MA1C0103 鄭雅文
Introduction
English has been more and more important nowadays in Taiwan, no matter for
schools or businesses.
There are many similar pronunciation in English which is
difficult for Taiwan students to distinguish, especially for /e/, /ɛ/ and /æ/.
Even if
some learners can consciously pronounce single words well while reading them, they
may unconsciously forget to pronounce the same words accurately while in daily
conversation.
The researchers always to pay a lot of attention on students’
pronunciation and discover that students usually fail to differentiate the production of
the three front vowels and are seldom aware of their differences if not reminded. The
researcher has been wondering what leads to the great difficulty in Taiwanese
students' pronunciation of English front vowels /e/, /ɛ/ and /æ/.
In general, students find out it is not difficult to build up communicative
competence.
Upon practicing a sufficient number of drills and adapting to a variety
of communicative situations, language learners are able to speak English fluently.
However, their “fluent” English may sometimes not be understood very well or may
cause misunderstood.
The problem is because of their pronunciation.
Speaking a language fluently but without accurate pronunciation brings about
hindrance to communication.
This shows how important a role pronunciation plays
in English teaching and learning.
Good pronunciation helps language learners
express themselves clearly and makes their speech understandable.
Even if some
learners can consciously pronounce single words well while reading them, they may
unconsciously forget to pronounce the same words accurately while engaged in daily
conversation.
Motivation and Literature Review
To do this study, students now have more opportunities to speak up in class because
of teachers’ encouragement and requirement.
Good pronunciation helps language
learners express themselves clearly and makes their speech understandable. Besides,
good pronunciation also implies that learners can heighten the perception of the target
language, and thus they are able to receive messages accurately and to comprehend what
is conveyed in utterances.
At the same time, an increasing number of students start to
think highly of listening and speaking skills in order to pass the General English
Proficiency Test, which incorporates not only reading and writing but also listening and
speaking components.
In general, students find it is not difficult to build up
communicative competence.
Upon practicing a sufficient number of drills and adapting
to a variety of communicative situations, language learners are able to speak English
fluently.
However, their “fluent” English may sometimes not to be understood very
well or even be misunderstood.
Their pronunciation caused the problems.
Speaking a language fluently but without accurate pronunciation brings about
hindrance to communication.
It is difficult for teachers at school to point out each
student’s errors in pronunciation because there are usually a large number of students in
one class, which can sometimes exceed fifty.
However, it is essential to make students
familiar with the functional distinctions between different phonemes so that they can
develop their skill of precise pronunciation.
Learners of English in different countries can encounter various problems while
learning pronunciation, and in Taiwan, there is no exception.
Being an English
teacher now, the researcher once had difficulty distinguishing certain vowels,
especially the three vowels /e/, /ɛ/ and /æ/ during my English learning process. Even
if some learners can consciously pronounce single words well while reading them,
they may unconsciously forget to pronounce the same words accurately while
engaged in daily conversation. The researcher always pays a lot of attention to
students’ pronunciation and notices that students usually fail to differentiate the
production of the three front vowels and are seldom aware of their differences if not
reminded.
James F. Lee and Bill VanPatten (2003) mentioned that people orally
communicate for various different reasons in the world outside the classroom, to
bond with someone or some group socially or psychologically, or to obtain
information.
Then there appeared the rising popularity of Communicative
Language Teaching (CLT), marking the beginning of a major paradigm shift within
language teaching in the twentieth century (Richards & Rodgers, 2001).
Lado (1957) points out that it is not often suspected that the speaker of a language
who listens to a foreign language does not actually perceive the foreign language sound
units.
Instead, he hears the phonemes of his own language and doesn't notice the
phonemic differences in the foreign language if there is no similar phonemic difference in
his native language.
The researcher supposes accurate production usually comes after
good perception, which has a lot to do with students’ learning proper pronunciation.
As
Flege (1993) points out, production has a perceptual basis and perception generally
precedes production.
Flege (1995) also found in his study that the native Korean
subjects were incapable of differentiating the English front vowel /i, I/ and / ɛ, æ / in a
perception test and it turned out that they also had problem producing these pairs.
However, on the contrary, Sheldon & Strange (1982) had a different discovery.
They found that Japanese subjects performed somewhat better in producing a contrast
between English liquids than in perceiving the distinction between these two
phonemes. Therefore, one may conclude that perceptual mastery of a L2 contrast
does not always precede the learners’ ability to produce the contrasting phones.
In
that case, the researcher is curious about whether senior high school students in
Taiwan will confirm to the results of Flege, where by production follows from
perception, or whether they will confirm the results of Sheldon and Strange, where
production actually exceeded perception.
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. During the
process of acquiring the first language, we tend to consider the sounds of our mother
tongue to be “normal”, and therefore a sort of mental “filter” is formed, predisposing us
to look on some sounds as rather important and others as not.
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).
Research questions
There are three questions had been sorted out:
1. Can the subjects identify the three front vowels / e /, / ɛ / and / æ /?
2. How is the subjects’ performance of their pronunciation of / e /, / ɛ / and / æ /?
3. In what range is the subjects’ performance of production intelligible for English
native speakers?
Methodology
The purpose of this study is to investigate Taiwanese senior high school students’
performance in their production and perception of the English front vowels /e/, /ɛ/ and
/æ/.
The method adopted in the present study is largely empirical.
This study aims to
analyze vowels, and it is necessary to understand vowel quality.
The subjects of this study were 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.
They were the students in two classes the researcher taught at school
and were all willing to participate in the experiments.
In order to collect the subjects'
personal data and their English learning experience, a questionnaire sheet was distributed
to each of them to fill out before the experiments. All of them were born in Taiwan, and
almost none of them had any experience studying in an English speaking country. One
girl once lived in Thailand and Singapore for five years and one boy had studied in
America for one year at the age of 17.
There are two types of instruments for this study.
First, two kinds of
questionnaires, one for students to investigate their attitudes and experiences in
learning English pronunciation and the other for English teachers to explore the
current conditions of English pronunciation teaching and learning in Lugang Junior
High school.
The second is the oral reading texts.
The current study includes such instruments as the General Scholastic Ability Test, a
questionnaire, a perception experiment and a production experiment.
The English
scores of GSAT were adopted in order to specify the subjects’ proficiency levels and the
materials of the other instruments are presented in the following sub-sections.
To make a questionnaire was to investigate each subject’s language background,
which might influence the results in this study, and to make sure that the subjects share
similar linguistic backgrounds.
Moreover, two male English native speakers were
invited to record their utterances as the speech stimuli for the perception experiment.
The English oral reading text was composed of three parts:
a word list which contained
twenty single words, five sentences, and a short passage.
In the perception experiment, the numbers of the correct items answered by the
subjects were the scores they received.
For the first, students' perception of the three
front vowels will be examined. Second, students' production of the three English
front vowels / e /, / ɛ / and / æ / will be examined to inspect how they pronounce the
English vowels, and be compared with some previous related studies.
That is, if the
subject had only one correct item, the score reported would be 1; if two, the score would
be 2, and so on. The program Excel VBA was adopted to produce an S-P table, in
which we could examine immediately which sounds were easier to distinguish and
which ones were the most difficult for the subjects.
In order to gain the acoustic
measurements, a desktop computer and a PRAAT program were the major aids during
the process of analysis.
Findings
The study found that it is more difficult for adult Chinese learners of English to
accurately pronounce the English vowel that sounds similar to the Chinese vowel but
is actually quite different from it.
The three front vowels / e /, / ɛ / and / æ / are challenging for English learners in
Taiwan to distinguish.
The vowel /e/ in closed syllable with a voiceless consonant is
more difficult to perceive than that in the other two phonetic environments.
The
vowel / ɛ / in closed syllable with a voiced consonant is more difficult to perceive
than that in the other two phonetic environments.
The vowel / æ / in open syllable is
more difficult to perceive than that in the other two phonetic environments.
Those
who did better on the written test of English —GSAT— also performed better on the
perception task of English.
More than half of all the subjects failed to aurally recognize the vowel / ɛ /.
The rate is even lower than that gained in the vowel / e /.
Most of the subjects were
not aware of the vowel / ɛ / in closed syllable with a voiced consonant.
/æ/ is not similar to any of the Chinese vowels.
The English
The English /ɛ/ is a completely new
sound to adult Chinese male speakers as well.
It is obvious that the female subjects gained higher scores than the male ones.
Moreover, the high achievement English learners gained higher scores than the low
achievement English learners whether for the female group or the male group.
gap in the male group is even wider than the gap in the female group.
The
Although the
subjects’ groups were separated based on their scores of the written test, the figures
clearly tell us that those who did better on the written test of English also performed
better on the perception task of English.
The present study shows a different outcome from that in Teng’s study (2002).
Teng found that the average error rates of / e / and / ɛ / go higher as the task gets
larger. However, the present study presents the highest error rates in the smallest
task－the wordlist.
After consultation with the three evaluators about the result, it is
found that when the vowels are presented in single words, the listeners would focus
on the accuracy of the pronunciation because there are not other elements around to
distinguish what the words are.
However, once the vowels appear in sentences or
even in a passage, the contexts before and after the vowels help the evaluators to
understand what words they hear. In that case, the intelligibility of the vowel sounds
is thus more than that in the word list.
In conclusion, factors affecting language perception and production are interlocked.
Therefore, elevation of language learners’ listening and speaking skills takes an
overall contemplation of various elements, which is discussed and explored in the
next section.
Implications
The fundamental purpose of learning a language is to communicate with people
from another country and to attain new information in a different language.
As long as
a receiver is able to understand what messages a speaker is delivering, the goal of
communication is achieved.
The results of the present study manifests that the 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.
Accordingly, if language
learners can speak the target language fluently, giving a complete context, it seems that
they are not far from a successful communication.
Nevertheless, it can take second
language learners a long while to speak the target language fluently.
Before they
accomplish fluency, they tend to only be able to express themselves with separate single
words, or fragmental phrases.
Under such circumstances － smaller scopes of
production, the significance of accurate articulation can not be ignored.
If language
learners speak the target language fluently without appropriate structures, the
compensation for the erroneous articulation through context won’t be effective and the
attempted communication might be in vain.
So, the most basic elements such as the
articulation of a phoneme and grammar rules for learning a language are indeed crucial
for later development of other language skills.
Good pronunciation and sense of structures are formed by drills and accumulation
of habits in production, and instructors of beginners may be expected to put in more time
on these aspects.
For more advanced learners, if they have mastered the basic elements
in the early phase of language acquisition, then they will have more time to develop the
other language skills.
My own responses
I believe that it is really difficult for Taiwan students to distinguish the difference
between /e/, /ɛ/ and /æ/.
Because I am also the one that didn’t know that well. To
do this research could know more about where the problem is and what the problem
is. This research could provide to the teachers, maybe they could come up with
some ideas which could make students to know well about the vowels.
teacher could enhance their teaching knowledge and skills.
And also
Hope in the future
students in Taiwan could have more ability to distinguish the difference between the
vowels.
After reading this research, it let me know clearly about the method of
doing this research.
for a long long time.
I love this study! These three vowels have been frustrated me