Midterm paper
Professor: 鍾榮富教授
Student Number: MA1C0213
Name: 蔡雨蓉
Introduction:
This thesis is talking about how the third grade of senior high school students
can distinguish the differences between similar pronunciations of words and how
they pronounce sentences appropriately.
Because Taiwanese students can hardly
recognize or distinguish the vowels /e/, /G/, and /$/, the researcher wants to find
out how the students are capable of perceiving these three sounds and help them
improve their pronunciation and students’ ability of differentiating these sounds.
The researcher will use two methods in the study: examine students’ perception of
the three front vowels and examine students’ production of the three front vowels
to inspect how they pronounce the English vowels.
There are five findings in
this study: 1. The three front vowels /e/, /G/, and /$/ are challenging for English
learners in Taiwan to distinguish.
Among them, /G/ is the most difficult and /$/
is the easiest one to perceive. 2. The vowel /e/ in closed syllable with a voiceless
consonant is more difficult to perceive than that in the other two phonetic
environments.
3. The vowel /G/ in closed syllable with a voiced consonant is
more difficult to perceive than that in the other two phonetic environments.
4.
The vowel /$/ in open syllable is more difficult to perceive than that in the other
two phonetic environments.
5. Those who did better on the written test of
English –GSAT—also performed better on the perception task of English.
Motivation:
The literature mentioned in this thesis: According to the behaviorist theories
prevalent at the time of the development of Contrastive Analysis, language learning
was a question of habit formation, and as such could be reinforced or impeded by
existing habits (Skinner, 1957; Spada & Lightbown, 2002).
It was believed that
systematically comparing points of similarity and difference between a native
language and a target language could lead to a more efficient pedagogy
(Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991).
Charlies Fries (1945) once pointed out that the
most efficient materials should be grounded on a scientific description of the target
language which then has to be compared with a parallel description of the learner’s
native language.
Lado (1957) claimed that by systematically comparing a language
and culture to be learned with the students’ native language and culture one can
predict and describe in which areas language learners will have difficulties.
Burns
and Seidlhofer (2002) pointed out that foreign language learners often find some
sounds easy and others difficult because varied languages select different sound
spectrum, which in linguistic terms includes both vowels and consonants.
Wardhaugh (1970) discovered that a Frenchman tends to pronounce the English th as
s while a Russian usually pronounces it as t. Contrastive analysis may offer possible
reasons and explanation for problems like these via the comparison of the
phonological systems of English and French as well as English and Russian. (Chen,
2003). The significance of such comparison lies in its function to locate the areas of
difficulty for learners and to make proper grading possible (Chen, 2003; Lado, 1957;
Lehn & Slager, 1983; Valdman, 1966).
According to Chen (2003), the notion of
markedness is derived from grammar universal or language universal.
Eckman
(1977) submitted the Markedness Differential Hypothesis, which predicts the
difficulty of a L2 language learner based on the relative degree of markedness of the
native language and the target language. Provided that the target language is more
marked than the native language, the language learner will encounter more obstacles
than another whose native language is more marked than the target language (Chen,
2003). There are fourteen simple vowels and three diphthongs in English and there
are five articulatory dimensions involved in the classification of vowels: tongue
height, tongue advancement, tenseness, lip rounding, and retroflexion (Ladefoged,
1993; Sun, 1991). According to Tung (1954) and Chao (1980), there are seven
monophthongs and eight diphthongs in Mandarin. The diphthong /ei/ is a mid-high
front vowel, which Ma (1994) thought was the most identical to English /e/.
Lu
(1979) pointed out that Taiwanese students tended to pronounce Mandarin /e/ with
their tongues in a final position as an open vowel and this tongue position has a
certain level of influence on the production of Mandarin /ei/ and English /e/.
According to Chen (1999), vowels in English and Mandarin vary in many
perspectives. For one thing, they vary in tenseness (tense or lax). The English vowel
/G/ cannot be found in Southern Min (Tai, 2000).
According to Zhou (2004), the
quality of a vowel depends on its overtone structures.
Ladefoged (1993; 2001)
points out:
Formants are the resonances of the vocal tract. The air in the vocal tract is set
in vibration by the pulses of air from the vocal folds. Every time they open and close,
the air in the vocal tract above them will be set in vibration. Because the vocal tract
has a complex shape, the air within it will vibrate in more than one way. We can
consider the body of air behind the raised tongue (i.e. in the throat) to be vibrating in
one way, and the body of air in front of it (i.e. mouth) to be vibrating in another. As
to higher formants like F3 and F4, there is great difference from speaker to speaker
(Bao, 1984; Kent & Read, 1992; Ladefoged, 1993; Zhou, 2004). Age and sex can
also determine vocal tract length. Children’s formants are highest in frequency,
women’s intermediate, and men's formants are lowest (Bao, 1984; Kent& Read, 1992;
Peterson&Barney, 1952; Zhou, 2004). Other variables which have impacts on
acoustic properties are inclusive of dialects (Holden & Nearey, 1986; Peterson &
Barney, 1952; Zhou, 2004) and speech style (Johnson, Flemming & Wright, 1993;
Zhou, 2004).
In that Peterson and Barney (1952) indicated that the production of
vowels by male and female subjects can be rather different, the productions of vowels
by male and female subjects were compared separately in this study. The English /i/
and /I/ are said to be similar to the Chinese /i/ but different from the Chinese /i/ (Deng,
1987). Teng (2002) investigated Chinese students’ difficulty in their pronunciation
of English vowels in her study Chinese Students’ Performance in the Pronunciation
of English Tense and Lax Vowels. Teng (2002) provided a possible explanation for
the error distribution pattern that the subjects were able to spend more time and
energy on the words containing the target vowels when the task was smaller and
simpler. Chen (1999) conducted research aiming to describe the characteristics of
second language speech produced by junior high school students in the process of
learning English within the framework of inter-language phonology.
explored the problem of Lugan students’ English pronunciation.
Tai (2000)
According to Tang
(1979), many speakers of the Min dialects do not perceive there is a glide after the
vowel /e/. They are inclined to substitute their Southern Min //e// for the English /e/.
The results of Chen's (1999) study signify that L1 transfer is by no means the only
cause that is effectual in L2 phonology.
Ingram’s & Park’s study (1997) offers
abundant information for readers to think about a language from different
perspectives.
The reason why the writer wants to conduct this research is that he/she wants to
find out how students can identify and pronounce the three front English vowels: /e/,
/G/, and /$/.
Research Questions:
1. Can the subjects identify the three front vowels /e/, /G/ and /$/?
2. How is the subjects’ performance of their pronunciation of /e/, /G/ and /$/?
3. In what range is the subjects’ performance of production intelligible for English
native speakers?
Methodology:
Subjects: One hundred and two students in the third grade of senior high school,
seventy-two males and thirty females from a senior high school in Tainan, Taiwan.
The subjects have normal hearing and no history of speech disorder.
were born in Taiwan.
All of them
Most of them did not have any experience studying in an
English speaking country.
Instruments:
General Scholastic Ability Test, a questionnaire, a perception
experiment, and a production experiment.
Also, the English scores of GSAT were
adopted.
Basis for data analysis: Excel VBA was used to produce an S-P table to help the
researcher examine which sounds were easier to distinguish the most difficult words
for the subjects.
There will be man-evaluation and computer-processed analyses.
Two native speakers, who were the ones recording the speech stimuli, will evaluate
the subjects’ recordings based on intelligibility.
A non-native evaluator who has
been teaching English in a senior high school for four years will also evaluate the
students’ pronunciation.
production.
Acoustic analysis was used to analyze the English
A desktop computer and a PRAAT program are the major aids.
Criterion: As long as the native speaker can understand what the recordings were
conveying, the subjects’ can be given a correct mark on their pronunciation, vice
versa. The number of errors was turned into a percentage and presented in several
tables according to different phonetic environments and scopes of the task.
With
these measurements, the results of the range the subjects’ performance of each target
vowel is intelligible for English native speakers.
Findings:
1. The three front vowels /e/, /G/, and /$/ are challenging for English learners in
Taiwan to distinguish.
Among them, /G/ is the most difficult and /$/ is the easiest
one to perceive.
2. The vowel /e/ in closed syllable with a voiceless consonant is more difficult to
perceive than that in the other two phonetic environments.
3. The vowel /G/ in closed syllable with a voiced consonant is more difficult to
perceive than that in the other two phonetic environments.
4. The vowel /$/ in open syllable is more difficult to perceive than that in the other
two phonetic environments.
5. Those who did better on the written test of English –GSAT—also performed better
on the perception task of English.
I think the first finding of this study draws most attention to me.
As a
non-native English speaker, I do have the problem pronouncing these three vowels
correctly.
Although I can recognize these words through listening, I cannot really
pronounce the correct sounds.
I think it is fun to testify how students pronounce
these sounds because with this experiment, I might know why I can’t pronounce the
vowels very well and how to improve my pronunciation.
Implications:
Language learners display more flaws in articulation of a smaller task of
production and that context helps message receivers disregard the speakers’ minor
errors in articulation.
If a language learner can speak the target language fluently
and give complete context, he or she may be close to make a successful
communication.
Basic elements such as the articulation of a phoneme and grammar
rules for learning a language are important for later development of other language
skills.
Good performance of perception and production may help high school
students gain higher grades in written tests.
Teacher must help students to integrate
all language skills.
My responses:
I actually think this study quite interesting.
experiment is conducted in high school.
In this study, I see how an
The researcher use specific instrument to
testify students’ ability in pronouncing three English vowel sounds and how they
understand the pronunciation of words in sentences.
suggestions I would like to make about this study.
However, there are several
First of all, I think if the number
of male and female students were the same, the result of the experiment will be more
convincing. Secondly, the structure of this thesis is not clear enough for the readers
to comprehend what message the researcher is trying to convey, especially in the part
“data analysis”.
little bit.
Last but not least, the grammar of this thesis should be improved a
Nonetheless, if there is a chance for me to know more about this kind of
study, I would be very happy.