Improvement In Pronunciation Research Articles

In This Issue

In This Issue

A Study on Pronunciation Improvement with Denture Sticking

A Study on Pronunciation Improvement with Denture Sticking

APPLYING ENGLISH SONGS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING.

The objective of this paper is to report the findings of a survey carried out with students in the Public University of Milagro to investigate the opinions regarding the use of songs in the English language learning classroom, and to make concrete proposals to help teachers in the use of this resource.Using songs in English learning produces a series of positive reactions in the cognitive learning process, enabling meaningful learning of vocabulary, phrases, and expressions; improvements in pronunciation and more natural interaction in the classroom. This study was carried out with students in the Second Semester of different courses, for this they responded to a survey with 10 questions about the topic. A simple analysis of the result revealed that students believe that the application of songs aids lay learning by providing opportunities to learn vocabulary in context, notice grammatical structure and improve pronunciation. They also responded that the use of songs was motivating.Drawing on these results, a number of activities are proposed to develop specific knowledge and skills and provide examples of how to design and apply them with different songs.

Differential effects of SA and intensive AH courses on teenagers' L2 pronunciation

The present study compares the differential effects of two learning contexts on the L2 pronunciation accuracy of L1‐Spanish/Catalan teenage learners of English. The learners engaged in either a study abroad (SA) course in the UK (n = 14) or in an intensive course at home (AH) in Spain (n = 22) for 3 weeks. Sentence‐sized production samples were elicited before and after the SA and AH courses through a delayed imitation task targeting difficult L2 phonetic and phonological features. L2 pronunciation accuracy was assessed through voice onset time (VOT) and perceived foreign accent (FA) measures. The results indicated that the SA learner group significantly improved their VOT and reduced their FA to a greater extent than the AH learner group did. VOT gains were significantly correlated with amount of FA reduction, suggesting that speakers who had developed a more target‐like production of oral stops were also perceived to have reduced their overall FA to a greater extent. Taken together these results underscore the potential of SA to induce improvement in L2 pronunciation. Several pedagogical implications are discussed.

Using Auditory Word Repetition to Improve L2 Pronunciation of English Schwa by Japanese Learners: From the Perspective of Phonological Processing

This study investigates the effects of immediate repetition of auditory words on L2 pronunciation improvement of English schwa by Japanese EFL learners. More specifically, the study is concerned with how the amount of input (i.e., five or ten repetitions) and stimuli characteristics (i.e., the position of schwa in a word, word familiarity) influences the repetition effect. The study consists of a study and a test phase: In the study phase, participants listened to and repeated words. In the test phase, they repeated spoken stimuli including previously heard as well as new words, both ten minutes and one week after the study phase. The auditory materials consisted of 32 real words. The duration ratio of schwa to a stressed vowel in a word and the quality of the schwa were acoustically examined. A repetition effect was mainly found in the durational aspect. Repeating the stimuli more than five times did not differentiate the effect. One week after the study phase, the effect persisted only for initial schwa, which is weakly represented in the participants’ mental representation. The pedagogical implications for L2 pronunciation teaching from the view of language processing are discussed.

The potential of music in promoting oracy in students with English as an additional language

The ways in which we are able to communicate are, most of the time, dominated through speaking and listening. The ability to speak, listen and understand speech is the basis of oracy; a necessity within society today. The purpose of this study was to examine the interconnectedness of music and language to identify if music can assist in the promotion of oracy in everyday communicative contexts in students who have English as an additional language (EAL). Through the creation of a purpose specific music program, five primary school participants were taught six Western songs, paired with appropriate questions, over a six-week period to determine their oral capacity. Methods within this action research study included observations, informal interviews and graphic melodic contouring. The results indicate that all participants demonstrated an increase in oracy, but to varying degrees, as well as the improvement of pronunciation and vocabulary acquisition. Recommendations for future studies within this area are discussed.

Exploring Optimal Pronunciation Teaching: Integrating Instructional Software into Intermediate-level EFL Classes in China

This study sought to investigate the effectiveness of teaching pronunciation with instructional software to a cohort of Chinese speakers of English aged from 13 to 16 with a lower-intermediate language proficiency level. It also attempted to explore the relationship between language learners’ attitudes towards pronunciation and their pronunciation learning. 
 
 
 
 Sixty students at an English language school in China participated in this project: 20 were instructed by a teacher, another 20 used instructional software (New Oriental Pronunciation) alone, and the remaining 20 received combined instruction from both a teacher and the software. Participants’ performances on pronunciation were evaluated in a pre-test and post-test. Their attitudes towards pronunciation were also assessed, in pre- and post- surveys. In addition, an open-ended questionnaire collected students’ reflections on the software and the lead researcher took observation notes during instruction.
 
 
 
 The greatest increase in performance was achieved by students who had undergone both forms of instruction, suggesting that the combination is optimal. Participants whose attitudes towards pronunciation changed the most made the greatest improvement in pronunciation, indicating that attitudes are crucial to pronunciation learning. This study provides a number of recommendations for various fields including software design, teacher training, and future research.

비원어민 교수자 음성모델을 이용한 자동발음평가 시스템

An appropriate evaluation on learner`s pronunciation has been an important part of foreign language education. The learners should be evaluated and receive proper feedback for pronunciation improvement. Due to the cost and consistency problem of human evaluation, automatic pronunciation evaluation system has been studied. The most of the current automatic evaluation systems utilizes underlying Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. We suggest in this work to evaluate learner`s pronunciation accuracy and fluency in word-level using the ASR and non-native teacher`s speech model. Through the performance evaluation on our system, we confirm the overall evaluation result of pronunciation accuracy and fluency actually represents the learner`s English skill level quite accurately.

Native and Nonnative Teachers of L2 Pronunciation: Effects on Learner Performance

Both native and nonnative language teachers often find pronunciation a difficult skill to teach because of inadequate training or uncertainty about the effectiveness of instruction. But nonnative language teachers may also see themselves as inadequate models for pronunciation, leading to increased uncertainty about whether they should teach pronunciation (Golombek & Jordan, 2005). Although studies have regularly shown that instruction is effective in promoting pronunciation improvement (Saito, 2012), it is not known if improvement depends on the native language of the instructor, nor if learners improve differently depending on whether their teacher is native or nonnative. This study investigated the effect of teachers' first language on ratings of change in accentedness and comprehensibility. Learners in intact English classes were taught one class by a nonnative‐ and one by a native‐English‐speaking teacher. Each teacher taught the same pronunciation lessons over the course of 7 weeks. Results show that native listeners' ratings of the students' comprehensibility were similar for both teachers, despite many learners' stated preference for native teachers. The results offer encouragement to nonnative teachers in teaching pronunciation, suggesting that, like other language skills, instruction on pronunciation skills is more dependent on knowledgeable teaching practices than on native pronunciation of the teacher.

웹(web)기반 프랑스어 발음 학습자료 활용에 대한 대학생 학습자들의 인식 연구

This study aims to develop a French pronunciation website based on constructive instruction design, online learning principles, and CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) interactions. This site is divided into three stages, in accordance with the 3P pronunciation teaching phases: a presentation stage, a practice stage, a production stage. In addition, questionnaires and face-to-face interview were conducted to investigate the usefulness of this approach. After a 10-week period, the results of the post-test showed a clear improvement in learners pronunciation. Comparison between the two test results illustrated that scores in reading passages showed a wider range of improvements compared to communicative assessment. This demonstrates the difficulty of attaining automatic use of learned pronunciation by means of learners conscious efforts. In that sense, the site was proven to be useful in learning suprasegmental features. Furthermore, questionnaires have demonstrated a positive effect on learners pronunciation, listening, and speaking ability. Improvement in listening was due to students being able to download, listen, and repeat native voices. Learners' speaking ability was also positively influenced by communicative tasks that integrated real encounters with online talking tools.

Effects of perceptual training on second language vowel perception and production

ABSTRACTThis study investigates whether audiovisual training leads to greater improvement in perception and production than auditory training. The participants (n= 60) were American English native speakers enrolled in intermediate French courses. They received audiovisual training, audio-only training, or no training, and were tested at pretest and posttest on their perception and production of French nasal vowels. The results suggest that both training groups improved significantly from the pretest to the posttest, but that the differences between the audiovisual and audio-only groups were not statistically significant. However, the production of the audiovisual training group improved significantly more than the production of the audio-only training group did, suggesting that seeing facial gestures leads to greater improvement in pronunciation.

Learners’ use of communication strategies in text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication environments: opportunities for language learning

This study investigates the different learning opportunities enabled by text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) from an interactionist perspective. Six Chinese-speaking learners of English and six English-speaking learners of Chinese were paired up as tandem (reciprocal) learning dyads. Each dyad participated in four kinds of interactions, namely, English text-based SCMC, Chinese text-based SCMC, English video-based SCMC and Chinese video-based SCMC. Their use of communication strategies (CSs) were analyzed along with an after-task questionnaire and with stimulated reflection to explore systematically and comprehensively the differences between text-based and video-based SCMC. In addition to the main role of qualitative analysis, the quantitative analysis was undertaken to provide an overview of the relative frequencies of the occurrence of the different strategies and to understand their distribution in the different conditions. A MANOVA was applied to understand to what extent the differences are likely to have occurred by chance. The results showed that learners used CSs differently in text-based and video-based SCMC and indicated different learning opportunities provided by these two modes of SCMC. While text-based SCMC appears to have greater potential for learning target-like language forms, video-based SCMC seems particularly effective for fluency development as well as pronunciation improvement.

Factors influencing the pronunciation of adult speakers of a foreign language

Abstract The present paper is an overview of selected investigations into acquisition of second language phonology (L2).1 It describes L2 phonology researchers’ attempts to determine the number, quantity, quality and roles of the factors which shape the pronunciation of L2 adult speakers, i.e. what is the influence of native language limitation, how the L2 phonology acquisition is governed by universal linguistic features, and whether adults use the same processes in acquiring the L2 that are used by children when they acquire their first language. This article will describe a number of longstanding phonetic and phonological projects whose aim was to discover patterns in the improvement of pronunciation in a second language (see research by Archibald, Broselow, Eckman, Flege, Hancin-Bhatt, Major and Weinberger, published in numerous compilations). It strives to explain the universal stages in the development of second language phonology. The main goal of the research is to assess the grammatical knowledge of the L2 learner, i.e. their competence in their interlanguage. The analyses show typological disproportions and universality of the strategies applied by the speakers in the target language. A few important hypotheses have been established (see below for their description), but it is important to note that most of the results verifying these hypotheses concern the acquisition of the English language, with a variable being the “input” languages of the speakers. Although this unilateral focus of the research projects reflects the expansion of the English language as the lingua franca of modern times, it might severely limit understanding of the important and interesting aspects of second language acquisition which structurally do not apply to that language, and are consequently overlooked.

Efficacy of Task-Based Learning in a Chinese EFL Classroom: A Case Study

This study investigated how task-based learning (TBL) developed the verbal competence of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) by employing qualitative and quantitative analyses. We compared the impromptu oral presentations on reading texts of 76 intermediate EFL learners given respectively in the beginning and the end of the 15-week study period at a Taiwanese university. The findings revealed that TBL was effective in fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and ineffective in accuracy. Besides, a standardized pretest and a post-test of English proficiency were administered, apart from a students’ self-report questionnaire at the end of the experiment. The results of the proficiency exams showed that students made significant improvements in reading and little improvement in listening after TBL. In the self-assessment of the effects of TBL, students felt improvements in vocabulary and pronunciation. Overall, TBL was motivational and useful for language acquisition. Learners’ attention was directed to a reading text as a whole for communicative purposes, and therefore their receptive and productive competence was enhanced.

Directing Attention to Pronunciation in the Second Language Classroom

Motivated by predictions of the theory of Input Processing, this study adds to previous research on second language (L2) Spanish pronunciation learning by investigating the impact of two distinct types of pronunciation assignments on first language (L1) English L2 Spanish students’ improvement in pronunciation of the vowels /e, o/. Two sections of a Spanish conversation class (n = 28) received identical instruction in Spanish articulatory phonetics over the course of one semester. One section (n = 15) completed a production-based pronunciation assignment five times throughout the semester in addition to this instruction. In this assignment, students recorded themselves and received feedback from the instructor. The other section (n = 13) completed a perception-based pronunciation assignment designed to force students to attend to English and Spanish phonetic differences five times throughout the semester. This assignment required students to listen to non-native Spanish speakers speaking in Spanish and to provide feedback on their pronunciation. Findings suggest that when students are forced to attend to differences in L1 and L2 articulatory phonetics, they are likely to improve their own pronunciation more than when they only receive articulatory phonetic instruction or when they complete assignments that do not require strict attention to L1 and L2 phonetic differences, such as speaking and receiving feedback.

Tongue-tie Repair: Z-Plasty Vs Simple Release.

Ankyloglossia is a congenital anomaly in which the lingual frenulum is unusually short and thick, thus decreasing tongue mobility. In the context of the newborn or young infant it is a subject of ongoing controversy within and between medical specialties. The controversy involves not only the definition but also the management of this anomaly. A tight lingual frenulum is considered a minor malformation by some investigators. Usual treatments for ankyloglossia include speech therapy, as well as simple frenulotomy and frenuloplasty. The aim of this study was to compare the latter two methods with respect to postoperative results and complications. A total of 50 patients referred for surgical care were randomly assigned into two groups: simple release (frenulotomy ) or Z-plasty (frenuloplasty), and underwent a pre-surgical assessment. After 3 months, patients were followed with a scheduled interview and questionnaire comparing the outcomes of the two methods. The data were analyzed using SPSS version 18. Surgery had a significant effect on all variables measured in our study (P<0.05). Z-plasty had a greater effect on articulation, breast pain, tongue movement and parent satisfaction than simple release (P<0.05). Z-plasty and simple release had the same effect on breast feeding, latching, and sucking. Z-plasty is the preferred surgical method to address tongue-tie due to a greater improvement in mother's breast pain, pronunciation and speech, tongue movement, and parental satisfaction.

Urdu EFL Students' Pronunciation, Awareness, and Instruction in Pakistan

This study probed into the speech of 40 Urdu EFL learners in a 16 weeks listening/speaking course, exploring the relationship between students’ pronunciation improvement and their pronunciation awareness, examined through learners’ conceptions of learning. The course focused segmental and supra-segmental aspects, including connected speech processes, intonation, and i¬‚uency. Students wrote weekly articles eliciting measures of pronunciation awareness and completed read†aloud and picture description tasks at the beginning and end of the course. Speech analysis was made through seven measures, including i¬‚uency and segmental and supra-segmental accuracy. Results displayed signii¬ cant improvements in students’ segmental production, enchainment, and some aspects of intonation and i¬‚uency. Several variables were associated with pronunciation awareness measures. Results have been discussed in the light of L2 pronunciation improvement and instruction awareness links.

Student Teachers’ Cognition about L2 Pronunciation Instruction: A Case Study

In view of the minimal attention pronunciation teacher preparation has received in second language (L2) teacher education, this study examined the cognition (i.e. beliefs, thoughts, attitudes and knowledge) development of 15 student teachers during a postgraduate subject on pronunciation pedagogy offered at an Australian tertiary institution. Findings revealed that, as a result of taking the subject, student teachers’ cognition shifted from teaching individual sounds (i.e. segmentals) to favouring a more balanced approach to pronunciation instruction. That is, teaching the melody of the English language (i.e. suprasegmentals) was seen as important as teaching segmentals. Non-native speakers’ self-perceived pronunciation improvement, an increase in their awareness of their spoken English, and native/non-native collaboration played critical roles in facilitating participants’ cognition growth. The findings also showed that cognition development is a complex process. The paper concludes with recommendations for preparing L2 teachers to teach English pronunciation in their classroom contexts.

What Predicts the Effectiveness of Foreign-Language Pronunciation Instruction? Investigating the Role of Perception and Other Individual Differences

Abstract: This study investigated second language (L2) learners’ perception of L2 sounds as an individual difference that predicted their improvement in pronunciation after receiving instruction. Learners were given explicit pronunciation instruction in a series of modules added to their Spanish as a foreign language curriculum and were then tested on their pronunciation accuracy. Their perception of the target sounds was measured with an AX discrimination task. Though the best predictor of pronunciation post-test score was pre-test score, perception made a unique and significant contribution. The other factors associated with better pronunciation of some L2 sounds were age, attitude, and time spent using Spanish outside the classroom. The results suggest that instructors should give adequate time for learners to hone their perception of target sounds at the outset of pronunciation instruction, because their initial ability to perceive the target sounds will, in part, determine how much they learn from such instruction. The results support models of L2 speech acquisition that claim that target-like perception is a precursor to target-like production, in this case in a formal learning context.

Tongue width at rest versus tongue width during speech: A comparison of native and non-native speakers

Most pronunciation researchers do not focus on the coronal view. However, it is also important to observe because the tongue is hydrostatic. We believe that some pronunciation differences between native speakers and second-language (L2) speakers could be due to differences in the coronal plane. Understanding these differences could be a key to L2 learning and modeling. It may be beneficial for pedagogical purposes and the results of this research may contribute to the improvement of pronunciation of L2 English speakers. An interesting way to look at native and L2 articulation differences is through the pre-speech posture and inter-speech posture (ISP—rest position between sentences). In this research, we compare native speakers to L2 speakers. We measure how different those postures are from the median position of the tongue during speech. We focus on movement of a side tongue marker in the coronal plane, and we normalize for speaker size. We found that the mean distance from pre-speech posture to speech posture is shorter for native English speakers (0.95 mm) than for non-native English speakers (1.62 mm). So, native speakers are more efficient in their pre-speech posture. Results will also be shown for distances from ISP to speech posture.