Previous research suggests that intonation is a particularly challenging aspect of L2 speech learning. While most research focuses on speech production, we widen the focus and study the perception of intonation by L2 learners. We investigate whether advanced German learners of English have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in a narrative context with different sentence types (e.g. statements, questions). The results of a tonal pattern selection task indicate that learners (n=20) performed similar to British English controls (n=25) for some sentence types (e.g. statements, yes/no-questions), but performed significantly worse than the control group in the case of open and closed tag questions and the expression of sarcasm. The results can be explained by the fact that tag questions are the only sentence type investigated that does not exist in the learners' L1, and sarcasm is not represented syntactically. This suggests that L1 influence can partly account for why some intonation patterns are more challenging than others, and that contextualized knowledge of the intonation patterns of the target language rather than knowledge of intonation patterns in isolation is crucial for the successful L2 learning of intonation.

In this paper, we introduce the language-pedagogic potential of the Corpus of Product Information (CoPI). The corpus is XML-annotated and contains about 100,000 words of product descriptions of health products, cleaning supplies and products for beauty and personal care, divided into three textual moves: (1) overview, (2) directions and (3) warnings. First, we describe the data collection, corpus design and annotation scheme of the corpus, and then we present the findings of an analysis of CoPI's most frequent words, clusters and its type–token ratio. Finally, we show its potential for language-pedagogic purposes and suggest how the CoPI analyses can be used for paper- and computer-based DDL activities that foster corpus-based genre teaching in the advanced EFL classroom. We conclude this paper by summarising the outcomes of a first case study we conducted to test these activities with advanced learners of English.

Investigations of the link between the perception and production of prosody by language learners can inform theories of prosody perception and production, especially with regard to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and for the implementation of prosody in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). The perception and production of prosody in L2 speech are often analyzed separately, but the link between the two is rarely the focus of investigation [e.g. 1, 2].In a previous study [3], we analyzed the perception of prosody in read speech by German learners of English (n=20), who performed similarly to the British English (BrE) control group (n=25) for some sentence types (e.g. statements, yes/noquestions) and worse for others (e.g. open and closed tag questions, sarcasm). The present study extends this analysis by comparing the same learners' perception and production of prosody in read speech with the same sentence types.Overall, the learners (n=20) performed better in production and were more similar to the native speakers' (n=10) performance than in the perception task. However, the learners significantly differed from the native controls in production, i.e. closed tag questions and checking questions. Interestingly, the learners also performed significantly better in yes/no and statement questions than the native speakers.

Investigation of the characteristics of spoken learner language has increased in recent years but has been primarily limited to the investigation of one linguistic level (e.g., lexico-grammar), which gives a limited picture of learners’ overall linguistic competence (e.g., Skarnitzl & Rumlová, 2019). In this study, we investigate lexico-grammar, fluency, and prosody in LINDSEI (German, Czech, and Spanish) alongside British and American English comparable corpora, using multidimensional analysis, a statistical procedure that identifies co-occurring linguistic features and leads to functional interpretation of the discourse. Results show significant differences between L1 and L2 groups on four of six dimensions and reveal novel patterns of co-occurrence. Dimension 1, for example, identifies correlates of informationally driven discourse on all three linguistic levels under investigation. These findings show the importance of including multiple linguistic levels in the analysis of learner discourse and have implications for a more holistic and functionally based approach to language instruction.

Adopting a corpus-based approach within the autosegmental-framework, this paper reports on a study on L2 learners’ intonational deviances of edge tones within intonational units in spontaneous speech in monologues and dialogues derived from a “Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis” (CIA) (cf. Granger 1996, 2015). The analysis reveals that German, Spanish, and British speakers of English deviate from each other in their intonational phrasing and pitch heights in utterance-final and -medial position. The learners break their utterances into considerably more intonation phrases (IP) and intermediate phrases (ip) than native-speakers. While the British native-speakers (n = 10) mainly stick to the usage of falls within IPs and ips, the German learners (n = 10) frequently use rising tones and the Spanish learners (n = 10) frequently use falling tones.