Turkish English Research Articles

Assimilation as a Co-articulation Producer in Words and Pronunciation Problems for Turkish English Teachers

The aim of this research is to diagnose and help students overcome their problems through practice activities in English Language Education Departments in Turkey. This paper measures the perception of co-articulatory information in terms of consonant-to-consonant relations in the structure of vocabulary items and affixes of English. Thirty eight freshmen who are presently studying in the department of English language education at Hacettepe University are the participants, who were given a pretest on vocabulary items that include 25 questions, with five alternatives for the diagnosis of the secondary articulations in the words. Thereafter, a three-hour intense teaching and practicing process took place. After two weeks, the participants were given a posttest that included new vocabulary items not asked in the pretest. Results of data analysis revealed that co-articulation and secondary articulation connection in the creation of assimilations constituted a serious pronunciation problem due to consonantal and vowel assimilations for Turkish students of English Language Education. Results also indicated that the perception of assimilation is weak at the end of the pretest, but there is a remarkable development after the instruction on secondary articulation and coarticulation in relation to the perception of assimilation in connected speech in English utterances.

Evaluation of the Production of the Intonation of Adverb Clauses with Time by Turkish English Teachers: A Demonstration by Computer Application

Adverb clauses can provide additional information about how something is done in relation to time; these clauses are often called “time clauses” or temporal clauses in English grammar books and fol...

Operationalizing multilingualism: language learning motivation in Turkey

This study is an examination of language learning motivation and multilingual status in the Turkish English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Using Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) framework, specifically the ideal and ought-to L2 selves, this study examines the relationship between motivation and two operationalizations of multilingualism: (1) any experience with a third language and (2) Perceived Positive Language Interaction (PPLI). Using an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and one-way ANOVAs with the data from 159 EFL learners in Turkey, the results indicate that there is a significant group effect for multilingual status for both operationalizations of multilingualism with the ideal L2 self; however, no significant difference was found between the groups with the ought-to L2 self. There is also a discussion about the importance of performing EFAs with questionnaire data in a variety of contexts, as well as further insights regarding the operationalization of the PPLI construct. As the L2MSS has not yet been investigated in the Turkish context, the results of this study help to further elucidate Turkish EFL students' language learning motivation to add to the growing body of literature on the multifaceted and dynamic nature of motivation in the field of second language acquisition.

Self and teacher assessment as predictors of proficiency levels of Turkish EFL learners

Although self-assessment of foreign language skills is not a new topic, it has not yet been widely explored in the Turkish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. The current study investigates the potential of self-assessment of foreign language skills in determining proficiency levels of Turkish learners of EFL: 239 learners participated in the study. Their receptive language skills were tested with an objective placement test, and the results were compared with the grades assigned by their instructors and the results of criterion-referenced self-assessment scores. Multiple regression analysis revealed that teacher and self-assessment scores were significantly correlated with each other; however, teacher assessment, compared to self-assessment, appeared to be a much stronger predictor of the actual proficiency levels of the participants. In addition to this, participants at lower level of proficiency revealed a common tendency of overestimating their language skills, while with the higher level learners there were clear signs of underestimation.

A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Pragmatic Markers as Speech-like Features in Turkish EFL Learners’ Argumentative Essays

Authentic learner data is important when investigating the use of the target language by learners during second language acquisition process. Whether it is written or spoken, corpus-based learner data provides an explanation for how learners actually use a foreign language and serves as a relatively narrow empirical basis that second language acquisition research tends to be based on. Analysing learner data has two main goals: to help researchers to better understand the second language acquisition process and to highlight the factors that influence this process (Granger, 2008). Gilquin & Paquot (2007) state that many learners use features more typical of speech than of writing, giving their essays an overly oral tone that may be problematic for learners, as academic writing requires an awareness of the appropriate stylistic use of tone. According to Aijmer (2004), learners may overuse or underuse certain structures in their writing in comparison with native speakers. Pragmatic markers are linguistic features that are more peculiar to conversation than writing, for instance well, you know, I think, etc. and learners may mistakenly include them in their academic writing. This study examines the pragmatic markers in the written text of Turkish English as foreign language (EFL) learners. The study's aim is to analyse the learners’ use of speech-like features when writing an academic essay. In addition, it is important to investigate whether or not learners overuse or underuse such features when compared to native speakers. Data were gathered from three corpora: the Turkish Corpus of Learner English, the Japanese Corpus of Learner English, and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays. Frequency counts and log-likelihood calculations were utilized as quantitative methods to measure the overuse/underuse and to determine whether the possible differences are statistically significant. The results indicated that Turkish EFL learners tend to use oral features in their argumentative essays, which may negatively influence their writing in terms of a stylistically appropriate tone.

Overuse of Discourse Markers in Turkish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Learners’ Writings: The Case of ‘I Think’ and ‘in My Opinion’

This study tries to dwell on overuse of two discourse markers I thinkand in my opinionin Turkish EFL learners’ written productions. The data was collected from 161 Turkish EFL learners and a corpus...

English

The purpose of this study was to examine Turkish English as a Foreign Language Learners’ (EFL) handling of unknown words while reading English texts. The study also examines the relationship between these learners’ perceptions and actual practices in the employment of knowledge sources while trying to guess the meaning of unknown words. The participants involved in this study were 40 pre-service teacher education students between the ages of 18-22 years old. Data were collected through mixed (qualitative and quantitative) methods, namely, by a twofold vocabulary strategy survey and a lexical inference test. Pearson correlation coefficients were conducted to determine what relationships exist among the perceived behaviours and actual practices of learners for unknown words. The results of the correlation analyses identified an insignificant correlation between the actual practices and perceptions of students for the contextual and intralingual knowledge sources. Keywords : contextual knowledge sources; intralingual knowledge sources; lexical inference

Validation of Self-Regulatory Capacity in Vocabulary Learning Scale in Turkish

This paper presents the findings of an adaptation and validation study of a questionnaire designed to measure self- regulatory capacity in vocabulary to a Turkish English as a Foreign Language context. First, the instrument was translated into Turkish and back translated into English. It was then administered to 102 pre-intermediate high school students. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the original higher order model after the removal of all environment control items and two emotion control items. The findings suggest that the Turkish version of the questionnaire can be a reliable and valid measurement of self-regulated vocabulary learning in high school students.

The impact of a third language on executive control processes

This study aims to investigate whether the representation of a third language in the mind provides an advantage in executive control processes compared to bilinguals. To this end 10 high proficient bilingual Turkish–English and 10 high proficient trilingual Turkish–English–German speakers were given a language control demanding task and participants’ response times (RTs) and the accuracy of their responses were analyzed. The results showed that the bilingual group responded to their L2 (English) statistically slower than their L1 (Turkish) while the trilingual group did not show any difference in RTs in their three languages. It is also found that the trilingual participants were far more accurate in their responses. Based on these results it is hypothesized that a third language system represented in the mind might have the effect of promoting experience or regulation costs of the executive control system.

Which/r/Are you Using as an English Teacher? Rhotic or Non-Rhotic?

There are many obvious differences between North American English (NAE) and British English (BrE)/r/phoneme, and a great majority of Turkish English teachers do not know which variant of the/r/they are using. It must be noted that such a case easily confuses the students. The articulation and production of North American English-r is ambiguous. In terms of articulation and pronunciation, NAE is also referred as General American (GA), and BrE is accepted as Received Pronunciation (RP). The American-r phoneme, whose IPA sign is [ ], which is a retroflex case of pronunciation, also called a flap, represents a very serious setback in teaching standard American pronunciation to Turks. As opposed to this, the BrE-r is a tap whose articulation is very close to Turkish-r word-initially and intervocalically.

Demonstration of Problems of Lexical Stress on the Pronunciation Turkish English Teachers and Teacher Trainees by Computer

Abstract Stress is an important intonational and prosodic feature both in North American English (NAE) and Brtish English (BrE.); therefore, lexical stress placement of the speaker and its perception as lexical stress detection occupy a crucial role in teaching English as a foreign language. The identification, determination and assignment of lexical stress are crucial issues because the perception of stressed syllables can provide non-native speaking teachers islands of reliability where the phonetic information is more prominent. But still the issue of stress assignment has not received much attention in foreign language teacher training programs. This paper stresses that nuclear stress placement has important implications for non-native speaking teachers.

The causes of the schwa phoneme as a fossilized pronunciation problem for Turks

The articulation of the schwa phoneme, symbolized by the [ə] in the IPA system, of the English language, is a serious pronunciation problem for Turkish English teachers, teacher trainees and the students of other fields of study. Because it does not take place in the Turkish vowel inventory, its articulation is managed by Turks in general. It holds a phonemic status in the English vowel inventory, and therefore it changes the grammatical category and the meaning of words, which boil down to mean that it can create breakdowns in communication. Mother tongue interference, vowel reduction, connected speech, lack of professional instruction are some of the causes that lead to the mispronunciation of the schwa phoneme by Turks. The inevitable result is that the schwa phoneme is a fossilized error of articulation for Turks.The aim of this study is to explore the causes of the constant mispronunciation of the English schwa phoneme by Turkish English teachers, teacher trainees and the students of other fields of study. Another purpose of this study is to show its importance in teacher education.

The specification of the difficulties in the perception and articulation of the English schwa phoneme by Turkish English teachers and students

“The term schwa, comes from Hebrew, where it means ‘emptiness’ and designates a Hebrew vowel of the same quality” (Skander and Burleigh, 2005:37). The schwa sound, whose symbol is [ə] in the IPA system, does not exist in modern standard Turkish Due to this mother tongue interference case, its correct production does not ever correctly take place in the articulation of a great majority of Turkish people because it is not audibly heard. Moreover, when the schwa sound appears in the connected speech, the recognition and production of its phonetic value generally goes unheeded. For example, such words like conclusion, confess, confuse, information, pronunciation, solution, and hundreds of other words are articulated not with a schwa. In addition, due to vowel reduction in English, the shift of all vowels and diphthongs into schwa because of stress shift in vocabulary items makes its recognition and production much more difficult.

Emotion-memory effects in bilingual speakers: A levels-of-processing approach*

Emotion-memory effects occur when emotion words are more frequently recalled than neutral words. Bilingual speakers report that taboo terms and emotional phrases generate a stronger emotional response when heard or spoken in their first language. This suggests that the basic emotion-memory will be stronger for words presented in a first language. Turkish–English bilinguals performed a deep processing task (emotional-intensity rating) or shallow processing task (counting letter features) and two additional deep processing tasks (translation and word association) on five categories of words (taboo words, reprimands, positive words, negative words, and neutral words), followed by a surprise recall task. Reprimands had the highest recall in English (L2), which may be a novelty effect. If reprimands are set aside, then overall emotion-memory effects were similar in the two languages, with taboo words having the highest recall, followed by positive words. Negative words had no recall advantage over neutral words, an unexpected finding. Results indicate that emotional attributes of words are equally available to boost memory in a first and second language in both shallow and deep processing tasks, athough some task-specific effects did occur.

A model to rehabilitate a fossilized pronunciation error of Turkish English language teachers: the nasal devoicing of /ŋ/ as /ŋk/

The Nonnative learners sharing the same L1 naturally converge toward L2 pronunciation heavily by the intrusion of L1, creating the fossilized articulation errors. It must be noted that fossilized pronunciation errors of segmental nature inevitably exert disproportionate impacts on the communicative competence by impairing the intelligibility, accuracy, and fluency of the nonnative learners. This negative Lı segmental intrusion is inescapable because the Lı phonemic inventory exerts mental blocks on the learners’ articulation skills if Lı and L2 do not share the same language typology. This presentation will prove that the difficulty of the/(/ nasal phoneme to Turks is such a case. In this study, it has been indicated that the audio-articulation model is a practical and workable method, and that novice teachers and students are capable of modifying their fossilized pronunciation errors and can bring them closer to the target language norms if they practice with the pronunciation correction model called the audio-articulation model.

The /æ / and /ʌ / Phonemes as Fossilized Pronunciation Errors for Turkish English Language Teachers and Students: Undoing the Fossilized Pronunciation Error

According to Haycraft, (1984: 90), “Since all humans have almost identical speech organs, there should not be any ‘difficult’ sounds.” This is not a totally true thought because the nonnative speaking students apply the pronunciation rules of their native language, and the result of such a conduct is the establishment of mother-tongue interference which boils down to be an unavoidable intrusion while learning a foreign language. A great majority of pronunciation errors are due to inevitable mother-tongue pronunciation habits, which exhibit certain resistance to the sounds of the target language. The mother-tongue association to the acquisition of some target language phonemes that are called the core sounds. (Demirezen 2007e). The core sounds of the English language, such “consonants like / t --->q, d ---> ð, v ---> w / and vowels like / e ---> ae, e ---> ɛ, ae ----> ɛ, ǝ ---> ae, ae ---> ʌ, ɔ ----> ow, ʊ -----> ʊw /, constitute the prime fossilized mistake continuum for the Turkish teachers, teacher trainees and students in learning and teaching English as a foreign language.” Demirezen, 2007e: 306). This articles aims at analyzing and offering rehabilitative solutions to one of such core sounds, namely / ae ---> ʌ / contrast that harms the pronunciation of Turkish learners of English.

Bilingual deep dysphasia

We report B.R.B., a bilingual Turkish–English speaker with deep dysphasia. B.R.B. shows the typical pattern of semantic errors in repetition with effects of lexicality and imageability on performance in both languages. The question we asked is whether language type (Turkish or English) or language status—that is, first acquired (L1) or second acquired (L2)—has a greater impact on performance. Results showed that repetition in L1 (Turkish) was better than that in L2 (English). We also observed effects of language status on oral reading, writing to dictation, and naming (spoken and written) with greater impairment to repetition than other tasks in both languages. An additional finding was that spoken-word translation in both directions was worse than written-word translation, and word class had an effect on translation from L1 to L2. We argue that interactive activation models of deep dysphasia could explain deep dysphasia in bilingual speakers and interactions between task and language, if the weighted connections that support language processing in L2 are assumed to be weaker, thus causing rapid phonological decay to have more impact on task performance in L2. Implications of the results for models of bilingual language processing are also considered.

A Model to Rehabilitate a Fossilized Pronunciation Error of Turkish English Language Teachers: the English Consonant Phoneme /ŋ/ Wrongly Articulated as /ŋk/ Through Nasal Devoicing

Turkish English language teachers have a general affinity to mispronounce the word-final /ng/ sound combination as /ŋk/ form, but not in an /Iŋ/ form, which is the right case. This is a typical case of a fossilized pronunciation. The result of the articulation is a bad sounding articulation that gives a serious hardship to the foreign language teacher. It must be borne in mind that bad pronunciation impedes and obscures intelligibility, accuracy, fluency, and automatic control of pronunciation in the target language. The fossilized pronunciation errors keep bothering the communicative fluency of the teacher trainees and novice foreign language teachers who are on the job. Since teaching foreign languages is a vocational job, developing a good intelligible pronunciation skill is an integral part of the profession. In this study, a very common and wrong articulation of /N/ phoneme as /Nk/ by Turkish English teachers will be tried to be rehabilitated by using the audioarticulation model.

The / æ / and / ǝ / Contrast as a Case of Fossilized Pronunciation Error for Turkish English Teachers

The [ae], called “ash” and [ ǝ ], called “schwa” are very frequent phonemes in English language that confuse the Turkish teachers of English. The main reason for this confusion is that both of them do not exist in modern standard Turkish. Another reason is the reduction of [ae] into [ǝ] in word formation process with the accompaniment of the change of primary stress to another syllable. For example, milk man, post man, and gate man are phrases by nature, but in a process of compounding they take the morphological form of milkmǎn, postmǎn, and gatemǎn through a phonological decay of the / ae / phoneme into / ǝ / phoneme with the reduction of the primary stress of the free word man into the weak stress form like -mǎn, relegating it into the position of a bound morpheme. This article, through a model lesson plan, will explore such sound changes that confuse the Turkish English teachers.

Taboo words and reprimands elicit greater autonomic reactivity in a first language than in a second language

Second language speakers commonly acknowledge that taboo terms can be uttered with greater ease in their second language (L2) than in their first language (L1). To investigate this phenomenon psychophysiologically, 32 Turkish–English bilinguals rated a variety of stimuli for pleasantness in Turkish (L1) and English (L2) while skin conductance was monitored via fingertip electrodes. Participants demonstrated greater autonomic arousal to taboo words and childhood reprimands (“Shame on you!”) in their L1 compared to their L2. This finding provides quantifiable support for the subjective experiences of L2 speakers.