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3.3. Summary
Thanks to the ten participants and the three listener-judges, this pilot experiment was carried out in good conditions. Despite some people’s constraints of time, every recording and rating was completed well. Typical French-speaking non-English students participated. Furthermore, the trainings of the experiment were redolent of typical pronunciation classes in a secondary school or to non-specialists. […]
CHAPTER 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this chapter, a detailed analysis of the results of the experiment is provided. After the three listener-judges had finished giving the four hundred scores, the latter were typed into tables, found in Appendix E. A close examination of these scores, as well as the calculation of each group’s mean scores, will enable us to […]
4.1. Between-groups design
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4.1.1. Hypotheses
The verification of the central hypothesis about the results of the experiment implies a crossgroup comparison of the scores (a thorough account of which is given in Appendix E). The first way of looking at the completed experiment is to compare the post-training scores of Group A with those of Group B. Thereby, knowing which […]
4.1.2. Results
Overall post-training scores (Hypothesis 1) Interestingly enough, the overall comparison of the post-training scores (marked out of seven: cf. 3.2.3.) obtained by the two groups reveals that neither group is better than the other after the trainings. As a consequence, neither training has had a better effect on the French EFL learners’ read production capacities […]
4.2. Within-groups design
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4.2.1. Hypotheses
First and foremost, it should be reminded that the rating task was blind, and the pre-training and post-training recordings were completely randomized before being given to the listenerjudges. In order to investigate the importance of prosody with respect to segments in EFL acquisition, we should now consider how the French subjects’ production skills evolved from […]
4.2.2. Results
In order to calculate the evolution of the learner’s pronunciation skills within each group from the first recordings to the second recordings, the following mathematical formula was used: The source value corresponds to the the pre-training score, and the target value is the posttraining score. The result gives the pre-training to post-training evolution, expressed in […]
4.3. Discussion of the results
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4.3.1. Between-groups: Hypotheses 1 and 2
The major claim of this work was that the importance of prosody in the acquisition of English as a Foreign Language by French learners is as strong as, indeed stronger than, the importance of segmental features such as phonemes. By extension, our view was that intelligibility and the welfare of communication greatly depended on the […]
4.3.2. Within-groups: Hypotheses 3 and 4
The within-groups analysis of the pre- and post-training scores was supposed to show that both groups had better scores after their respective trainings than before the trainings (Hypothesis 3), even if this might have seemed to go without saying. Indeed Group A increased by 23.5%, and Group B increased by 8%, as was reported in […]
CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
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5.1. Conclusion
Throughout this work, the main objective has been to enhance the role of prosody in L2 phonology acquisition, and its contribution to intelligibility. In the theoretical section (Chapter 1), we saw that, interestingly enough, French teachers of English as a Foreign Language tend to focus on phonemes when it comes to pronunciation teaching, thereby overlooking […]
5.2. Future work
The creation of this pilot experiment now serves as a basis for future comparative studies on the acquisition of English segments and suprasegments by French learners. Given the limitations of this study, more elaborate experiments investigating the role of prosody in intelligibility, foreign-accentedness, and communication in general, are required. As was reminded several times throughout […]
REFERENCES
Abercrombie, D. (1967). Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Atoye, R. O. (2005). Non-Native Perception and Interpretation of English Intonation. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 14 (1), 26-42. Auer, P. (1993). Is a Rhythm-Based Typology Possible? A Study of the Role of Prosody in Phonological Typology. KontRI Working Paper No. 21. Konstanz, Fachgruppe […]
APPENDIX A: QUESTIONNAIRE OF SELECTION
1. Nom : 2. Prenom : 3. Age : 4. Pays de residence : 5. Nationalite : 6. Langue maternelle : 7. Quelles etudes faites-vous ? 8. A quel age avez-vous commence l’anglais ? 9. Quelle est votre moyenne d’anglais (sur 20) approximative en milieu scolaire ? 10. Pensez-vous avoir un accent anglais britannique, americain, […]
APPENDIX B: FRENCH-SPEAKING SUBJECTS
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APPENDIX C: STIMULI
The tables below present the stimuli that were used in the experiment, i.e. the words and the sentences, as well as details about each of them. The following abbreviations are used: N‹ = number of the item; W = word; P = phrase; # Syll. = number of syllables that the item consists of; V/C […]
APPENDIX D: INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE RATING TASK
French speakers recorded English words and sentences. All you have to do is: listen to the sound file; score the recording on a 7-point scale (roughly: 1 = terrible/unintelligible/very strong foreign accent; 2 = very bad; 3 = bad; 4 = so-so; 5 = good; 6 = very good; 7 = nativelike/ no foreign accent). […]
APPENDIX E: SCORES
These are the scores (out of 7) that were given to each recording by the three listener-judges. The first table gives the scores of the productions before the trainings, and the second table shows the scores after the trainings. The following abbreviations and symbols are used: S00 = Subject n°00; W00 = Word n°00; P00 […]
EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH INTO THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH RHYTHM AND PROSODY BY FRENCH LEARNERS
EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH INTO THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH RHYTHM AND PROSODY BY FRENCH LEARNERS
Auteur : Marc CAPLIEZ
Année de publication : 2011
Université Lille 3 Charles-de-Gaulle
Directeur de recherche : Maarten Lemmens
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I would like to thank Maarten Lemmens for supervising this work and enabling me to explore a field that I truly like. I am very thankful to his help in every way. His constant good mood and kindness made this research very pleasant. I am also very grateful to the French speakers […]
INTRODUCTION
In everyday speech, it is very common to come across such phrases as it’s not what you said but the way you said it, or a situation in which a mother disapproves of her child’s tone (Wells, 2006). These simple instances seem to provide some evidence that not only phonemes, but the global structure of […]
CHAPTER 1. ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION AND FRENCH LEARNERS
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1.1. The status of English pronunciation teaching in France
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1.1.1. The place of pronunciation in EFL classes
As Abercrombie (1967) puts it, spoken language and written language can be defined as two different yet complementary mediums of one and the same language. The learning of a language should include both of them equally, even if they may be taught separately in school context. In our view, the teaching of English pronunciation in […]
1.1.2. Segments vs. suprasegments in EFL pronunciation teaching
Regarding English pronunciation teaching per se when it is taught, segmentals appear to be studied at the expense of prosody. Vowels and consonants are the basis for English pronunciation learning in French schools, however slight the teaching may be. Usually, it consists in the same repetitive exercises, that is, minimal pair drills (e.g. beat vs. […]
1.2. Phonological difficulties for French speakers
It is not rare to hear French students say that English pronunciation is “too difficult”, “too irregular”, or “too different”, hence very bad results in phonetics exams – the mean mark of students doing an English degree is sometimes around 5 out of 20. In this respect, Abercrombie (1967: 20) evokes the idea that a […]
1.2.1. Segmental difficulties and recurrent errors
As is specified in Avery and Ehrlich (1992), many English words were borrowed from French after the Norman Conquest. Still today, the two languages share many vocabulary items, at least orthographically. As regards pronunciation, the difficulty encountered by French speakers is noticeable, and it partly originates in too great an influence of spelling (Burgess & […]
1.2.2. Suprasegmental difficulties and recurrent errors
Although most French EFL learners do not realize it, they have a number of problems with English rhythm and prosody (Mortreux, 2008), all the more as they often prefer to practise vowel production, thus producing full vowels only and not realizing vowel reduction naturally. Burgess and Spencer (2000) used questionnaires that they gave to EFL […]