Podcasting as a way to improve teacher trainees’ ability to make proper sentence stress

153 Páginas.El presente es un reporte de un proyecto de investigación acción que se llevo a cabo con 26 estudiantes del programa de Licenciatura en Inglés de la Universidad del Tolima, con el fin de identificar el efecto de usar archivos de audio digitales (podcasts) como herramienta para mejorar los acentos de frase en ingles. El proyecto conectó los conceptos de andragogía, podcasting, inteligibilidad y acentos de frase. Los datos fueron recolectados usando dos encuestas, (una al principio y otra al final de la implementación), archivos de audio y diarios elaborados por los estudiantes. Dichos datos revelaron que aun cuando el avance a nivel de acentos en frases en inglés no resultó ser tan significativo, los estudiantes percibieron las actividades de manera muy positiva y manifestaron que el trabajo con los archivos de audio les había sido muy útil al auto-evaluar su pronunciación y al enriquecer su repertorio de herramientas pedagógicas para su docencia

Explicit phonetic instruction vs. implicit attention to native exposure: Phonological awareness of English schwa in CLIL

Abstract: The present study aims at determining whether instruction in the form of explicit phonetic training and of implicit exposure to native input impacted Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) students? phonological awareness of the occurrence of English schwa in unstressed syllables of content words (bacon). Four intact CLIL groups were administered a perception task immediately before and after an intervention period of one month in which two groups underwent explicit instruction on the incidence of reduced vowels versus full vowels in English disyllabic words while another group was exposed to native input in their CLIL sessions. A fourth CLIL group with neither explicit intervention nor native teacher input served as control group. All four groups tended to judge both schwas and full vowels as correct in the pre-test, indicating that they were not knowledgeable of the general pattern of vowel reduction occurrence in unstressed syllables in English prior to intervention. In the post-test, the three experimental groups significantly improved their ability to identify full vowels as incorrect, the groups receiving explicit instruction exhibiting higher gains than the group which was implicitly exposed to native input.This article was supported by the University of the Basque Coutry (UPV/EHU) (IT904-16), and Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (FFI2009-10264)

Challenges of Oral English in English as a Second Language (ESL) Learning in Nigeria

Second language learning has continued to pose learning challenges to English as a Second Language Learner (ESL) learners in Nigeria. Many scholars have carried out various research works on the problems of language learning and have come out with various recommendations, but in spite of these efforts, the problems of learning to use a second language have persisted. As it is, many of the teachers of English are non – native speakers and secondly, the language is being learnt and used far away from its natural environment. Elugbe (2000) observes that non native speakers are not likely to have expertise in second language because only the native speaker can claim to have expertise and proficiency in his language, other users are only aspiring to reach the target of proficiency, especially in spoken English. This challenge is the focus of this paper

The status of the word-final domain and linguistically-constrained language learning cues

Past experimental and theoretical research have argued that phonological devoicing as a word-final phenomenon only has inherent phonetic motivation to exist utterance-finally and that its presence at lower domain levels is due to analogy (Hock 1991, 1999; Hualde and Eager 2016). This evinces the idea that the word is not a domain tied to phonology inherently. Juxtaposingly, final devoicing (FD) is found phonetically at various prosodic domain levels. Final lengthening (FL) is also found at various prosodic levels, though is explained as only having a push to exist utterance-finally through a process similar to the “slowing down of a machine” or “tempo change...local to the final gesture in the phrase” (Klatt 1976 and Edwards et al. 1991 respectively). The present artificial language learning (ALL) experiment gives evidence that these cues may have an inherent reason for existing at lower domain levels. Participants were exposed to 7 minutes of AL stimulus in one of three conditions: transitional probabilities (TP) or the likelihood that syllables will occur in sequence together, final lengthening (FL) or greater duration of final segments, and final devoicing (FD) or a trailing off of voicing in word-final segments. They were then tested on their ability to segment the AL words out of the speech stream. The results show there is a perceptual effect to having phonetic FL at the right edge of words for listeners, in that it increases novel word segmentation ability above the level of only TPs. The same effect was not found for FD. The FL results indicate that phenomena in the word-final area may be used for perceptual reasons, providing evidence speakers use phonetic effects at the word-level

Teaching and learning English pronunciation in Finland

Abstract. The purpose of this Bachelor’s thesis is to review existing literature regarding the teaching and learning of English pronunciation with the perspective of Finnish education. As English has become a worldwide language, in the future, people will need to be more adaptable to the versatile front of international spoken English, leading to the need for English as foreign language students to be able to understand and speak a comprehensible variation of it. Most students in Finland start learning English in the beginning of elementary school, and by the time they finish comprehensive school, they will be expected to understand various accents, and speak an intelligible variation of English themselves. However, students do not need to become ‘perfect pronouncers’, but confident and comprehensive users of spoken English (Atli & Bergil, 2012). This, already, establishes the need for quality pronunciation education. In this thesis, schools’ explicit influence in the acquisition of pronunciation is looked through the general viewpoint of foreign language learning in Finland, before considering the importance and intelligibility issues of pronunciation teaching and learning. The aim of this literature review is to discover the methods and techniques used to teach English pronunciation to Finnish students, in addition to considering the various aspects affecting the optimization of the learning. Furthermore, it is found, that factors such as age, personal background and motivation affect the learning of English pronunciation. Also, the schools’ and teachers’ impact on the learning process are considered. Pronunciation remains an integral part of language learning, and it should be given its due recognition in foreign language teaching and learning, as it paves way for intelligibility and comprehensibility.Tiivistelmä. Tämän kandidaatintyön tarkoitus on tarkastella olemassa olevaa kirjallisuutta englannin lausumisen opettamisesta ja oppimisesta Suomen koulutuksen näkökulmasta. Koska englannista on tullut maailmanlaajuisesti käytetty kieli, ihmisten tulee tulevaisuudessa olla paremmin sopeutuvia sen monipuolisiin muotoihin. Tämä tarkoittaa, että englantia vieraana kielenä oppivan oppilaan tulee pystyä ymmärtämään ja puhumaan sitä ymmärrettävästi. Suurin osa suomalaisista oppilaista alkaa opiskelemaan englantia ala-asteen ensimmäisillä luokilla. Peruskoulun päättyessä heidän oletetaan myös ymmärtävän erilaisia englannin aksentteja ja puhesävyjä. Oppilaiden ei kuitenkaan tarvitse osata täydellistä englannin lausuntaa, mutta heidän toivotaan olevan itsevarmoja ja ymmärrettäviä englannin puhujia. Jo tämä vahvistaa englannin lausumisen opiskelun tarpeen. Tässä kandidaatintyössä käydään läpi koulun vaikutusta englannin lausumisen oppimiseen vieraan kielen opetuksen näkökulmasta ennen lausumisen opiskelun tärkeyden ja ymmärrettävyyden käsittelyä. Tämän kirjallisuuskatsauksen tarkoitus on tarkastella suomenkielisten oppilaiden englannin lausumisen oppimisen menetelmiä ja toteutumista, sekä sen oppimisen mahdollistamista. Koulussa tapahtuvan opetuksen lisäksi tarkastellaan muita englannin lausunnan oppimiseen vaikuttavia tekijöitä, kuten oppilaan ikää, kielellistä taustaa sekä motivaatiota. Myös koulun ja opettajan rooleja oppimisen optimoinnissa käsitellään. Lausunta on yksi kielen olennaisimmista osista, mikä tulee huomioida vieraan kielen opetuksessa ja oppimisessa, sillä se tukee oppilaan lausunnan ymmärrettävyyttä

Impact of visual based prosody training on listening micro-skills.

El fomento de la habilidad de escucha en el aprendizaje del idioma inglés ha sido directamente acercado al desarrollo de estrategias para mejorar la escucha comprensión. Sin embargo, incluso abrazar tal habilidad receptiva en clase, el lenguaje educadores han prestado poca atención al desarrollo de las habilidades de escucha micro necesaria para permitir la comunicación genuina. Como Ylinen (2010) sostiene, la correcta la comprensión del habla idioma extranjero requiere un reconocimiento adecuado de los sonidos del habla. Con esto en mente, este estudio trata de determinar hasta qué punto formación basada visual en la prosodia de la lengua facilitaría escucha los alumnos el desarrollo de micro-habilidades. Esta investigación involucró a 29 pre-servicio de idiomas Inglés profesores de una universidad pública que se inscribieron en la fonética y por supuesto fonología. Dentro de la clase de instrucción y actividades fuera de clase eran implementado por implique la utilización del software de análisis de realimentación visual acústico.Fostering the listening skill in English language learners has been directly approached to the development of strategies for enhancing listening comprehension. However, even embracing such receptive skill in class, language educators have paid scant regard to the development of listening micro-skills needed to enable genuine communication. As Ylinen (2010) contends, the correct comprehension of foreign language speech requires an adequate recognition of the speech sounds. With this in mind, this study sought to determine to what extent visual based training in prosody of the language would facilitate learners’ listening micro-skills development. This research involved 29 pre-service English language teachers from a public university who were enrolled in the Phonetics and Phonology course. In-class instruction and outside class activities were implemented by entailing the use of the acoustic analysis software visual feedback

Integrating Information Technology in theTeaching/Learning of English Pronunciation in the Classroom: Designing and Implementing an Online Course to Teach Word and Sentence Stress to Tertiary Level Students.

Este estudio investiga el potencial del uso de la tecnologia en la ensenanza y el aprendizaje de la pronunciacion. El estudio explora el progreso de los estudiantes en la pronunciacion en ingles con respecto a la acentuacion de palabras y oraciones. El curso de pronunciacion era original, se creo especialmente para los participantes de este estudio, teniendo en cuenta los errores tipicos que cometen los hablantes de espanol / catalan como resultado de la interferencia del idioma materno. El estudio se llevo a cabo con dos grupos de 24 estudiantes universitarios de primer ano que actuaron como control y experimental. El grupo control recibio instruccion sobre la acentuacion de ingles por medios convencionales, mientras que el grupo experimental utilizo un entorno virtual para el aprendizaje de la pronunciacion. El estudio utilizo un diseno de prueba previa, intervencion y prueba posterior. Para evaluar los datos, se adoptaron tres enfoques diferentes. Las tareas de lectura fueron evaluadas mediante analisis acustico

A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters