Learning English Intonation Through Exposure to Resynthesized Self-produced Stimuli

Zhongmin Li, Andrew-Peter Lian, Butsakorn Yodkamlue

Abstract


EFL learners are prone to having problems in pronunciation, while their problems in intonation are more salient. The Chinese EFL pronunciation classroom has long been criticized for teacher-centered, “one-size-fits-all” teaching, which is inefficient and ineffective for solving individual student’s specific pronunciation problems. This study conducted an experiment to examine the effectiveness of exposure to resynthesized self-produced stimuli for intonation learning. The participants were 66 first year English majors studying at a university in China. The treatment was a form of English intonation training wherein the students in the experimental group used their resynthesized self-produced stimuli (their own voices) as the pronunciation model for learning while the control group used a model produced by a native speaker. After the training, the results of the intonation production test showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in eight intonation patterns. The students’ problems in intonation support Mennen’s (2007) claim that intonation learning involves a first stage of acquiring the phonological representations of intonation patterns and a second stage of acquiring the phonetic realizations of those patterns. The results of this study revealed that exposure to resynthesized self-produced stimuli for intonation learning was as effective as the native speaker model for helping the students form the phonological representations of intonation patterns, while it was more effective than the native speaker model for facilitating the students to produce more accurate phonetic realizations of those patterns.


Keywords


English intonation; precision language education; modified stimuli; phonological representation; phonetic realization

Full Text:

PDF

References


Anderson-Hsieh, J., Johnson, R. & Koehler, K. (1992). The relationship between native speaker judgments of nonnative pronunciation and deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. Language Learning. 42(4), 529-555.

Beckman, M. E. & Pierrehumbert, J. B. (1986). Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology. 3, 255-309.

Bi, R. & Chen, H. (2013). Developmental changes of tone patterns in Chinese EFL students’ read speech. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching. 1, 50-54.

Bissiri, M. P. & Pfitzinger, H. R. (2009). Italian speakers learn lexical stress of German morphologically complex words. Speech Communication. 51(10), 933-947.

Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2018). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.37. Retrieved from http://www.praat.org/

Botinis, A., Granström, B. & Möbius, B. (2001). Developments and paradigms in intonation research. Speech Communication. 33(4), 263-296.

Brown, C. A. (1999). The interrelation between speech perception and phonological acquisition from infant to adult. In J. Archibald (Ed.), Second Language

Acquisition and Linguistic Theory (pp. 4-63). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Cook, C. R., Kilgus, S. P. & Burns, M. K. (2018). Advancing the science and practice of precision education to enhance student outcomes. Journal of School

Psychology. 66, 4-10.

Cruttenden, A. (1997). Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dalton, C. & Seidlhofer, B. (1994). Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Felps, D., Bortfeld, H. & Gutierrez-Osuna, R. (2009). Foreign accent conversion in computer assisted pronunciation training. Speech Communication. 51(10), 920-

Fuchs, D., Mock, D., Morgan, P. L. & Young, C. L. (2003). Responsiveness-to-intervention: Definitions, evidence, and implications for the learning disabilities

construct. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice. 18(3), 157-171.

Gilbert, J. (2014). Myth 4: intonation is hard to teach. In Grant, L. & Brinton, D. (Eds.), Pronunciation Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom

Teaching (pp. 107-137). Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Halliday, M. A. K. (2015). Intonation and Grammar in British English (Vol. 48). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

Hardison, D. M. (2012). Second language speech perception: A cross-disciplinary perspective on challenges and accomplishments. In S. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.),

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 349-363). London: Routledge.

Hart, S. A. (2016). Precision education initiative: moving toward personalized education. Mind, Brain, and Education. 10(4), 209-211.

Hirose, K. (2004). Accent type recognition of Japanese using perceived mora pitch values and its use for pronunciation training system. In Proceedings of the

International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages: Emphasis on Tone Languages (pp. 77-80), Beijing, China.

Huo, S. Y. & Luo, Q. (2017). Misuses of English Intonation for Chinese Students in Cross-Cultural Communication. Cross-Cultural Communication. 13(1), 47-52.

Isaacs, T. & Thomson, R. I. (2013). Rater experience, rating scale length, and judgments of L2 pronunciation: Revisiting research conventions. Language

Assessment Quarterly. 10(2), 135-159.

Jenkins, J. (2004). Research in teaching pronunciation and intonation. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 24, 109-125.

Jiang, H. L. (2012). An empirical study of the learning effect of college English majors in intonation. Foreign Languages in China. 9(2), 65-80.

Jilka, M. (2000). The contribution of intonation to the perception of foreign accent. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Kang, O. (2010). Relative salience of suprasegmental features on judgments of L2 comprehensibility and accentedness. System. 38(2), 301-315.

Kennedy, S. & Trofimovich, P. (2008). Intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of L2 speech: The role of listener experience and semantic context.

Canadian Modern Language Review. 64, 459–489.

Leather, J. (1983). Second-language pronunciation learning and teaching. Language Teaching. 16(3), 198-219.

Lee, A. H. & Lyster, R. (2017). Can corrective feedback on second language speech perception errors affect production accuracy?. Applied Psycholinguistics. 38, 1-

Lengeris, A. (2012). Prosody and second language teaching: Lessons from L2 speech perception and production research. Pragmatics and Prosody in English

Language Teaching. 15, 25-40.

Lian, A. P. (2014). On-Demand Generation of Individualized Language Learning Lessons. Journal of Science. 9(1), 25-38.

Lian, A. P. & Sangarun, P. (2017). Precision Language Education: A Glimpse Into a Possible Future. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies. 17(4), 1-15.

Lively, S. E., Logan, J. S. & Pisoni, D. B. (1993). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. II: the role of phonetic environment and talker variability

in learning new perceptual categories. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 94(3 Pt 1), 1242-1255.

Logan, J. S., Lively, S. E. & Pisoni, D. B. (1991). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

(2), 874-886.

Lu, J., Wang, R. & De Silva, L. C. (2012). Automatic stress exaggeration by prosody modification to assist language learners perceive sentence stress. International

Journal of Speech Technology. 15(2), 87-98.

MacDonald, D. (2011). Second language acquisition of English question intonation by Koreans. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference of the Canadian

Linguistic association.

Makarova, V. & Zhou, X. (2006). Prosodic characteristics in the Speech of Chinese EFL learners. Proceedings of Speech Prosody. Dresden, Germany.

Mennen, I. (1999). The realisation of nucleus placement in second language intonation. In Proceedings of the fourteenth international congress of phonetic sciences

(pp. 555-558).

Mennen, I. (2004). Bi-directional interference in the intonation of Dutch speakers of Greek. Journal of Phonetics. 32(4), 543-563.

Mennen, I. (2007). Phonological and phonetic influences in non-native intonation. Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs. 186, 53-76.

Meng, X. J, & Wang, H. M. (2009). Boundary tone patterns in Chinese English learners’ read speech. Foreign Language Teaching and Research (Bimonthly). 6, 447-451.

Morley, J. (1991). The pronunciation component in teaching English to speakers of other languages. Tesol Quarterly. 25(3), 481-520.

Pellegrino, E., Vigliano, D. (2015). Self-imitation in prosody training: A study on Japanese learners of Italian. In Steidl, S., Batliner, A. & Jokisch, O. (Eds.),

Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (pp. 53-57), Leipzig, Germany.

Pickering, L. (2001). The role of tone choice in improving ITA communication in the classroom. Tesol Quarterly. 35(2), 233-255.

Roach, P. (2009). English phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Romero-Trillo, J. (2012). Pragmatics, Prosody and English Language Teaching. Dordrecht: Springer.

Rui, T. (2007). The English intonation of Chinese EFL learners: A comparative study. CELEA Journal (Bimonthly). 12(6), 34-45.

Swerts, M. & Zerbian, S. (2010). Intonational differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa. Phonetica. 67(3), 127-146.

Tang, M., C. Wang & S. Seneff, (2001). Voice transformations: from speech synthesis to mammalian vocalizations. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference

on Speech Communication and Technology (pp. 357-360), Aalborg, Denmark.

Tench, P. (2015). The Intonation Systems of English. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Thomson, R. (2017). Measurement of accentedness, intelligibility, and comprehensibility. In Kang, O. & Ginther, A. (Eds.), Assessment In Second Language

Pronunciation (pp. 11-29). London: Routledge.

Wells, J. C. (2006). English Intonation: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Willems, N. (2010). English Intonation from a Dutch Point of View. Walter de Gruyter.

Yang, J. (2006). Inappropriate divisions of intonation groups in Chinese university students’ read speech. Modern Foreign Languages (Quarterly). 29(4), 409-417.

Yang, M., & Mu, F. Y. (2011). Study on fluency-related IP-internal pauses in Chinese EFL learners’ spontaneous speech. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching. 6,

-21.

Yoon, K. C. (2009). Synthesis and evaluation of prosodically exaggerated utterances. Phonetics and Speech Sciences. 1(3), 73-85.

Zhang, L. (2015). An empirical study on the intelligibility of English Spoken by Chinese university students. Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics. 38(1), 36-54.

Zhu, L. (2007). The rhythm patterns of English spoken by Chinese and its pedagogical implications. Doctoral dissertation, Minzu University of China, China.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/gema-2020-2001-04

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


 

 

 

eISSN : 2550-2131

ISSN : 1675-8021