The Role of Curriculum Design and Teaching Materials in Pronunciation Learning

This paper aims to provide insights into the role of curriculum design and teaching materials in the development of English pronunciation skills in EFL contexts. One of the main contextual factors negatively affecting the development of pronunciation abilities of EFL learners relates to the ‘often-unchanging’ curriculum design and the ‘blind’ choice of teaching materials without regard to students’ needs and goals. This study utilises structured interviews and focus group discussions (N=2 sessions) to elicit the views of a group (N=71) of third- and fourth-year English-major students at a university college in Saudi Arabia on the appropriateness of the curriculum design and teaching materials to their learning expectations in the area of English pronunciation. The results show that the great majority of students spoke unfavourably about the overall curriculum and teaching materials and considered those to be among the obstacles that they encounter in their learning of English pronunciation. This finding raises the question of curriculum design of English language teaching programs and the extent to which these curricula meet the needs of learners. The study suggests that a reformation of the structure of the curriculum in the study context is urgently needed and that more involvement of students’ perspectives on the design of curricula is of major importance

Desperately Seeking a Communicative Approach: English Pronunciation in a Sample of French and Polish Secondary School Textbooks

The first part of this paper analyses pronunciation exercises in a representative sample of textbooks from each country. Pronunciation exercises were classified based on the degree to which they mobilize communicative abilities, according to the five categories of a Communicative Framework for teaching pronunciation (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, p45): Description & analysis, Listening discrimination, Controlled practice, Guided practice, Communicative practice. The first category involves little risk-taking by the learner, usually focusses on form and allows little freedom. At the other end of the spectrum, communicative practice involves a focus on meaning and interaction, with the concomitant greater freedom to make mistakes. The exercises were then analysed to see which segmental and/or prosodic features they favoured and to what extent

Hidden Losses: How Demographics Can Encourage Incorrect Assumptions about ESL High School Students’ Success

Data from ESL students’ records in Vancouver are examined in the light of the BC Ministry of Education’s claim that ESL high school students are more successful than students whose first language is English. We argue that the academic achievement of well-to-do students whose parents are skilled workers or entrepreneurs may mask the completion rates of students who entered BC through the family and refugee classes. The latter students, like their counterparts throughout Canada, are disappearing through the cracks in the education system. We maintain that it is time for provincial ministries, school boards, postsecondary institutions, and other stakeholders to work together to improve the current situation, which prevents many immigrant youths from achieving their educational aspirations.Des données provenant de dossiers académiques d’étudiants en ALS à Vancouver sont étudiées pour évaluer l’assertion du ministère de l’éducation de la Colombie-Britannique selon laquelle les élèves du secondaire en ALS réussissent mieux que ceux dont l’anglais est la langue maternelle. Nous proposons que la performance académique des élèves bien pourvus et dont les parents sont des travailleurs qualifiés ou des entrepreneurs pourrait masquer les taux de réussite des élèves étant arrivés en Colombie-Britannique sous les catégories «regroupement familial» et «réfugiés». Ces élèves, tout comme leurs homologues partout au Canada, glissent entre les mailles du système d’éducation. Finalement, nous affirmons qu’il est temps que les ministères des provinces, les commissions scolaires, les institutions postsecondaires et d’autres intervenants travaillent ensemble pour améliorer la situation actuelle qui empêche beaucoup de jeunes immigrants d’atteindre leurs objectifs en matière d’éducation

Spectral Characteristics of Schwa in Czech Accented English

The English central mid lax vowel (i.e., schwa) often contributes considerably to the sound differences between native and non-native speech. Many foreign speakers of English fail to reduce certain underlying vowels to schwa, which, on the suprasegmental level of description, affects the perceived rhythm of their speech. However, the problem of capturing quantitatively the differences between native and non-native schwa poses difficulties that, to this day, have been tackled only partially. We offer a technique of measurement in the acoustic domain that has not been probed properly as yet: the distribution of acoustic energy in the vowel spectrum. Our results show that spectral slope features measured in weak vowels discriminate between Czech and British speakers of English quite reliably. Moreover, the measurements of formant bandwidths turned out to be useful for the same task, albeit less direc

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

Do native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive comprehensibility in second language speech?

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10 Singaporean raters for overall comprehensibility and then submitted to pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, and grammar analyses. Whereas the raters’ comprehensibility judgements were generally influenced by phonological and temporal qualities as primary cues, and, to a lesser degree, lexical and grammatical qualities of L2 speech as secondary cues, their linguistic backgrounds did make some impact on their L2 speech assessment patterns. The Singaporean raters, who not only used various models of English but also spoke a few L2s on a daily basis in a multilingual environment, tended to assign more lenient comprehensibility scores due to their relatively high sensitivity to, in particular, lexicogrammatical information. On the other hand, the comprehensibility judgements of the Canadian raters, who used only North American English in a monolingual environment, were mainly determined by the phonological accuracy and fluency of the L2 speech

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

Foreign Accents in Polish: Non-native Speakers’ and Native Listeners’ Views

to draw implications for the phonetic training of foreigners who undertake to learn Polish

Citizenship Education for Adult Immigrants: Changes Over the Last Ten Years

During the past few years Citizenship and Immigration Canada has significantly changed the citizenship process by modifying the application procedure, eliminating many citizenship judge positions, introducing a multiple-choice test, and restructuring the citizenship ceremony itself. In order to assess the impact of these changes on citizenship education, we located and contacted citizenship programs across the country. For comparison purposes we followed much the same procedure used in a study conducted for the Secretary of State 10 years ago. The current study identified far fewer programs available to adult immigrants than in the past. Furthermore, since the last study the scope of the content in citizenship education programs has remained essentially unchanged in some instances or has been reduced in others. Recommendations are made for policy-makers.Depuis quelques années, Citoyenneté et Immigration Canada a modifié considérablement le processus d'obtention de la citoyenneté en apportant des changements à la procédure de demande, en éliminant plusieurs postes de juges de la citoyenneté, en y ajoutant une évaluation à choix multiples et en restructurant la cérémonie de remise des certificats de citoyenneté. Dans le but d'évaluer l'impact de ces changements sur l'éducation civique, nous avons identifié des programmes de la citoyenneté de par le pays et en avons contacté les responsables. Four faciliter la comparaison, nous avons suivi de près la même procédure qui a été employée lors d'une étude entreprise pour le Secrétaire d'État il y a 10 ans. Notre étude a noté que le nombre de programmes mis à la disposition des immigrants adultes a beaucoup diminué. De plus, depuis la dernière étude à ce sujet, l'envergure du contenu des programmes d'éducation civique a demeuré essentiellement inchangée dans certains cas, et a diminué dans d'autres. Nous offrons des recommandations aux initiateurs de programme