This study aimed to identify some of the strategies students used when pronouncing unfamiliar words. Questionnaires were handed out to 94 students in the 9th grade in a medium-sized Swedish town. In addition, two teachers and 13 students were interviewed. The results indicate that the students had acquired some basic knowledge about the English sound system from phonetic training in their past education. However, there seemed to be a tendency among the students to use the trial-and-error strategy to a larger extent than using tools such as phonetic transcription in order to figure out the pronunciation of a word. The results also show that the teachers did not teach planned lessons on pronunciation, but instead it was more common that they responded to errors made by students. In conclusion, the results show that the students' knowledge in pronunciation in general was limited. In addition, there seemed to be a connection between the way the students and the teachers approached pronunciation and the student's ability to solve pronunciation issues.

La notion d' iconicité¦ est devenue aujourd'hui un sujet fécond au sein de la linguistique cognitive occidentale. Nous avons choisi d'étudier le problème de l'iconicité dans le cadre de la grammaire du chinois. Comme toute langue " idéographique", le chinois mandarin relève évidemment d'une iconicité de haut degré par son écriture. Dans l'histoire de linguistique chinoise, beaucoup d'é¦tudes ont été faites sur la ressemblance entre la forme du caractère chinois et le sens qu'il représente. Or, c'est depuis une trentaine d'années que nous avons commencé à développer la notion d'iconicité dans les domaines phonétique et syntaxique, avec l'introduction de la linguistique cognitive en Chine. Dans cette thèse, nous allons développer la notion d'iconicité dans la grammaire du chinois à travers trois aspects : la phonétique, l'écriture chinoise et la syntaxe. D'abondants exemples serviront de fil organisateur à notre exposé. / The notion of iconicity has become an interesting topic in the Western cognitive linguistics today. We chose to study the problem of iconicity in the context of Chinese grammar. Like any "ideographic" language, the Mandarin Chinese reveal a high degree of iconicity by his writing. In the history of Chinese linguistics, many studies have been done on the similarity between the form of the Chinese character and the sense which it represents. However, we only began to develop the notion of iconicity in the phonetic and syntactic domains with the introduction of cognitive linguistics in China thirty years ago. In this thesis, we will develop the notion of iconicity in the grammar of Chinese in three aspects by giving abundant exemples: phonetics, Chinese characters and syntax.

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The goal of this project will be to design a phonemic awareness handbook which will be discussed at a kindergarten staff in-service. The information in the handbook will explain the concept of phonemic awareness and its importance to successful reading acquistion. The handbook will also provide some phonemic awareness assessment inventories as well as some activities.

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The teaching of singing is fraught with psychological problems not met with in the other branches of applied music. The inordinate physical and mental concepts with which the singing teacher must deal result in the necessity that the singing teacher, to be highly efficient, must be a practicing psychologist. In the writer's experience, first as student and then as teacher and observer of the work of other teachers, it has become obvious that in the minds of the majority of pupils, diction problems are so paramount that they supercede the purely vocal aspects of singing. As the language sounds are rightly but a point of departure for the building of a beautiful and expressive singing tone, it seems absolutely essential that the way must be pointed whereby language in singing can find its proper place in the pupil's development, where it can assume the position of a help rather than a hindrance in vocal achievement.

Mehrsprachige Anwendungen finden heute eine immer größere Verbreitung. Und zusehends treffen dabei Sprachen mit vollkommen unterschiedlichen Zeichensätzen aufeinander. Wie können aktuelle Datenbanksysteme und Programmiersprachen damit umgehen? Ist eine vollständige Unterstützung solch verschiedener Sprachen in heutigen datenbank-basierten Anwendungen möglich? Das werde ich in dieser Arbeit klären und ein praktisches Beispiel einer solchen Anwendung vorstellen: das Online-Wörterbuch Teiresias. Es vereint nicht nur die Sprachen Deutsch und Neugriechisch in sich, sondern es nutzt auch linguistisch interessante Verfahren zur Suche und zur Bewertung der Treffer. Außerdem greift es auf Data-Warehouse-Techniken zurück um eine möglichst hohe Effizienz zu erzielen. Die schwierige Übernahme des Datenbestandes der Vorgängerversion zeigt dabei auch die Probleme bei der Weiterentwicklung von Software und der Umstellung auf neue Technologien auf.

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Different opinions exist about the use of phonetic alphabet symbols in teaching English pronunciation to second language learners. Some authors and researchers believe phonetic symbols can benefit students in many ways; others consider this tool hardly recommendable. However, little empirical research has been done to find out what ESL teachers think about the use of this linguistic tool. Thus, via an online survey this study sought to identify ESL teachers' attitudes towards the use of phonetic symbols in teaching ESL pronunciation. A total of 120 teachers took the survey and most of them were experienced in teaching pronunciation to adult ESL students. The analyses of qualitative data identified a contradiction between experienced teachers' opinions and what they practiced in class. On the one side, the teachers had predominantly positive attitudes towards the use of phonetic symbols, and about 80% of them agreed that it was a valuable use of class time. Despite this, many teachers (n=40) did not report using phonetic symbols in their teaching. In addition, though the teachers pointed out enabling student independent learning as the main reason to teach phonetic symbols, only three participants reported that they used phonetic symbols for this purpose. The results of the study suggest that ESL teachers' lack of training in teaching phonetic symbols to ESL students can be one of the main factors causing this contradiction.