Future challenges of the impact agenda

This chapter acts as an afterword, summarising the main themes in the book, including the challenges presented by the UK impact agenda and how these challenges might look in the future

Research-led teaching in phonetics: an exercise in research literacy

Research-led teaching can take a number of different forms, including training students in research methods, exposing students to research, and engaging students in it as participants. This paper reports on an exercise to engage university students in phonetic research as part of a credit-bearing module by involving them in the research as participants and using an assessed reflective exercise to improve students’ understanding of aspects of phonetic research, i.e., research design and data collection. This enabled students to evaluate not only the research methodology, but also their roles as participants and as prospective researchers, thus improving their research literacy

English lexical stress, prominence and rhythm

English speech rhythm is closely associated with the patterns of lexical stress and prominence in a stream of speech. Older varieties of English (OVEs), such as British and American English, which usually operate as the model in English language teaching, are often described as ‘stress-timed’, meaning the time between stressed syllables is more or less equal, in comparison with ‘syllable-timed’ languages (e.g., French or Cantonese), for which the time between successive syllable onsets is more or less equal. The usefulness of this distinction, however, has been disputed; e.g., Cauldwell (2002) talks about ‘functional irrythmicality’ in English speech. Cutler (1984) explains that native speakers of English focus on stressed syllables when listening to a stream of speech as part of the decoding process; i.e., for native speakers, lexical stress and the rhythm of the incoming signal play an important part in perception. Couper-Kuhlen and colleagues (e.g., Auer, Couper-Kuhlen, & Müller, 1999) have shown that speech rhythm plays an important part in the coordination of turn-taking in conversation. Anderson-Hsieh and Venkatagiri (1994) argue that speakers’ intelligibility will be affected if they do not sufficiently weaken English unstressed syllables. Such research indicates that the differences in the lexical stress and/or speech rhythm patterns of learners of English, or speakers of New Varieties of English (NVEs) which are not ‘stress-timed’, could create difficulties in comprehension and cooperative interaction for native speakers of OVEs and also, plausibly, for other speakers of English if they are using similar strategies. However, whether the majority of speakers of English in the world have a speaker of an OVE as their target interlocutor is coming increasingly under question. This chapter gives an overview of English lexical stress, prominence and speech rhythm in OVEs, including theoretical approaches to their description, and includes suggestions for pedagogical approaches for the English language classroom

Malay English intonation: the cooperative rise

This paper presents the findings of a study on the intonational features in ten proficient Malay Speakers of English (MSEs), focusing on a distinct rising tone (the Cooperative Rise, CR). Using Brazil’s (1985) Discourse Intonation as a framework for analysis, the CR discourse function differs from the rise and fall-rise of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) as described in Brazil (1985). The CR is a referring tone used to provide extra emphasis on important information and create a more cooperative and supportive tone. The form and function of the CR are examined in relation to Standard Southern British English (SSBE, 1985) and other varieties of World Englishes. The results indicate that duration and pitch range of the CR are significantly different from the standard rise

Pitch range and vowel duration in the speech of children with Williams syndrome

This paper reports the pitch range and vowel duration data from a group of children with Williams syndrome (WS) in comparison with a group of typically developing children matched for chronological age (CA) and a group matched for receptive language abilities (LA). It is found that the speech of the WS group has a greater pitch range and that vowels tend to be longer in duration than in the speech of the typically developing children. These findings are in line with the impressionistic results reported by Reilly, Klima and Bellugi [17]

The penultimate syllable vowel length among Setswana-English bilingual children

This study examines the relative duration of the penultimate syllable vowel (PSVL) in multisyllabic Setswana words in the speech of 20 Batswana (citizens) primary school children aged 6-7 years growing up in Botswana. Setswana phonology requires the lengthening of the vowel in the penultimate syllable of multisyllabic words. The participants are 10 privately educated English medium early sequential Setswana-English bilingual children, taught full-time in English (L2) from the age of 3 years, for whom English has become dominant, and 10 Setswana monolingual children. The aim is to see whether the L2, which does not have the PSVL as a phonological pattern, has had an effect on the L1 of the bilinguals. The results show that the bilinguals do not lengthen the penultimate syllable vowel; rather, they lengthen the vowel of the final syllable. The results support the notion that extensive exposure to L2 can cause changes to the patterns of L1

Enhancing L2 learners’ perception and production of the Arabic emphatic sounds

This study examined the Arabic L2 learners’ ability to perceive and produce the emphatic sounds /sˤ/, /ðˤ/, /dˤ/, and /tˤ/. Specifically, the study explored the effects of traditional-based and technology-based instruction in enhancing learners’ perception and production of these sounds. Data were collected from forced-choice identification tasks and audio recordings taken during pre- and post-test conditions. The results revealed that the emphatic sounds posed a considerable amount of perception and production difficulties to L2 learners of Arabic. Additionally, there were significant improvements among all participants after the traditional and technological training courses and that the difference in the outcome between the two teaching methods was not significant

Students as change partners in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading

The pedagogic landscape in Higher Education (HE) has certainly witnessed change in recent years, and involving students as partners in aspects of degree programme development is part of that change (Lowe and Dunne, 2017). Darling-Hammond (2009) described how educational systems internationally are changing priorities to enable students to ‘cope with complexity, use new technologies, and work cooperatively to frame and solve novel problems’ (p. 45). Zhao (2011) asserts that it is vital to engage students as partners in change, giving them an active hand in programme design, to enable students to develop into creative individuals who leave education with much more than just an academic qualification; it is an ‘authentic way to develop professional skills’ (Giles, Martin, Bryce & Hendry, 2004, p. 681) as well as an opportunity to develop a positive and autonomous approach to learning that will be long lasting and productive The case study which follows involved students working cooperatively with each other and with staff in a School of Literature and Languages. Together, we re-designed a new module aimed at developing students’ understanding of the demands of university level study and writing and supporting them in their transition from sixth form to Higher Education

Nuclear tones in Hong Kong and British English

This paper contributes data towards a phonological description of intonation in Hong Kong English (HKE), an emergent, ‘nativising’ but under-described variety of English spoken primarily as the second language of L1 Cantonese speakers. We demonstrate choice and realisation of nuclear tones for ten HKE-speaking and ten British English (BrE)-speaking university students. All speakers were recorded undertaking a storytelling task in which different nuclear tones are canonically associated with different types of utterance, e.g., yes/no question and sarcastic statement. New BrE data not only provide a point of comparison, but also demonstrate ways in which form and function of contemporary BrE prosody have changed since the textbook descriptions of the last century. Greatest disparity between the groups is found for ‘tag’ phrases such as in checking, and in the paralinguistic use of rise-fall. Production of target contours ranged from 64 to 86% for the BrE cohort, 43-71% for HKE

The perception of sentence stress in Malay and English

There is little research on stress and prominence in Bahasa Melayu (BM). Work which has been done on varieties of Malay concluded that pitch or durational differences do not contribute to the production or perception of stress. This study aimed to investigate the role of intensity in the perception of stress in BM among two groups of listeners, 16 native speakers of BM and 30 of BrE, in comparison with spoken British English (BrE) and Malay Speaker English (MSE). Listeners rated 30 low-pass filtered sentences, ten from each language, indicating all syllables they perceived as stressed. Comparisons of listener identification of stress with syllable intensity yielded no statistically significant difference in the BrE and MSE conditions. In the BM condition, BrE listeners rated significantly more syllables as stressed with low to mid intensity than the BM listeners. The results are discussed in terms of the contribution of intensity to perceived prominence in languages