This literature review sets out to revisit the studies exploring impact of rater characteristics on language oral assessments. Three categories of raters' backgrounds: occupation, accent familiarity, and native language are identified and will be addressed respectively in the following sections. The results showed that no consensus regarding raters' occupational background, linguistic background and native-speaker status on examiners' rating has been found so far. However, this review will highlight the current testing situations, bring up limitations from previous studies, provide implications for both teachers and raters, and hopefully shed light on future research. / text

The diploma thesis Czech Language of Native Speakers of Russian is a study which analyses the use of the Czech language by few non-native speakers whose native language is Russian. The first theoretical section constists of introduction to the most important theories in the field of language acquisition and selected types of analyses which will be used in my own research. The second part contains specification of my goals, approaches and the description of used materials. Third, there are language biographies of my speakers and analysis of several texts (or transcripts of oral recordings) with the emphasis on the influence of speaker's L1. The analysis of data is the accuracy, complexity and fluency measuring that should test qualities of speaker's language use from various points of view. The conclusion summarizes the results of the research and verification of my hypothesis. Key words: non-native speaker, Russian, Czech as foreign language, language error, fluency, accuracy, complexity

This thesis explores the experiences of Japanese native speaker teachers teaching Japanese in New Zealand. The main purpose of this study is to analyse and understand their experiences, to evaluate the extent to which their experiences endorse previous research in the area, and to identify aspects of their experiences that may be universal to immigrant teachers in general or specific to Japanese immigrant teachers in the New Zealand context. This study therefore adopts a qualitative research approach. Findings emerge mainly from the analysis of interviews with twenty-five Japanese native speaker teachers and are supplemented by fifty-two written survey responses. Major themes include ways that the teachers’ backgrounds influenced their career development decision-making process; differences that teachers expected and found in teaching in New Zealand; difficulties that teachers encountered in New Zealand schools; adjustments that teachers made to fit into teaching in New Zealand; adaptation strategies that they adopted to work effectively in the New Zealand cultural environment; and the teachers’ perceptions of working well as Japanese language teachers in New Zealand. The main findings reveal that the teachers confronted difficulties and challenges similar to those of all beginning teachers, but in their case, specific values they held enabled them to develop useful teaching strategies peculiar to them and make successful adaptations to the New Zealand teaching environment. This successful outcome was influenced by their additional learning experience of having gone through the complexity in teacher development as immigrants. Previous research demonstrated that teachers’ experiences and their values influenced curriculum making, the teaching process and classroom organisation. My research extended these findings by describing more specifically the values and strategies that my participant teachers adopted to teach New Zealand students. In addition to the suggestions made for other teachers, several recommendations are made for future research. This study concluded that immigrant teachers need to continue their learning, utilise skills previously acquired in their own countries, and participate in the new society to make successful adaptation.

La notion d’insécurité linguistique a été régulièrement explorée depuis les années 1960: les recherches ont été initialement centrées autour des questions de prononciation dans différents milieux sociaux ; ensuite un cadre d’analyse a été organisé autour des communautés francophones dites « périphériques » ; elle a enfin été abordée dans des contextes plurilingues. La présente recherche examine la notion d’insécurité linguistique comme elle est vécue par les professeurs non natifs de langues étrangères, et notamment des professeurs grecs de français. Ce groupe socioprofessionnel joue un rôle de premier plan dans la diffusion des langues : l’enjeu est de trouver des moyens d’atténuer les éventuels effets négatifs de l’insécurité linguistique inhérents à leur contexte professionnel. Pour ce faire, nous avons construit un corpus pour une étude qualitative. La méthodologie retenue a été celle d’entretiens individuels, semi dirigés, permettant à des répondants présentant des profils divers en termes d’âge, de sexe, de formation, de lieux et de contextes professionnels, de s’exprimer sur leur conception de l’insécurité linguistique et sur les stratégies mobilisées pour y faire face. De manière assez constante, émerge la question de la légitimité d’enseigner une langue dont on n’est pas locuteur natif et les difficultés que cela pose dans le contexte professionnel. Pourtant, au terme d’un processus plus ou moins long, ces personnes parviennent, en redéfinissant leur rôle dans la classe et parfois leurs objectifs en tant qu’enseignants, à gagner en assurance. Elles reconstruisent une légitimité qui articule acceptation, remédiation des imperfections et compétence professionnelle. / The concept of linguistic insecurity has been regularly explored since the 1960’s : research was initially centered around the questions of pronunciation in various social environments; then a framework of analysis was organized around French-speaking communities known as “peripheral”; it was finally approached in multilingual contexts. This research examines the notion of linguistic insecurity as it is experienced by non-native foreign languages teachers, and in particular Greek teachers of French. This socio-professional group plays a leading role in the diffusion of the languages : the stake is to find the means to moderate the possible negative effects of linguistic insecurity inherent in their professional context. With this intention, a corpus for a qualitative study has been assembled. The methodology selected was that of individual, semi-structured interviews, allowing interviewees of various profiles in terms of age, sex, training, professional places and contexts to express themselves on their conception of the linguistic insecurity and the strategies mobilized to face it. In a rather constant way emerges the question of legitimacy to teach a language of which one is not a native speaker and the difficulties that this poses in the professional context. However, at the end of a more or less long process, these people arrive, by redefining their role in the class and sometimes their objectives as teachers, to gain in confidence. They rebuild a legitimacy which articulates acceptance, remediation of the imperfections and professional competence.

The aim of the thesis is to find out whether providing feedback to Arabic language learners will help them improve their pronunciation, particularly of words involving sounds that are not distinguished in their native languages. In addition, it aims to find out, if possible, what type of feedback will be most helpful. In order to achieve this aim, we developed a computational tool with a number of component sub tools. These tools involve the implementation of several substantial pieces of software. The first task was to ensure the system we were building could distinguish between the more challenging sounds when they were produced by a native speaker, since without that it will not be possible to classify learners’ attempts at these sounds. To this end, a number of experiments were carried out with the hidden Markov model toolkit (the HTK), a well known speech recognition toolkit, in order to ensure that it can distinguish between the confusable sounds, i.e. the ones that people have difficulty with. The developed computational tool analyses the differences between the user’s pronunciation and that of a native speaker by using grammar of minimal pairs, where each utterance is treated as coming from a family of similar words. This provides the ability to categorise learners’ errors - if someone is trying to say cat and the recogniser thinks they have said cad then it is likely that they are voicing the final consonant when it should be unvoiced. Extensive testing shows that the system can reliably distinguish such minimal pairs when they are produced by a native speaker, and that this approach does provide effective diagnostic information about errors. The tool provides feedback in three different sub-tools: as an animation of the vocal tract, as a synthesised version of the target utterance, and as a set of written instructions. The tool was evaluated by placing it in a classroom setting and asking 50 Arabic students to use the different versions of the tool. Each student had a thirty minute session with the tool, working their way through a set of pronunciation exercises at their own pace. The results of this group showed that their pronunciation does improve over the course of the session, though it was not possible to determine whether the improvement is sustained over an extended period. The evaluation was done from three points of view: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and using a questionnaire. Firstly, the quantitative analysis gives raw numbers telling whether a learner had improved their pronunciation or not. Secondly, the qualitative analysis shows a behaviour pattern of what a learner did and how they used the tool. Thirdly, the questionnaire gives feedback from learners and their comments about the tool. We found that providing feedback does appear to help Arabic language learners, but we did not have enough data to see which form of feedback is most helpful. However, we provided an informative analysis of behaviour patterns to see how Arabic students used the tool and interacted with it, which could be useful for more data analysis.

This paper investigates foreign born teachers working as EFL educators and their attitudes towards teaching as well as their roles in teaching the English language. The purpose of this study is to examine what motivates EFL teachers to work abroad and to explore why they are highly valued in non-English speaking countries. Through qualitative interviews with four (4) Filipino teachers working overseas as EFL educators their strengths and weaknesses are explored. My investigation shows that the Filipino teachers’ primary role is to teach communication and literacy skills. In addition, the reasons why these four teachers have chosen to work abroad are higher salary rates and better working conditions. However, their lack of knowledge of the local language and culture are their weaknesses. Finally, findings show that the respondents’ positive attitude towards teaching English abroad shows the importance of English in globalization.

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No description available.

Building upon current research in native-speaker (NS) perception of L2 learner phonology (Zielinski, 2008; Derwing & Munro, 2009), the present investigation analyzed multiple dimensions of NS speech perception in order to achieve a more complete understanding of the specific linguistic elements and attitudinal variables that contribute to perceptions of accent in learner speech. In this mixed-methods study, Spanish monolinguals (n = 18) provided information regarding their views of L1 American English (AE) speakers learning Spanish and also evaluated the extemporaneous production of L2 learners from this same population. The evaluators' preconceived attitudinal notions of L1 AE speakers learning Spanish negatively correlated with numerical accentedness ratings for the speech samples, indicating that evaluators with more positive perceptions of the learners rated their speech as less accented. Following initial numerical ratings, evaluators provided detailed commentary on the individual phonological elements from each utterance that they perceived as "nonnative." Results show that differences in the relative salience of the nonnative segmental productions correspond with certain phonetic and phonemic processes occurring within the sounds, such as aspiration, spirantization and lateralization. / Spanish

Submitted by Maicon Juliano Schmidt (maicons) on 2015-07-20T16:20:09Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Cléia Maria Lima Azevedo.pdf: 1478132 bytes, checksum: 28c725270a83fedf373ac6e4a206f039 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-20T16:20:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cléia Maria Lima Azevedo.pdf: 1478132 bytes, checksum: 28c725270a83fedf373ac6e4a206f039 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-20 / UEMA - Universidade Estadual do Maranhão / Esta pesquisa possibilita uma reflexão sobre formação e atuação profissional, a partir das vozes das professoras alfabetizadoras, usuárias da língua materna, com conhecimento específico e particularidades próprias do trabalho pedagógico. Nesta perspectiva, coloca-se o objetivo de analisar concepções sobre práticas alfabetizadoras dessas egressas do curso de Pedagogia, tendo em vista suas concepções de leitura e escrita e suas vivências como produtoras e usuárias da língua materna, considerando também o processo de formação docente. Neste cenário, busca-se compreender o jogo social entre o que tem influenciado teoricamente e produzido a sua prática pedagógica de alfabetizadoras. Participam do estudo cinco professoras alfabetizadoras, em exercício de sua docência no ciclo de alfabetização, e duas professoras formadoras, pertencentes ao grupo de coordenadores do PNAIC da Secretaria de Educação do município, todas egressas do curso de Pedagogia de uma universidade estadual da região Nordeste do Brasil. O estudo é de cunho qualitativo, tendo como ponto de partida as entrevistas com as docentes envolvidas na pesquisa, além da sistematização de encontros de grupo dialogal que versavam sobre leitura, escrita, alfabetização e formação docente. Os alicerces teóricos da investigação apoiam-se em Bakhtin (2003, 2006), Faraco (2009, 2010, 2012), Kleiman (2004, 2005, 2007), Morato (2004) Soares (2005, 2010, 2013), Rego (1995), Vygotsky (1996, 1998), dentre outros. Entre as constatações do estudo destaca-se que língua, linguagem, alfabetização e letramento são conceitos produzidos na forma particular como as alfabetizadoras interagem com o fazer docente, considerando suas vivências como usuárias de língua materna constituída no curso de suas histórias de escolarização. Neste percurso, concebem a língua como objeto e meio para alcançar o conhecimento. / This survey provides a reflection on training and professional practice, from the voices of literacy teachers, users of the mother tongue, with specific knowledge and particularities of pedagogical work. In this perspective, place to analyze conceptions of literacy teachers practices of these graduates of the Faculty of Education with a view to their conceptions of reading and writing and their experiences as producers and users of the mother tongue, also considering the teacher training process. In this scenario, we are trying to understand the social game between what has influenced theory and produced their practice of literacy teachers. Participate in the study five literacy teachers, exercising their teaching in the literacy cycle, and two forming teachers, belonging to PNAIC, coordinators group of municipality's Department of Education, all graduates of the Faculty of Education of a state university in the northeast of Brazil. The study is a qualitative approach, taking as starting point the interviews the teachers involved in research, in addition to the systematization of dialogical group meetings that focused on reading, writing, literacy and teacher training. The theoretical foundations of research support in Bakhtin (2003, 2006), Faraco (2009, 2010, 2012), Kleiman (2004, 2005, 2007), Morato (2004) Soares (2005, 2010, 2013), Rego (1995 ), Vygotsky (1996, 1998), among others. Among the study's findings highlight the language, language, literacy and literacy concepts are produced in particular how literacy teachers interact with the teacher do, considering her experiences as a mother tongue of users made in the course of their schooling stories. In this course, conceive of language as an object and means to knowledge.