TEACHING ENGLISH INTONATION: CHALLENGES AND EFFECTIVE PRACTICES

Two experiments explored factors affecting the influence of visual (lip‐read) information on auditory speech perception, the “McGurk effect”, in 120 advanced ESL learners of 4 L1s (Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Malay) and 50 native speakers (NSs) of English. The audio and video speech signals of a female English speaker producing CV syllables with /p,f,w,r,t,k/ and// were combined on videotape. For nonnative speakers (NNSs), identification accuracy of /f/ and /r/ increased with matched visual cues. Visual nonlabials /t,k/ significantly influenced perception of auditory labials. For NSs, significant effects were noted only in noise. When stimuli involved only /p,t,k/, NSs and NNSs reported significant visual effects. Results demonstrate the influence of first language (L1) and linguistic experience on the relative information value of the cues, assumption of perceptual unity, and thus audiovisual integration. Implications for bimodal speech perception and second language instruction are discussed.

The current study is motivated by the dearth of studies regarding English translation students' grammatical and sociocultural competencies and their relationship with their Grade Point Averages (GPAs). To fill this gap, this study sought to find if there is a statistically significant relationship between the respondents' GPAs and their levels of grammatical and cultural knowledge. To do this, a multiple-choice test with four sections was developed and validated by experts in the field to examine the respondents' levels of grammatical and sociocultural knowledge. The first two sections examined respondents' knowledge levels of the functions of the key elements of English language tense and aspect (FELTA) and Acceptable Forms of English Language Tense and Aspect (AFELTA). The other two sections examined their knowledge levels of aspects of the culture of American English native speakers (AspCNS) and culturally appropriate American English language use (AppLU). The sample for this study were selected randomly from the department of English Language and Translation at King Saud University. Seventy-five male English translation students from different college levels responded to the questionnaire test. Using descriptive statistics, the responses were coded and analyzed, and thereafter, the respondents' scores on each single section of the test were compared with their GPA scores to determine the statistical significance of differences and correlation. It was found that there was a statistically significant relationship between the GPA scores, the respondents' knowledge of AFELTA, and the knowledge of AppLU. However, no significant relationships were found between the GPA scores and the respondents' knowledge of FELTA or knowledge of AspCNS.

The academic textbook entitled “Developing Academic English in Speaking and Writing” responds to the need identified by the authors in their own teaching practice to integrate the enhancement of the academic skills of speaking and writing into a single coherent approach. Using complex methodologies of academic speaking and academic writing, the authors offer practical guidelines on how to broaden students’ knowledge of the discourse of Academic English and how to improve their academic competencies and productive language skills in speaking and writing in English. The textbook is designed for university students of English philology, students of literary and cultural studies focusing on Anglophone areas, students of English translation and interpretation study programmes, but also for students who study in English and who are expected to engage in scientific inquiry, document their research in Bachelor and Master theses or in doctoral dissertations written in English, and to present their work to their academic community.

Language learning

The present study examines how Japanese language learners use referential expressions in discourse, especially topicalized or non-topicalized subjects, in addition to whether the first language of a Japanese language learner influences the choice of referential expressions. The text of narrative stories, written in both the subject’s first language and second language (i.e. Japanese) by native Chinese speakers and native Korean speakers, as well as text written by Japanese native speakers, were analyzed. As a result, the first language influence and common difficulties were observed in the use of referential expressions by Japanese language learners. Using referential expressions is not simply a matter of negative or positive transfer.

The purpose of the present research is investigating cultural competence development processes of students studying at Selcuk University Department of English Translation and Interpretation. Data of the research were collected with English Translation and Interpretation Students’ Cultural Competence Development Processes Survey, developed by the researcher. The courses promoting cultural competence were identified based on the analysis of the collected data. Additionally, the present research studies whether students’ cultural competence development habits varied and how they formed these habits in terms of different demographic features. At the end of the research some suggestions below were given. High school students at foreign language and other programs should be offered with clear information about the department of English Translation and Interpretation. English Translation and Interpretation students, who were born abroad, can be detected and further studies can be conducted on the reasons for their preferences of the department. Even English education starts at an earlier age in Turkey, most of the participants stated that they started to learn English between the ages 9-11. A more comprehensive study should be conducted by language educators on the reasons for this finding. In the present research, the participants were asked to self-report on their speaking, reading comprehension and writing proficiency levels. In a further study on this subject, researchers can conduct proficiency exams to define participants’ levels.

The present study examined English sentence stress produced by native Cantonese speakers who were speaking English as a second language (ESL). Cantonese ESL speakers' proficiency in English stress production as perceived by English-speaking listeners was also studied. Acoustical parameters associated with sentence stress including fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and intensity were measured from the English sentences produced by 40 Cantonese ESL speakers. Data were compared with those obtained from 40 native speakers of American English. The speech samples were also judged by eight naïve listeners who were native speakers of American English for placement, degree, and naturalness of stress. Results showed that Cantonese ESL speakers were able to use F0, vowel duration, and intensity to differentiate sentence stress patterns. Yet, both female and male Cantonese ESL speakers exhibited consistently higher F0 in stressed words than English speakers. Overall, Cantonese ESL speakers were found to be proficient in using duration and intensity to signal sentence stress, in a way comparable with English speakers. In addition, F0 and intensity were found to correlate closely with perceptual judgement and the degree of stress with the naturalness of stress.

Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience

William G. Moulton Mark L. Louden [ Correction: click here ] William Gamwell Moulton, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, passed away on June 2, 2000, in Exeter, New Hampshire, at the age of eighty-six. Professor Moulton served as a member of the executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America, as well as its vice president, and, in 1967, its president. Moulton was born February 5, 1914, in Providence, RI. Like so many linguists of his generation, he came to the field by way of an interest in—and exceptional talent for—languages. As he himself put it in an autobiographical essay, ‘[i]n my day, no one planned to “become a linguist”: we all stumbled into it, entering by the back door, because there was no front door’ (Moulton 1980:60). Moulton’s path toward linguistics was anything but stumbling. Already as a boy he was an assiduous student of Latin, French, and German. He began his undergraduate education at Princeton in 1931 where he pursued a dual degree in French and German, as well as a program in international relations. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree with first-class honors in 1935. After graduating from Princeton, Moulton received a scholarship to study languages for a year at the University of Berlin. During that year he met Jenni Karding, whom he married on July 7, 1938. In 1936 Moulton enrolled at Yale for graduate study, where he began work with Eduard Prokosch. In those days, Yale was clearly THE place to study linguistics as it emerged from traditional philology. It actually took me the better part of a year to discover ‘linguistics’ at Yale. It began with the Gothic course which I took from Prokosch. Then, somewhere during that first year, I discovered that there was at Yale a professor named Edward Sapir. Though he was on leave during my second year, I took his course in phonetics and phonemics in the fall of 1938—shortly before his death in early 1939. By this time I had also had the sense to take courses with Edgar H. Sturtevant (for Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin) and with Franklin B. Edgerton (for a year of Sanskrit). Prokosch died in an auto accident in the summer of 1938, but he was in a sense replaced by his son-in-law Hans Kurath who for two years came two days a week from Brown University to teach courses in Germanic linguistics. There may have been very few students of linguistics in Yale in those years, but we were hardly underprivileged. What a galaxy of stars: Prokosch, Sapir, Sturtevant, Edgerton and Kurath! (Moulton 1980:59) In 1940 Leonard Bloomfield came to Yale and supervised Moulton as he completed the dissertation project begun under Prokosch. The following year, Moulton finished his dissertation, Swiss German dialect and Romance patois, which was published that same year as a supplement (17.4) to Language (Moulton 1941). This monograph, one of the very first to examine the structural effects of language contact in a rigorous way, advanced the frontiers of German dialectology and structural linguistics more generally by examining the role of Germanic-Romance contact in the historical development of sound systems in the Wallis/Valais region of Switzerland. It also established Moulton’s reputation among German-speaking Swiss scholars as one of the pioneers in Swiss German dialectology, a reputation that endures today. While Moulton’s dissertation marked his entry into the fields of Swiss German dialectology and contact linguistics, he came to his topic by way of a straightforward historical linguistic question pertaining to Old High German vocalism. [End Page 161] One day in the spring of 1938 the late Professor Eduard Prokosch of Yale University suggested that I might find a topic for my doctoral dissertation in the general field of Old High German final vowels. In going through the work that has been done on this subject, the greatest stumbling block which I found was the assumption, made by many scholars, that certain final vowels must have been long in OHG because they still survive in a few modern dialects, especially in southwestern Switzerland. When I turned...

Learning nonnative speech categories is often considered a challenging task in adulthood. This difficulty is driven by cross-language differences in weighting critical auditory dimensions that differentiate speech categories. For example, previous studies have shown that differentiating Mandarin tonal categories requires attending to dimensions related to pitch height and direction. Relative to native speakers of Mandarin, the pitch direction dimension is underweighted by native English speakers. In the current study, we examined the effect of explicit instructions (dimension instruction) on native English speakers' Mandarin tone category learning within the framework of a dual-learning systems (DLS) model. This model predicts that successful speech category learning is initially mediated by an explicit, reflective learning system that frequently utilizes unidimensional rules, with an eventual switch to a more implicit, reflexive learning system that utilizes multidimensional rules. Participants were explicitly instructed to focus and/or ignore the pitch height dimension, the pitch direction dimension, or were given no explicit prime. Our results show that instruction instructing participants to focus on pitch direction, and instruction diverting attention away from pitch height, resulted in enhanced tone categorization. Computational modeling of participant responses suggested that instruction related to pitch direction led to faster and more frequent use of multidimensional reflexive strategies and enhanced perceptual selectivity along the previously underweighted pitch direction dimension.

ABSTRACTFor learning foreign language pronunciation, prosodic fea-tures are important as much as, or more than segmen-tal features. For Japanese speakers, one of difficulties tolearn English pronunciation is rhythm because of the dif-ferences between two languages: mora-timing rhythm andstress-timing rhythm. In order to correct errors in rhythm,the method of evaluating sentence stress that constitutesrhythm is very significant. In this paper, we present amethod of automatic detecting sentence stress syllables forthe evaluation criterion. Using a linear discriminant func-tion of pitch, intensity and vowel duration, about 90% ofthe syllables were correctly detected as to sentence stress.Also we analyzed the different and common characteristicsamong different English native speakers. The results re-vealed that the perception of the sentence stress among 11native speakers had general agreement with respect to howto integrate three features.1. INTRODUCTIONProsodic features play an important role in human commu-nications as to make clear focal point of topics, and alsoto emphasize or express one’s intention. However, the dif-ferences between English and Japanese in the expressionsof stress and rhythm cause serious difficulties for learnersmastering prosodic patterns. Japanese speakers tend to ut-ter English pronunciation in monotonous rhythm, whichoccasionally misleads their communication. So effectiveevaluationand instructionofrhythmare essentialtoacquirecorrect English pronunciation.Recent advancement in speech technology enables usto develop a computer-assisted language learning (CALL)system. In the previous studies[1][2][3], effective evalua-tion criteria for segmental features or intonation were pro-posed. Also, the method of evaluating and instructing En-glish word accent for Japanese was proposed[4]. However,the evaluation criterion of sentence stress, which is one ofthe most essential factors of English rhythm, is not estab-lished. So we propose a method of automatic detectingsentence stress syllables for a base of an effective CALLsystem.It is known that English syllable stresses consist ofpitch, intensity and duration. These features correspondto fundamental frequency, power and vowel duration, re-spectively. In [6], the rhythm instruction was realized byjudging the stress with duration and vowel quality, not withpitch or intensity. According to [8], pitch and power alsobecome key factors of sentence stress. So we utilized threefeatures to detect sentence stresses. However, it is not clearwhich acoustic feature is the most important or how thesefeatures are integrated when English native speakers per-ceive sentence stresses. We investigate these issues and tryto establish a universal evaluation criterion of English sen-tence stresses.In order to estimate the appearance of sentence stresssyllables from contours of fundamental frequency andpower, each acoustic feature is to be normalized and quan-tized by syllable units. Then we adopt a linear discrim-inant function that integrates these acoustic features withweights. The weights, which reflect the importance of eachacoustic feature in perceiving English sentence stresses,are estimated by discriminant analysis using the TIMITdatabase.From the degree of agreement between natives’ per-ception and our method by a linear discriminant function,we verify the validity of our model. Also by comparisonwith the weights that are estimated from different natives’labels, we see the common and different characteristicsamong different natives’ perception.2. SPEECH MATERIALAs materials for the study, we picked up 310 sentencesproduced by English native speakers with New Englanddialect from the TIMIT database. Those speech sampleswere labeled by eleven English native speakers. From theirperception, we eliminated inadequate speech samples thathad neutral declarative rhythm to improve the reliability ofspeech materials and those labels.

The present study adopts both empirical and theoretical methods for the analysis of the acquisition of English sentence stress based on Optimality Theory, aiming to overcome mispronunciation of English sentence stress. Optimality Theory has a dramatic impact on most areas in linguistics besides phonology. The acoustic software Praat is chosen to collect and label data as the basis of the empirical method. Then, through analyzing the four major principles of distribution of sentence stress (content words stressed principle, rightmost words stressed principle, leftmost words stressed principle, and new information priority principle) and based on the analysis of Optimality Theory, the software Praat, and SPSS, the researcher can present the following findings: firstly, the constraint hierarchical ranking of nonnative speakers is DEP‐IO >> NEW‐IP >> ALIGN‐IP‐LEFT >> ALIGN‐IP‐RIGHT. Secondly, the native speakers also undergo the demotion of constraint hierarchical ranking: NEW‐IP >> DEP‐IO >> ALIGN‐IP‐RIGHT >> ALIGN‐IP‐LEFT. Thirdly, the constraint in each demotion of constraint hierarchical ranking during different stages is as follows: NEW‐IP constraint moves from the undominated position to the dominated position in the hierarchy; ALIGN‐IP‐RIGHT and ALIGN‐IP‐LEFT constraints move from the dominated position to the lower position in the hierarchy. Through the specific analysis, the researcher draws a conclusion that the varied reasons affect the nonnative speakers to master the distribution of sentence stress due to their incorrect position in the demotion of constraint hierarchical ranking.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of first language thinking-for-speaking patterns on the acquisition of Greek as a second language (L2), as well as to determine whether proficiency level and stays in the target-language country have an effect on such influence. The participants (N=50) were Spanish/Catalan learners of Greek who belonged to different proficiency groups (from A2.1 up to B2.1 of the Common European Framework of Reference) and had had stays in Greece of various durations (from a few weeks up to several years). The participants performed two tasks in their L2: a grammaticality judgement task and a picture description task, which included expressions that are encoded as a single verb in Greek but as a periphrasis in Spanish/Catalan, as well as in English (e.g. to be hungry, to be sleepy, to be embarrassed, etc.). A group of Greek native speakers (N=15) also did the same tasks. The results indicate that L1 patterns were transferred to the L2 and that the performance of the L2 learners was significantly different from that of the native speakers'. Moreover, proficiency and time in Greece played a significant role in the acquisition of the patterns under analysis.

Indonesian is the most widely spoken language in Indonesia. More than 200 million people speak the language as a first language. However, acoustic study on Indonesian learners of English (ILE) production remains untouched. The purpose of this measurement is to examine the influence of first language (L1) on English vowels production as a second language (L2). Based on perceptual magnet hypothesis (PMH), ILE were predicted to produce close sounds to L1 English where the vowels are similar to Indonesian vowels. Acoustic analysis was conducted to measure the formant frequencies. This study involved five males of Indonesian speakers aged between 20-25 years old. The data of British English native speakers were taken from previous study by Hawkins & Midgley (2005). The result illustrates that the first formant frequencies (F1) which correlates to the vowel hight of Indonesian Learners of English were significantly different from the corresponding frequencies of British English vowels. Surprisingly, the significant differences in second formant (F2) of ILE were only in the production of /ɑ, ɒ, ɔ/ in which /ɑ/=p 0.002, /ɒ/ =p 0,001, /ɔ/ =p 0,03. The vowel space area of ILE was slightly less spacious than the native speakers. This study is expected to shed light in English language teaching particularly as a foreign language.Keywords: VSA, EFL, Indonesian learners, formant frequencies, acoustic

The article considers the issue of the to-be translators’ training for cross-cultural professional interaction using as an example the communication between representatives of Spanish and Italian cultures. In this study, the author considered the possibility of combining the theoretical discipline of philosophical science with practical exercises for the development of speech competencies in Spanish and Italian foreign languages. After all, philosophy, according to the author, can become an integral auxiliary element in the formation of the worldview of future professionals, the formation of thinking, imagination, disclosure of creative and spiritual potential of the individual for further effective use in the realities of professional activity. The philosophy of education in recent years is considered by many authors as an important element that makes possible conscious educational development, which is not implemented within the dominant mentality. The article also described the essence of the concept of intercultural communication, because it is a fundamental element of professional translation. Given the practicality of new teaching models, the article examines the problem of forming a translator’s personality, their worldview, their human qualities, finding motivation and inspiration, revealing creative and intellectual potential and much more, which includes the process of preparing a translator for cross-cultural professional interaction. The domestic and foreign scientific and journalistic materials of the authors who worked in the field of philosophical science and its relationship with other disciplines and the process of professional training of applicants in higher education were considered and analyzed. Based on the experience and findings of research, the author has developed several examples of practical exercises based on crosscultural interaction in the Spanish-Italian environment, using which students of philology, translation and linguistics can work out and consolidate all necessary competencies in the process of philosophical science tasks. In the course of writing the article, the object of research was analyzed, which was the process of training future translators in higher education on the basis of a combination of philosophy and translation. The subject of research, which was the pedagogical conditions of preparation of future translators for cross-cultural professional interaction on the basis of a combination of philosophy and translation, was also considered. A set of exercises for the practice of cross-cultural interaction in the Spanish-Italian environment was developed, in which students of philology, translation and linguistics can work out and consolidate all the necessary competencies in the process of performing the proposed tasks through the prism of philosophical science. In the future, it is planned to expand and deepen research on this issue and develop new practical exercises and recommendations for their application for a comprehensive coverage of philosophical science for translators.