The Influence of Attention to Language Form on the Production of Weak Forms by Polish Learners of English

The paper discusses a study whose aim was to examine the impact of attention to language form and task type on the realisation of English function words by Polish learners of English. An additional goal was to investigate whether style-induced pronunciation shifts may depend on the degree of foreign accent. A large part of the paper concentrates on the issue of defining ‘weakness’ in English weak forms and considers priorities in English pronunciation teaching as far as the realisation of function words is concerned. The participants in the study were 12 advanced Polish learners of English, who were divided into two groups: 6 who were judged to speak with a slight degree of foreign accent and 6 who were judged to speak with a high degree of foreign accent. The subjects’ pronunciation was analysed in three situations in which we assume their attention was increasingly paid to speech form (spontaneous speech, prepared speech, reading). The results of the study suggest that increased attention to language form caused the participants to realise more function words as unstressed, although the effect was small. It was also found that one of the characteristics of English weak forms, the lack of stress, was realised correctly by the participants in the majority of cases. Finally, the results of the study imply that, in the case under investigation, the effect of attention to language form is weakly or not at all related to the degree of foreign accent

Effects of two teaching methods of connected speech in a Polish EFL classroom

The results demonstrate that in general, NF proved more effective than NNF. With regard to individual processes of connected speech, NF was more effective in production, whereas no such effect was found for perception

Automatic Feedback for L2 Prosody Learning

International audienceWe have designed automatic feedback for the realisation of the prosody of a foreign language. Besides classical F0 displays, two kinds of feedback are provided to learners, each of them based upon a comparison between a reference and the learner's production. The first feedback, a diagnosis, provided both in the form of a short text and visual displays such as arrows, comes from an acoustic evaluation of the learner's realisation; it deals with two prosodic cues: the melodic curve, and phoneme duration. The second feedback is perceptual and consists in a replacement of the learner's prosodic cues (duration and F0) by those of the reference. A pilot experiment has been undertaken to test the immediate impact of the "advanced" feedback proposed here. We have chosen to test the production of English lexical accent in isolated words by French speakers. It shows that feedback based upon diagnosis and speech modification enables French learners with a low production level to improve their realisations of English lexical accents more than (simple) auditory feedback. On the contrary, for advanced learners involved in this study, auditory feedback appears to be as efficient as more elaborated feedback

Teaching Lexical Stress: Effective Practice in a Mandarin ELL Context

Current trends in teaching pronunciation to ELLs (English Language Learners) point towards a top-down approach. This refers to putting emphasis on the overarching prosodic features of English rather than the proper pronunciation of consonants and vowels. One of the most integral prosodic features in English is stress. Both lexical stress (stressed syllables within a word) and sentence stress (stressed words within a sentence) play an important role in the prosodic pronunciation of English. However, some languages, such as Mandarin, lack stress in their prosodic systems, instead employing features such as tonality. These languages both have overlap in their fundamental prosodic structures, with pitch changes as integral to both tonality in Mandarin and stress in English. I propose that ESL instructors will instill prosodic skills and thus make better communicators of their students by drawing attention to this positive transfer between both systems

A role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition

Infants segment words from fluent speech during the same period when they are learning phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. We use a Bayesian model to illustrate how feedback from segmented words might constrain phonetic category learning by providing information about which sounds occur together in words. Simulations demonstrate that word-level information can successfully disambiguate overlapping English vowel categories. Learning patterns in the model are shown to parallel human behavior from artificial language learning tasks. These findings point to a central role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition and provide a framework for incorporating top-down constraints into models of category learning

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)

Perception and production training effects on production of English lexical schwa by young Spanish learners

Phonetic training has been found to expedite aural and oral abilities in the L2. While considerable research has been conducted on the effects of perception training on production and of production training on perception, fewer studies have addressed them as separate training regimes in the same experimental setting outside laboratory conditions. This paper examined the effects of two training procedures (one based on production tasks and one based on perception tasks) on the production of English lexical schwa by young Spanish learners in their intact EFL classrooms. Both trained groups exhibited significant gains in the post-test and a slight advantage of the production-based trained group was observed. Learners? orosensory awareness, self-perception, and self-feedback were actions included in this protocol which may have contributed to such advantage. Our results demonstrate that guided pronunciation training protocols can be successful in the classroom with young learners to boost production skills