The Bold and the Beautiful: How Aspects of Personality Affect Foreign Language Pronunciation

In the main study, a group of Polish learners of English completed a number of mimicry tasks in three languages: Italian, Dutch and Chinese, as well as a narration task in English. Mimicry performance and English pronunciation were then assessed by native speakers and compared. Participants also completed a questionnaire concerning their feelings about the languages they were to mimic and a second questionnaire designed to detect affective factors such as language learning anxiety, as well as attitudes towards the pronunciation of Polish and English. The pilot study suggested that the perceived attractiveness of the foreign language to be mimicked did not affect the performance of most participants, and that mimicry skill was fairly constant across languages. However, those who were particularly concerned about their personal appearance showed greater fluctuation in their ability to mimic and their performance appeared to be influenced by their attitude towards the language. This is referred to by the author as the Cecily effect. That study also confirmed the results of my previous experimental work showing that mimicry skill is correlated to some degree with English language pronunciation and that both pronunciation and mimicry are negatively affected by high levels of anxiety. The main study sets out to investigate whether or not these conclusions hold true for a larger sample population and also seeks to determine the effect of confidence and willingness to take risks on scores for both foreign language pronunciation and mimicry exercises

Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch

An exploratory study of foreign accent and phonological awareness in Korean learners of English

Communication in a second or multiple languages has become essential in the globalized world. However, acquiring a second language (L2) after a critical period is universally acknowledged to be challenging (Lenneberg, 1967). Late learners hardly reach a nativelike level in L2, particularly in its pronunciation, and their incomplete phonological acquisition is manifested by a foreign accent—a common and persistent feature of otherwise fluent L2 speech. Although foreign-accented speech is widespread, it has been a target of social constraints in L2-speaking communities, causing many learners and instructors to seek out ways to reduce foreign accents. Accordingly, research in L2 speech has unceasingly examined various learner-external and learner-internal factors of the occurrence of foreign accents as well as nonnative speech characteristics underlying the judgment of the degree of foreign accents. The current study aimed to expand the understanding of the characteristics and judgments of foreign accents by investigating phonological awareness, a construct pertinent to learners’ phonological knowledge, which has received little attention in research on foreign accents. The current study was exploratory and non-experimental research that targeted 40 adults with Korean-accented English living in the United States. The study first examined how 23 raters speaking American English as their native language detect, perceive, describe, and rate Korean-accented English. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of the accent perception data, the study identified various phonological and phonetic deviations from the nativelike sounds, which largely result from the influence of first language (Korean) on L2 (English). The study then probed the relationship between foreign accents and learners’ awareness of the phonological system of L2, which was measured using production, perception, and verbalization tasks that tapped into the knowledge of L2 phonology. The study found a significant inverse relationship between the degree of a foreign accent and phonological awareness, particularly implicit knowledge of L2 segmentals. Further in-depth analyses revealed that explicit knowledge of L2 phonology alone was not sufficient for targetlike pronunciation. Findings suggest that L2 speakers experience varying degrees of difficulty in perceiving and producing different L2 segmentals, possibly resulting in foreign-accented speech

Re-examining Phonological and Lexical Correlates of Second Language Comprehensibility:The Role of Rater Experience

Few researchers and teachers would disagree that some linguistic aspects of second language (L2) speech are more crucial than others for successful communication. Underlying this idea is the assumption that communicative success can be broadly defined in terms of speakers’ ability to convey the intended meaning to the interlocutor, which is frequently captured through a listener-based rating of comprehensibility or ease of understanding (e.g. Derwing & Munro, 2009; Levis, 2005). Previous research has shown that communicative success – for example, as defined through comprehensible L2 speech – depends on several linguistic dimensions of L2 output, including its segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation, fluency-based characteristics, lexical and grammatical content, as well as discourse structure (e.g. Field, 2005; Hahn, 2004; Kang et al., 2010; Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012). Our chief objective in the current study was to explore the L2 comprehensibility construct from a language assessment perspective (e.g. Isaacs & Thomson, 2013), by targeting rater experience as a possible source of variance influencing the degree to which raters use various characteristics of speech in judging L2 comprehensibility. In keeping with this objective, we asked the following question: What is the extent to which linguistic aspects of L2 speech contributing to comprehensibility ratings depend on raters’ experience

Discrimination at Work: Comparing the Experiences of Foreign-trained and Locally-trained Engineers in Canada

This paper reports on the findings of a study of the experiences of discrimination faced by internationally- trained engineers in Canada. Three hundred foreign-trained and two hundred locally trained engineers were surveyed in order to identify the relationship of race, language proficiency, and location of training in finding work in the engineering field. In addition to measuring whether the applicants found work in the engineering field, this paper also sought to understand the perception of discrimination of internationally-trained engineers. Our findings demonstrate the relationship of race/ethnicity and its related marker—foreign training—with both ability to secure work in the engineering field and perceptions of discrimination. In the case of new immigrants, location of training was found to be a significant predictor of ability to find work in the engineering field, where locally-trained engineers were far more likely to acquire a job in the engineering field than foreign-trained engineers. Race/ethnicity was also found to be significantly associated with getting an engineering job among the locally-trained engineers

Lexical profiles of comprehensible second language speech: the role of appropriateness, fluency, variation, sophistication, abstractness and sense relations

This study examined contributions of lexical factors to native-speaking raters’ assessments of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Extemporaneous oral narratives elicited from 40 French speakers of L2 English were transcribed and evaluated for comprehensibility by 10 raters. Subsequently, the samples were analyzed for 12 lexical variables targeting diverse domains of lexical usage (appropriateness, fluency, variation, sophistication, abstractness, and sense relations). For beginner-to-intermediate speakers, comprehensibility was related to basic uses of L2 vocabulary (fluent and accurate use of concrete words). For intermediate-to-advanced speakers, comprehensibility was linked to sophisticated uses of L2 lexis (morphologically accurate use of complex, less familiar, polysemous words). These findings, which highlight complex associations between lexical variables and L2 comprehensibility, suggest that improving comprehensibility requires attention to multiple lexical domains of L2 performance

Addressing the Past, Embracing the Future: An Analysis of How Historic Inequality has Created Current Obstacles to Learning English in Brazil and a Proposal for a New Community-Based Approach

This paper contextualizes current challenges to English learning in Brazil within the educational history of the country. It explores the ways in which language, both native literacy and foreign, has been used to set apart and advantage the elite class, while educational policy and approaches have served to pacify and control the majority. This history has left psychological, cultural, and economic legacies which inhibit learning today. Nevertheless, modern globalization is placing increasing pressure on Brazilians to achieve fluency in English and other languages. This paper briefly outlines the new and complex intellectual and social skills needed to participate in a global world, which have not been developed by authoritarian approaches to education, as well as how the development of English as an International Language (EIL) provides a solution to the identity conflict caused by an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) perspective. With this historic and modern context as the background, this paper describes the importance of English in the ecotourism destination of Bonito, Brazil and outlines a new approach to English learning that seeks to address the challenges previously discussed here and engage learners actively in the process of language learning

English prosodic marking of Information Structure by L1-Japanese second language learners

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018