present brief discussion is stimulated by recent research publications (Appleby 2013; Hicks 2013; Stanley 2013) on discrimination against female native English speaker teachers in east Asia where native white males have long dominated the English teaching positions at language schools and colleges. Not only the global commodification of native English speakers but also the internationally known male-oriented hiring practices in east Asia and other unexplored factors appear to be working in favor of young male native speakers from the West. The present discussion explores gender gap in the EFL classroom in east Asia from the perspective of global ELT community's political sensitivity to its professionalism. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This Forum challenges the generally accepted position in the linguistic sciences -- conscious or not -- that monolingualism and nativeness are essentially synonymous in an exclusive way. We discuss two consequences of our position that naturalistic bilinguals and multilinguals exposed to a language in early childhood are also native speakers: (i) that bi-/multilinguals have multiple native languages; and (ii) nativeness can be applicable to a state of linguistic knowledge that is characterized by significant differences to the monolingual baseline. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article highlights a preliminary study that is part of a larger research project relating to a specific-purpose English language test for overseas-trained health professionals: the Occupational English Test (McNamara, 1996). The present study highlights findings from the first phase of the project designed to prove the views of spoken communication by doctors, nurses, and physiotherapists, eliciting these views by analyzing clinical experts' feedback on instances of trainee-patient communication proffered independently of the test setting. This research aims to determine "what criteria underlie the judgements of clinical educators regarding the spoken clinical communication of native- and nonnative-English-speaking health professionals." Adapted from the source document

摘要：The Native English Teachers (NETs) Scheme has been in place for over 20 years in secondary schools in Hong Kong and yet how students perceive these teachers is under-researched. This article reports a study which analyses student perceptions of the advantage and disadvantages of learning English from NETs and their non-native counterparts, local English teachers (LETs). Data were collected through semi-structured group interviews with 30 secondary students studying in three different schools in Hong Kong. Content data analysis was conducted, and main themes that emerged from interview transcripts were categorised. Results show that the perceived advantages of LETs include their proficiency in students' L1, their knowledge of students' learning difficulties, the ease students experience in understanding their teaching, and in communication. The perceived advantages of NETs are their good English proficiency and ability to facilitate student learning. The disadvantages of one category of teachers appear to be the reverse of the advantages of another. Data also show that some students experience anxiety when encountering NETs and tend to prefer certain teaching styles. This study has significant implications for classroom teaching practice and teacher professional development. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study tested three hypotheses about the direct and indirect contributions of derivational morphological awareness to English reading comprehension in sixth-grade students from differing language backgrounds (n= 952). Students included Spanish-speaking, Filipino-speaking, and Vietnamese-speaking language minority learners as well as native English speakers. Multiple-group structural equation modeling indicated that morphological awareness made a significant direct contribution to reading comprehension, controlling for reading vocabulary and word reading fluency. Morphological awareness also made a significant indirect contribution to reading comprehension via reading vocabulary, but not via word reading fluency. Effects were similar across the four language groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may play multiple important roles in English reading comprehension for students from a variety of home language backgrounds. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The goal of this study was to test on a non-francophone population a repetition task of non-words created for a francophone population. A group of heritage language speakers (n = 27) was paired with a group of native speakers of French (n = 27) with a corresponding level of receptive lexical knowledge. The scores of both groups on a task consisting of the repetition of nonwords were compared. An analysis of variance showed that heritage language participants scores were similar to those of native speakers of French, even though their first language was not the one from which the non-words had been formed. The results highlight the potential of using a non-word repetition task with a linguistically heterogeneous population. The findings also suggest that the best measurement of phonological memory may be the number of correct syllables produced, as this may limit the influence of various factors on the task. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This paper reports the findings of an empirical study on ESL/EFL teachers' evaluation and interpretation of oral English proficiency as elicited by the national College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) of China. Informed by debates on the issue of native speaker (NS) norms which have become the focus of attention in recent years, this study addresses the question of whether judgments of language proficiency by non-native English speaking (NNES) teachers, who are currently used to assess performance on the CET-SET, correspond to those of native English speaking (NES) teachers or whether the two groups draw on different constructs of oral proficiency. Data for the study were derived from two sources: unguided holistic ratings given by a group of 19 NES and 20 NNES teachers to CET-SET speech samples from 30 test-takers, and written comments to justify the ratings assigned. Results yielded by both quantitative (MFRM) and qualitative analyses of teacher data, revealed no significant difference in raters' holistic judgments of the speech samples and a broad level of agreement between groups on the construct components of oral English proficiency. However, the analysis of raters' comments revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences in the way NES and NNES teachers weighed various features of the oral proficiency construct in justifying the decisions made. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the study's findings for debates about the native speaker norm as the target for language learners and test-takers. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：The goal of this study was to explain individual differences in both native and non-native listening comprehension; 121 native and 113 non-native speakers of Dutch were tested on various linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive skills thought to underlie listening comprehension. Structural equation modeling was used to identify the predictors of individual differences in listening comprehension and to test for differences between the native and non-native participants. Listening comprehension for native speakers was found to be a function of knowledge of the language and the efficiency with which one can process linguistic information, while listening comprehension for non-native speakers was a function of knowledge and reasoning ability. Working Memory did not explain unique variance in listening comprehension in either group. Differences in experience with the Dutch language are likely to explain the observed pattern of results for both groups. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Native English-speaking (NES) English teachers at universities in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts are sometimes asked to edit English manuscripts written by non-native English-speaking (NNES) colleagues in scientific fields. However, professional peers may differ from English teachers in their approach towards editing scientific manuscripts (Benfield & Howard, 2000). This study examined (1) editing strategies used by NES English teachers at Japanese universities with different amounts of medical editing experience, compared to those used by NES healthcare professionals in editing an abstract written by a Japanese medical researcher; (2) points where participants felt the need to consult with the abstract's author; (3) revisions affecting definite articles; and (4) editors' attitudes towards editing. Results reveal that disciplinary knowledge and medical editing experience did not significantly impact editing strategies, but did impact the number of points where consultation was considered necessary, as well as revisions affecting definite articles. English teachers' ambivalence towards editing was also revealed. We argue that greater collaboration between English teachers and researchers in scientific fields is needed, and that consultation and clarity should become themes in courses designed for graduate and undergraduate EFL students. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：In order for discourse to be considered idiomatic, it needs to exhibit features like fluency and pragmatically appropriate language use. Advances in corpus linguistics make it possible to examine idiomaticity from the perspective of recurrent word combinations. One approach to capture such word combinations is by the automatic retrieval of lexical bundles. We investigated the use of English-language lexical bundles in advanced learner writing by L1 speakers of Swedish and in comparable native-speaker writing, all produced by undergraduate university students in the discipline of linguistics. The material was culled from a new corpus of university student writing, the Stockholm University Student English Corpus (SUSEC), amounting to over one million words. The investigation involved a quantitative analysis of the use of four-word lexical bundles and a qualitative analysis of the functions they serve. The results show that the native speakers have a larger number of types of lexical bundles, which are also more varied, such as unattended 'this' bundles, existential 'there' bundles, and hedging bundles. Other lexical bundles which were found to be more common and more varied in the native-speaker data involved negations. The findings are shown to be largely similar to those of the phraseological research tradition in SLA. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This article focuses on the issue of non-native English-speaking ELT instructors and the tendency to conceptualize them along the same lines as non-native speakers in general. This debate is important in the realm of teaching and learning English as an International Language as it is estimated that non-native speakers outnumber native-speaker counterparts by three to one. The ownership of the English language is shared by all speakers regardless of 'nativeness.' Adapted from the source document

摘要：While it is common for teachers to focus on learners errors in the EFL classroom, little attention is given to the errors that native English speakers make in their mother tongue. This paper reports on a study to assess the reaction of Japanese university students to an activity that primarily required identifying ungrammatical forms in audio clips of English NSs. The results of a post-activity questionnaire suggest that exposure to this particular feature of spoken language may make students less inhibited about making errors and thus help to overcome their reticence to speak in class. These initial findings were confirmed in a follow-up study conducted at a second Japanese university. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This paper reports on a comparative study of pauses made by L2 learners and native speakers of English while narrating picture stories. The comparison is based on the number of pauses and total amount of silence in the middle and at the end of clauses in the performance of 40 native speakers and 40 L2 learners of English. The results of the quantitative analyses suggest that, although the L2 learners generally pause more repeatedly and have longer periods of silence than the native speakers, the distinctive feature of their pausing pattern is that they pause frequently in the middle of clauses rather than at the end. The qualitative analysis of the data suggests that some of the L2 learners' mid-clause pauses are associated with processes such as replacement, reformulation, and online planning. Formulaic sequences, however, contain very few pauses and therefore appear to facilitate the learners fluency. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The theoretical framework of this study is based on the prevalent debate of whether prosodic processing is influenced by higher level linguistic-specific circuits or reflects lower level encoding of physical properties. Using the dichotic listening technique, the study investigates the hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native Japanese listeners and two groups of nonnative listeners with no prior pitch accent experience but differing in their native language experience with linguistic pitch: native listeners of Mandarin (a tone language with higher linguistic functional use of pitch) and native listeners of English (a stress language with lower functional use of pitch). The overall results reveal that, for both native and nonnative listeners, the processing of Japanese pitch accent is less lateralized (compared to lexical tone processing, which has been found to be a left hemisphere property). However, detailed analysis with individual pitch accents across groups shows a right hemisphere preference for processing the high-accent-low (H*L) pattern, a left hemisphere preference for LH*, and no hemisphere dominance for LH, indicating a significant reliance on the acoustic cues. These patterns are particularly prominent with the English listeners who are least experienced with linguistic pitch. Together, the findings suggest an interplay of linguistic and acoustic aspects in the processing of Japanese pitch accent by native and nonnative listeners. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study assessed, in a sample of 98 adult native speakers of Dutch, how their lexical skills and their speaking proficiency varied as a function of their age and level of education and profession (EP). Participants, categorized in terms of their age (18-35, 36-50, and 51-76 years old) and the level of their EP (low versus high), were tested on their lexical knowledge, lexical fluency, and lexical memory, and they performed four speaking tasks, differing in genre and formality. Speaking performance was rated in terms of communicative adequacy and in terms of number of words, number of T-units, words per T-unit, content words per T-unit, hesitations per T-unit, and grammatical errors per T-unit. Increasing age affected lexical knowledge positively but lexical fluency and memory negatively. High EP positively affected lexical knowledge and memory but EP did not affect lexical fluency. Communicative adequacy of the responses in the speaking tasks was positively affected by high EP but was not affected by age. It is concluded that, given the large variability in native speakers' language knowledge and skills, studies investigating the question of whether second-language learners can reach native levels of proficiency, should take native-speaker variability into account. Adapted from the source document