No description available.

This study is an examination of the effectiveness of a method of teaching French phonics at the junior high school level and its effect in reducing the dangers of using the printed word from the beginning of language study. Fifty-two grade IX students with no previous experience of French were taught a specially written ten week course using the mimicry-memorization method of learning sentence patterns in French. One group, the "two impression" group, studied this material with only oral-auditory stimuli, seeing only the English equivalent of the French they were expected to know. The other group, the "four impression" group, learned the same material by the oral, auditory, visual and kinesthetic stimuli since from the first lesson they saw and copied the French spelling after doing oral auditory drill. Special care was taken in drilling the latter group in the French orthographic system and in its phonetic basis. Students were expected in this way to "overlearn" the unit on French phonics in an attempt to reduce the English-type mispronunciation that could be expected. From the two groups were selected matched pairs using the following criteria for purposes of matching: first, I.Q.; secondly, the current year's grades on the June examinations in English language, Science, Mathematics and Social Studies; and lastly musical aptitude. Groups had equal number of boys and girls. Tests were administered in auditory comprehension, in oral translation from English into French, and in pronunciation of French. A comparison of the means at the end of the ten week course showed a slight difference in favour of the two impression group in auditory comprehension and in favour of the four impression group in oral translation and pronunciation. None of these differences was significant at the 5% level. The analysis of type and number of errors in the pronunciation test showed that those who saw the French had slightly more errors of pronunciation which seemed to be caused by interference from the English orthographic system. There were twice as many errors of this type in the four impression group as in the two impression group. These mistakes represented only six per cent of the total number of mistakes made. It was noted that those who had seen no French spelling still tended to mispronounce some French words in an English way. It is concluded that the overlearning of French phonics appeared to have overcome what disadvantage might be expected to accrue from the teaching of French using the written word from the beginning. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

This research addressed the nature of mainstream counsellors' attitudes towards their culturally different clients. This investigator conducted two separate studies in which all of the subjects were students in the Department of Counselling Psychology at The University of British Columbia. The counsellors in the first study were in the first year of the counselling program (novice) while those in the second study were in their final year (mature). The research design was an experimental post-test only control group. Counsellors' attitudes towards their culturally different clients were investigated by presenting a client who had a foreign accent. In each study one group was exposed to a non-accented client in a counselling situation and the other group was exposed to a foreign-accented client. A matched-guise videotape of a client presenting a counselling problem was shown to the two groups of counsellors in each study. Each counsellor in the control group viewed a non-accented client and each counsellor in the experimental group viewed the same client but with a foreign accent. To measure the attitudes of counsellors towards their clients, a Semantic Differential Attitude Scale was constructed utilizing 50 bipolar adjectives. In addition, the counsellors responded to a written Interview Questionnaire designed to investigate what may influence the attitudes of the counsellors, such as: similarity of beliefs; perception of the client's motivation and an awareness of cultural differences. In both studies all counsellors rated the client in the accented and non-accented situations with an overall positive attitude on the Semantic Differential Scale. However, the counsellors exposed to the accented client, in Study One responded with a more positive intensity of attitude than the counsellors who viewed the non-accented client (p≤.001). The counsellors in the second study did not differ in their attitudes towards the accented or non-accented client (p>.05). In response to the Interview Questionnaire, the novice, beginner counsellors in Study One generally reacted to the client on a more personal level with the mainstream counsellors in the accented situation reporting more affinity towards the client. Those more mature counsellors in Study Two were less involved and attended to the external influences on the client (accented or not). Recommendations for future counselling research are suggested in the areas of the attitudes of counsellors towards their accented clients; similarity of experience as a variable which influences the cross-cultural counselling process; and the utilization of the matched-guise videotape in training and education. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

This research project was designed to determine whether anxiety in counsellors was higher with clients with foreign accents, and if so, whether this resulted in counsellors being less effective within the counselling session. Other feelings experienced by counsellors specific to counselling accented clients were also examined. Two separate, but related studies were conducted in which a comparison between two groups of counsellors-in-training was made. One group counselled a client with a European accent, while the other counselled a client with a Western Canadian speech style, typical of the region in which the study took place. Subjects in both groups were presented with a 20-minute video training tape of a client presenting a problem. Each subject was asked to respond verbally as they would in a real counselling session. The video tapes shown to the two groups were identical with the exception of the accent variable. The findings in both studies were similar. No statistically significant differences were found between the two groups in level of state anxiety as measured by the A-State of the STAI. Results from a questionnaire constructed specifically for this research project supported these findings. It did appear, however, that counsellors presented with the foreign accented client may have experienced more anxiety in the first few minutes of the session resulting from their inability to fully understand the accent. An unexpected finding emerged when both studies were examined together. It was found that a lower proportion of counsellors exposed to the foreign accented client expressed feelings on a frustrated/thwarted dimension (p<.05). More expected however, was the finding that higher levels of counsellor state anxiety were correlated with lower levels of counsellor functioning in the session (p<.001). The results of this study are discussed in relation to cross-cultural counselling, the anxiety-counsellor competence relationship, and sociolinguistic accent research. These results question several assumptions prevalent in the cross-cultural literature and suggest that a new set of issues may be emerging for the counsellor working with the minority client. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

A long Canadian tradition has promoted the rise of multicultural education. In this multicultural society, ways to deal with the cultural differences in the teaching of Chinese to students with various backgrounds and needs have always been a challenging task. A review of the literature revealed that little research has focused on Chinese pronunciation teaching in Canada. In order to understand the teaching of Chinese pronunciation in Canadian universities, this study examines Integrated Chinese (Liu, Yao, et al., 2016), a Chinese textbook widely used in Canada. The study also qualitatively analyses two teachers' self-evaluations and their teaching experiences, as gathered from surveys and interviews. The results of the study aim to inform both seasoned and novice teachers in their work in the Canadian post-secondary context and to offer practical pedagogical recommendations for consideration. / Graduate

Thesis (M. Sc. (Computer Science)) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / The pronunciation of words and phrases in any language involves careful manipulation of linguistic features. Factors such as age, motivation, accent, phonetics, stress and intonation sometimes cause a problem of inappropriate or incorrect pronunciation of words from non-native languages. Pronunciation of words using different phonological rules has a tendency of changing the meaning of those words. This study presents the development of an automatic pronunciation assistant system for under-resourced languages of Limpopo Province, namely, Sepedi, Xitsonga, Tshivenda and isiNdebele. The aim of the proposed system is to help non-native speakers to learn appropriate and correct pronunciation of words/phrases in these under-resourced languages. The system is composed of a language identification module on the front-end side and a speech synthesis module on the back-end side. A support vector machine was compared to the baseline multinomial naive Bayes to build the language identification module. The language identification phase performs supervised multiclass text classification to predict a person’s first language based on input text before the speech synthesis phase continues with pronunciation issues using the identified language. The speech synthesis on the back-end phase is composed of four baseline text-to-speech synthesis systems in selected target languages. These text-to-speech synthesis systems were based on the hidden Markov model method of development. Subjective listening tests were conducted to evaluate the performance of the quality of the synthesised speech using a mean opinion score test. The mean opinion score test obtained good performance results on all targeted languages for naturalness, pronunciation, pleasantness, understandability, intelligibility, overall quality of the system and user acceptance. The developed system has been implemented on a “real-live” production web-server for performance evaluation and stability testing using live data.

<div>Having historically received less attention than other linguistic structures(Derwing & Munro,2005),second language (L2) pronunciation instruction represents an emergent area of research in the field(Thomson & Derwing, 2015). While several methods have been shown to be effective for improving L2 segmental production, including explicit instruction(Aliaga-García & Mora, 2009; Lord, 2010; Saito & Lyster, 2012)and inductive visual feedback instruction (Offerman & Olson, 2016; Olson, 2014b; Olson, 2019), there is a notable lack of empirically-based research comparing approaches(Derwing & Munro, 2015; Leeet al., 2015). Moreover, research has largely ignored the effects of instruction on L2 perception, due in part to the tacit assumption thatL2 perception precedes L2 production (Levy & Law, 2010). Responding to these gaps, this study provides a large-scale comparative analysis of three types of pronunciation instruction (explicit instruction[EI], visual feedback[VF], and a combination instruction [CI] approach) on L2 segmental production and perceptionin Spanish. Production-oriented analyses focus on the change in voice onset time (VOT), and perceptual analyses focus on anL2 discrimination task (AXB task) and a nativeness judgment task (Liker-scale ratingtask).Differences in VOT for the stops /p,t,k/ in word-initial position exist for English (long-lag VOT) and Spanish (short-lag VOT) (Lisker & Abramson, 1964), causing notable accentedness for English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish (Lord, 2005), thus serving as the basis for L2 learner performance. Considering results for the production portion of the study, all three experimental groups were found to outperform the control (CO) group, along with each experimental group significantly improving individually from pretest to posttest. For the perception portion, participants did not display difficultly in discriminating between long-lag and short-lag productions at the pretest, and as such, showed no improvement following instruction. In contrast,results from the nativeness judgment task showed thatparticipants were not able to categorize sounds as native-like (Spanish) or non-native-like (English), and significant improvement following training was found only for the CI group. Additionally, previous L2 perception theories largely focus on category formation and discrimination of sounds, such as the SLM (Flege, 1987), the PAM (Best, 1994), and the PAM-L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007), while this study considers perception as it applies to both discrimination and the social categorization of sounds in the L1 and L2. For the production and perception portions, the CI group largely outperformed all groups. It is proposed that the combination of two different modalities, auditory and visual (Baran-Łucarz, 2012), provides learners more resources for noticing (Schmidt, 1990) differences between their L1 and L2 forproduction and perception purposes.Moreover, the CI treatment is proposed to be most beneficial for teaching L2 pronunciation, although more research is to be done with comparative analyses for different segments in the L2, as it has been previously noted that not all pronunciation treatments are equally beneficial to L2 learners for different segmental features (Ruellot, 2011). This study adds to theoretical understanding of L2 phonetic acquisition, in both production and perception,while empirically testing pedagogical approaches in a classroom setting.<br></div>

<p>This study empirically investigated the effect of semester-long shadowing practice with in-class pronunciation training on L2 Japanese learners’ oral fluency and oral proficiency. The participants were 30 intermediate JFL university students at a U.S. university and participated in the experiment as a part of their coursework. This study deployed a pre-post research design and analyzed students’ improvement of oral fluency and oral proficiency quantitatively. </p> <p>Based on the previous finding that there is a lack of pronunciation teaching in current Japanese language education and the effectiveness of shadowing for various L2 skills including fluency, the present research conducted in-class pronunciation training along with shadowing practice as assignments. Then, the researcher examined if shadowing practice improves learners’ fluency and oral proficiency. The experiment was conducted with a control group and experimental group (shadowing and in-class pronunciation training). A read aloud task and a storytelling task were employed as pretest and posttest. </p> <p>The results found that there were no significant improvements in speed fluency or repair fluency in either the read aloud task or storytelling task. However, in the storytelling task, one breakdown fluency measure, silent pause ratio within AS-unit showed significant improvement. This indicates the learners acquired a more native-like pausing pattern by shadowing practice. The difference between the groups in oral proficiency was close to significant, and it suggests the two treatments may be effective for overall skills. </p> <p>Along with the quantitative analysis of students’ improvement, this study reports students’ perceptions toward the shadowing practice and in-class pronunciation training. The results showed that more than 83% of the students found the two treatments effective, and approximately 83% of the students would like to continue the shadowing practice if they had another opportunity.</p>

The present study focuses on students at two Swedish secondary schools and the pronunciation errors that are the most prominent during reception and production of specific speech sounds. The primary focus of this degree paper is to establish whether or not certain speech sounds such as e.g. the /tʃ/ sound, which do not occur in the Swedish language in initial position are difficult or not and whether or not they act as an obstacle for Swedish students learning English as their L2. The aim was to establish which specific pronunciation errors that occurred in the L2 language classroom. Since this was the aim, primarily quantitative studies were carried out at two secondary schools in southern Sweden. The results from the four different tests show that the tested Swedish L2 students seem to have a greater difficulty with speech sounds placed in initial position than in final position of a specific word. According to this degree paper this is due to the fact that the Swedish language does not have an equivalent to the difficult speech sound in initial position, therefore making it difficult and often resulting in negative transfer from the L1. Furthermore, the English sounds that posed the biggest problems for the students were ones that sometimes can be found in the Swedish language. These sounds were very similar to native sounds creating a challenge for the Swedish students when perceiving and producing the English sounds. However, it was shown that when these sounds were presented in a context, they proved to be less challenging for the students to receive and produce. Moreover, although the syllabus only mentions that communication should be functional, there still needs to be an element of focus on form in order to become a proficient language user.

One of the major questions in second language (L2) phonological learning is whether perception precedes (and therefore guides) production. This question is important for knowing what types of training most benefit L2 learners. While most theories assume that perception always precedes production (e.g., Best, 1995; Flege, 1995), several recent studies have found that production may precede perception (e.g., Baker & Trofimovich, 2006; Beach, Brunham, & Kitamura, 2001; Goto, 1971; Sheldon & Strange, 1982; Underbakke, 1993), demonstrating that this complex relationship may differ depending on how and when the L2 is learned. The current study seeks to further explore this relationship by examining how perception and production influence each other on the suprasegmental (i.e., primary word stress) level. While many studies have examined whether perceptual training can influence production accuracy of suprasegmentals, little to no research has examined whether the opposite is true. Thus the goal of this study was to examine whether ESL learners who were trained in suprasegmental pronunciation accuracy improved in listening and speaking more than similar students who were trained in perception accuracy. Comparisons of pre- and post-tests suggest that focusing on accurate production improves not only production accuracy, but also listening comprehension more than does training in listening comprehension. These results enlighten our understanding of how perception and production influence each other, and may underscore the importance of providing bottom-up pronunciation skills for improving L2 phonological learning.