Listening skills instruction: practical tips for processing aural input

Two listening challenges faced by English L2 learners are (1) successfully identifying words in continuous speech and (2) understanding a speaker’s intended meaning. Listening is a skill L2 learners report wanting to improve, yet teaching practices often fail to advance learner knowledge and control of listening processes. Instructors can benefit from empirically-supported recommendations to help learners parse continuous speech, and discern speaker intent. This Teaching Tip shares two 3-part strategies to facilitate processing utterance content and interpreting message meaning. The practical tips presented here are consistent with a return in the larger TESOL field to a true communicative approach, relying on authentic materials and real communicative contexts rather than mere mimicry of connected speech features or particular intonation contours.Published versio

The effect of metacognitive strategy instruction on L2 learner beliefs and listening skills

This pilot study investigated the effect of semester-long strategy-based instruction on learner beliefs and skills in the processing of aural input by adult learners of English as a second language at metacognitive and procedural levels. The study addressed two frequently encountered learner beliefs thought to impede L2 processing of aural input: The little words aren’t important; intonation is merely decorative. Working on the premise that learner beliefs underpin learner strategies for processing aural input and are reflected in learner productive and receptive skills, pre- and post-instruction instruments measured both learners’ awareness of connected speech processes and the functions of intonation, and their ability to segment a continuous speech stream, and to process utterances for speaker intent. Findings using repeated measures analysis of variance support strategy-based metacognitive training in connected speech and stress and intonation to promote listening skills awareness, aid word segmentation, and facilitate understanding utterance content and intended meaning.Published versio

A comparative study of Chinese ESL learners from Malaysia and the People's Republic of China in their pronunciation of /r/&/l/

The purpose of this study is to investigate if consonants /r/ presented similar problems for Chinese ESL students from Malaysia and Chinese ESL students from the People’s Republic of China. Both groups of students were enrolled in ESL classes in Malaysia at the time of the study, and they were all ethnic Chinese, but they came from different countries, and have had different previous language-learning experiences. Respondents were asked to read four word lists and a poem made up of different percentages of words containing /r/ in initial or medial positions. Interestingly, the results indicated that the ESL students from Malaysia generally have more problems in pronouncing /r/ than students from the People’s Republic of China. This paper elaborated the implications the study has for formulating strategies to better deliver pronunciation skills in order to minimise, if not eliminate this problem among the Chinese ESL students from Malaysia

A hypothesis on improving foreign accents by optimizing variability in vocal learning brain circuits

Rapid vocal motor learning is observed when acquiring a language in early childhood, or learning to speak another language later in life. Accurate pronunciation is one of the hardest things for late learners to master and they are almost always left with a non-native accent. Here I propose a novel hypothesis that this accent could be improved by optimizing variability in vocal learning brain circuits during learning. Much of the neurobiology of human vocal motor learning has been inferred from studies on songbirds. Jarvis (2004) proposed the hypothesis that as in songbirds there are two pathways in humans: one for learning speech (the striatal vocal learning pathway), and one for production of previously learnt speech (the motor pathway). Learning new motor sequences necessary for accurate non-native pronunciation is challenging and I argue that in late learners of a foreign language the vocal learning pathway becomes inactive prematurely. The motor pathway is engaged once again and learners maintain their original native motor patterns for producing speech, resulting in speaking with a foreign accent. Further, I argue that variability in neural activity within vocal motor circuitry generates vocal variability that supports accurate non-native pronunciation. Recent theoretical and experimental work on motor learning suggests that variability in the motor movement is necessary for the development of expertise. I propose that there is little trial-by-trial variability when using the motor pathway. When using the vocal learning pathway variability gradually increases, reflecting an exploratory phase in which learners try out different ways of pronouncing words, before decreasing and stabilizing once the ‘best’ performance has been identified. The hypothesis proposed here could be tested using behavioral interventions that optimize variability and engage the vocal learning pathway for longer, with the prediction that this would allow learners to develop new motor patterns that result in more native-like pronunciation

Confidence Measures for Evaluating Pronunciation Models

In this paper, we investigate the use of confidence measures for the evaluation of pronunciation models and the employment of these evaluations in an automatic baseform learning process. The confidence measures and pronunciation models are obtained from the ABBOT hybrid Hidden Markov Model/Artificial Neural Network (HMM/ANN) Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) system [8]. Experiments were carried out for a number of baseform learning schemes using the ARPA North American Business News (NAB) and the Broadcast News (BN) corpora from which it was found that a confidence measure based scheme provided the largest reduction in Word Error Rate (WER)