Chinese Native Speakers' Counterfactuals Revisited

This paper examines whether or not Chinese native speakers (CNSs) have difficulties in understanding English counterfactuals, whether CNSs have counterfactual reasoning problems in their own language, what the causes of these difficulties may be, and the problems in teaching English subjunctives. It also proposes on how to improve CNSs’ English counterfactual comprehension.

Language Teaching and Intercultural Communication:Teaching Korean Grammar to Non-native Speakers

Grounded upon the interactive relationship between intercultural communication(IC)and foreign language education and the recent gradual salience of communicative language teaching(CLT)in foreign language grammar learning sectors,the study reported in this paper deals with the issue of teaching Korean grammar to non-native speakers in terms of teaching Korean as a foreign language(TKFL).This paper attempts to examine and analyze several Korean language textbooks prepared for foreign learners of Korean,which is used overseas,especially in Hong Kong(HK).It is also attempted to evaluate the textbooks in terms of CLT and communicative competence.By doing so,we can further understand the methods of Korean grammar instruction provided to foreigners as a second language or a foreign language.

ELF Interactions Among Chinese, Greek, and Swiss Speakers of English

The paper concerns the issue of ELF （English as a lingua franca） in the European and Asian context. The authors start from a brief conceptual perspective to shed light on salient aspects related to ELF. Then, this paper discusses the study investigating the interactions among NNS （non-native speakers） of English in the naturalistic settings, namely in Zhangjiajie （China）, Masouri （Kalymnos/Greece）, and Unterwasser （Switzerland）. The main objective of the research based on the qualitative methodology was to analyze the ELF interactions from the linguistic point of view focusing on lexicogrammar and pragmatic features. The secondary objective was to establish whether the identified ELF features contributed to communication intelligibility. The obtained results indicated a few significant similarities with the Seidlhofer＇s list of the ELT characteristics. Furthermore, it was established in the study that the ELF features did not interfere with effective communication between interlocutors

Native/Non-native English Speakers’Attitudes:Addressing Learners’Goals and Needs Towards Pronunciation Issues

The study attempts to explore native and non-native English speakers’attitudes towards accents and pronunciation-related issues.The sample group surveyed is composed of non-native English speakers,specifically,Italian students studying at the University of Calabria(Italy)and native English speakers from Alberta University(Canada)and Florida Atlantic University(USA).An online link to a questionnaire was sent via email to all participants and was used as a research instrument to collect quantitative data.The research questions will investigate learners’attitudes in relation to the following aspects:accent and identity,beliefs about native/non-native accents,impact of pronunciation on communication,and learners’expectations towards pronunciation teaching.Firstly,mean scores in relation to the aforementioned aspects will be examined.Secondly,differences between native/non-native speakers’responses will be statistically analysed.Thirdly,non-native learners’responses will be correlated with their proficiency level in English to identify the extent to which language competence may affect learners’attitudes.The study aims to gain useful insights that may hopefully raise students and teachers’awareness of what models we expect learners to imitate and attain in the English language classroom,how appropriate and relevant these may be especially in the globalized English world where non-native speakers will increasingly use English in a diversity of forms to achieve their communicative goals.The preliminary results will be presented and pedagogical considerations suggested.

著名的海德公园一角——Speakers’Corner

在英国伦敦的繁华市区,坐落着著名的海德公园。园内绿草如茵,鲜花缤纷;令人心驰神往的石雕掩映在花草树木丛中。空气清新,景色宜人,碧空如洗,白云悠闲,给人宽松敞亮之感。19世纪以来,在公园的东北角,形成了一块热闹的“自由论坛”——Speakers’Corner(演讲者之角)。每个星期天的下午,人们站在装肥皂用的木箱上发表演说。

The Intelligibility of Thai Speakers’ Pronunciation from Chinese Listeners’ Perspective

The intelligibility of Thai speakers’English pronunciation from Chinese listeners’perspectives have not been analyzed deeply in current researches.As is known to all,the interconnection between China and Thailand is greatly developed with the sup⁃port of‘One Belt and One Road initiative’.However,it is inevitable for non-native English speakers to encounter some pronuncia⁃tion problems,which would affect them to communicate with each other.As for Chinese English learners,Thai accent to some ex⁃tent would be a great challenge during the conversation with Thai speakers.In order to promote a better communication,it is neces⁃sary to analyze the origin of Thai speakers’English pronunciation problems.Therefore,this research based on the previous studies to categorize the common pronunciation problems among Thai speakers.However,there are numerous English learners in Thailand that have various language proficiency.In this respect,two Thai speakers with different IELTS scores have been selected for com⁃parison,and six postgraduate students in the Education University of Hong Kong are invited to serve as a listener.As a result,this research will base on the listeners’feedback to highlight some suggestions to enhance the intelligibility of Thai speakers’pronun⁃ciation.

杨声器 Altec Lansing ACS500 Speakers:大声点!

如果你需要给你的高档多媒体PC配上一套具有丰富饱满声音的扬声器,那么Altec Lansing 399美元的ACS500Multimedia Speakers值得选用,这套扬声器提供了超重低音效果,并具有DolbyProLogic环绕立体声,只是需要占用一些桌面空间。 ACS500立式扬声器具有19英寸高,横截面积为5×7英寸。它们共享22.5W放大器和控制电路,以驱动各箱体内的四个扬声器。其中面朝前方的为一个3英寸中音扬声器和一个1英寸高频扬声器。

NCTO Announces 6th Annual Meeting SPEAKERS

NCTO is delighted to announce the preliminary slate of speakers who will address NCTO Member Companies during the Annual Meeting in May 2009.

A Critique of Ali Shehadeh's Non-native Speakers'Production of Modified Comprehensible Output and Second Language Learning

This study examined the NNSs' ability of modifying their interlanguage utterances in modified comprehensible output to give response to other-initiation and self-initiation,which was studied in both NS-NNS and NNS-NNS interactions.It was the qualitative study by using two different tasks which were picture-dictation task and opinion-exchange task to collect the data.There were 32 participants whose age ranged of 22 to 37.The author proposed two hypotheses based on his expectation that NNS-NNS interactions would provide more opportunities for NNS participants to give comprehensible output for other-initiated clarification requests and self-initiated clarification attempts than NS-NNS interactions.The author was good at using numbers to illustrate and describe the data in his writing.

Analysis of Deaf Speakers’ Speech Signal for Understanding the Acoustic Characteristics by Territory Specific Utterances

An important concern with the deaf community is inability to hear partially or totally. This may affect the development of language during childhood, which limits their habitual existence. Consequently to facilitate such deaf speakers through certain assistive mechanism, an effort has been taken to understand the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers by evaluating the territory specific utterances. Speech signals are acquired from 32 normal and 32 deaf speakers by uttering ten Indian native Tamil language words. The speech parameters like pitch, formants, signal-to-noise ratio, energy, intensity, jitter and shimmer are analyzed. From the results, it has been observed that the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers differ significantly and their quantitative measure dominates the normal speakers for the words considered. The study also reveals that the informative part of speech in a normal and deaf speakers may be identified using the acoustic features. In addition, these attributes may be used for differential corrections of deaf speaker’s speech signal and facilitate listeners to understand the conveyed information.

Unsuccessful letter–sound integration in English reading by native Chinese speakers: evidence from an event related potentials study

Integrating letters and sounds are essential for successful reading in alphabetic languages. It remains unclear if native speakers of non-alphabetic languages integrate letters and sounds in reading an alphabetic lan- guage in the same way as native alphabetic readers do. Chinese is a morpho-syllabic system （each character cor- responds to one syllable） and contrasts sharply with alphabetic languages such as English. Several fMRI studies have shown that native Chinese speakers apply their native language system to read English words. By using the cross- modal mismatch negativity （MMN） paradigm, we directly investigated letter-sound integration for reading in English among native Chinese speakers. To investigate the effect of native language background on letter-sound integration in second language reading, a group of native Korean English learners served as a comparison group. We compared MMN responses between an auditory only condition （only vowels presented） and two audiovisual conditions （AV0, vowel presented synchronously with the corresponding letter; AV200, the letter presented 200 ms before the corresponding vowel） for both native Chinese and native Korean speakers. Native Chinese speakers demonstrated significantly attenuated MMN amplitudes in audiovisual conditions compared with the auditory only condition, regardless of their phonological decoding speed. In con- trast, native Korean speakers showed amplified amplitude MMN in AV200 compared with that in the auditory only condition. The results suggest that native language may shape the brain responses of second language learners to reading a second language in the early stages. Native non- alphabetic language speakers may be unable to use visual information to facilitate their phonological processing in the early stage while naT：lye alphabetic language speakers are capable of integrating letter sounds automatically.

Global collaboration of eye research--personal experience

On December 9,2023,I was privileged to be honored and participate in the Dr.Chi Chao Chan Symposium on Global Collaboration of Eye Research as the Global Eye Genetic Consortium(GEGC)session,which was held in the 16th Congress of the Asia-Pacific Vitreo-Retina Society(APVRS)in Hong Kong.Along with my talk on“Global collaboration of eye research:personal experience”,other prominent international speakers provided their own perspectives on opportunities for networking,collaboration,and exchange of ideas with global leaders and experts in ophthalmic practice,research,and education.

Rethinking multi-spatial information for transferable adversarial attacks on speaker recognition systems

Adversarial attacks have been posing significant security concerns to intelligent systems,such as speaker recognition systems(SRSs).Most attacks assume the neural networks in the systems are known beforehand,while black-box attacks are proposed without such information to meet practical situations.Existing black-box attacks improve trans-ferability by integrating multiple models or training on multiple datasets,but these methods are costly.Motivated by the optimisation strategy with spatial information on the perturbed paths and samples,we propose a Dual Spatial Momentum Iterative Fast Gradient Sign Method(DS-MI-FGSM)to improve the transferability of black-box at-tacks against SRSs.Specifically,DS-MI-FGSM only needs a single data and one model as the input;by extending to the data and model neighbouring spaces,it generates adver-sarial examples against the integrating models.To reduce the risk of overfitting,DS-MI-FGSM also introduces gradient masking to improve transferability.The authors conduct extensive experiments regarding the speaker recognition task,and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of their method,which can achieve up to 92%attack success rate on the victim model in black-box scenarios with only one known model.

"Nativeness" and Intelligibility:Impacts of Intercultural Experience Through English as a Lingua Franca on Chinese Speakers' Language Attitudes

This paper investigates the impacts of intercultural experience through English as a lingua franca （ELF） on language attitudes, with the focus on Chinese speakers＇ narratives of ELF experience in relation to their views of Englishes. The data retrieved through 769 questionnaires and 35 interviews with Chinese users of English revealed the impacts in four aspects. First, the lack of ELF experience helps to maintain the assumption that conformity to native English is necessary for interactants to understand each other. Second, ELF experience triggers the question about the exclusive connection between nativeness and intelligibility. Third, it raises challenges to the exclusive relevance of native English for successful intercultural communication. Fourth, it helps to develop an awareness of intercultural communication strategies as important for communicative effectiveness in the context of the diversity of English. Attitudes revealed in the four aspects all point to a concern with the issue what is intelligible English. This paper thus discusses intelligibility in relation to （non-） nativeness and the role of intercultural experience in making sense of the issue of intelligibility, which leads to the exploration of pedagogical implications of this study.

Brief Introduction to Some Featured Speakers for the 3rd Asia TEFL International Conference

Tariq RahmanTariq Rahman earned his Ph.D in English from theUniversity of Sheffield in England.He did his post-doctoral research as a Fulbright scholar(1995-96)in the USA.He is presently National DistinguishedProfessor at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad,Pakistan.Dr.Rahman is a highly published scholar havingmore than eighty research papers in academic journals and six booksto his credit.He is considered an authority on the politics and historyof languages and language policy in Pakistan.His book Language andPolitics in Pakistan(Oxford University Press,1996)is regarded as aclassic in the field and has been reprinted four times.His latest bookDenizens of Alien Worhls(Oxford University Press,2004)is on

Histogram equalization using a reduced feature set of background speakers' utterances for speaker recognition

We propose a method for histogram equalization using supplement sets to improve the performance of speaker recognition when the training and test utterances are very short. The supplement sets are derived using outputs of selection or clustering algorithms from the background speakers' utterances. The proposed approach is used as a feature normalization method for building histograms when there are insufficient input utterance samples.In addition, the proposed method is used as an i-vector normalization method in an i-vector-based probabilistic linear discriminant analysis(PLDA) system, which is the current state-of-the-art for speaker verification. The ranks of sample values for histogram equalization are estimated in ascending order from both the input utterances and the supplement set. New ranks are obtained by computing the sum of different kinds of ranks. Subsequently, the proposed method determines the cumulative distribution function of the test utterance using the newly defined ranks. The proposed method is compared with conventional feature normalization methods, such as cepstral mean normalization(CMN), cepstral mean and variance normalization(MVN), histogram equalization(HEQ), and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute(ETSI) advanced front-end methods. In addition, performance is compared for a case in which the greedy selection algorithm is used with fuzzy C-means and K-means algorithms.The YOHO and Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute(ETRI) databases are used in an evaluation in the feature space. The test sets are simulated by the Opus Vo IP codec. We also use the 2008 National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST) speaker recognition evaluation(SRE) corpus for the i-vector system. The results of the experimental evaluation demonstrate that the average system performance is improved when the proposed method is used, compared to the conventional feature normalization methods.

Fundamental Frequency Statistics for Young Male Speakers of Mandarin

In forensic speaker comparison(FSC),it is essential not only to evaluate the similarity between two(or more)samples,but also the typicality of the features in the relevant population.For the typicality,it is necessary that the population statistics related to the phonetic parameters be available.This article presents the statistics for the fundamental frequency(F0)of 100 young Chinese male speakers producing both reading and spontaneous speech.Five descriptive statistics of long‑term F0,namely mean,median,mode,standard deviation(SD),and coefficient of variation(CV=SD/mean),are shown in histograms and scatter diagrams.Results show that the distributions of the five statistics are near normal.The findings are compared with the literature and discussed with respect to forensic phonetic implications.This article concludes that the results for the F0 statistics in the present study can be used in FSC casework as reference data on F0 for the young male Chinese population.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2023 CIC Blue Ocean Forum for Worldwide Scientists, sponsored by the China Institute of Communications and organized by China Communications Editorial Office, will be held at the beginning of August this year, aiming at the theme on “Sharing Academic Ideas & Promoting Innovation for Development”. The forum will feature world-class speakers, academic panels, and discussions. The Forum co-chairs invite the submission of original papers for presentation.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2023 CIC Blue Ocean Forum for Worldwide Scientists,sponsored by the China Institute of Communications and organized by China Communications Editorial Office,will be held at the beginning of August this year,aiming at the theme on“Sharing Academic Ideas&Promoting Innovation for Development”.The forum will feature world-class speakers,academic panels,and discussions.The Forum co-chairs invite the submission of original papers for presentation.