1,721,073 research outputs found
The phonetic basis of phonological vowel nasality: evidence from real-time MRI velum movement in German
Full text linkDevelopmental pathway of phonetic fine-tuning of phonological contrast in reference to information structure: The case of three-way contrastive stops in Korean.
No full textThis study investigates the acquisition of three-way stop contrast (lenis, aspirated, fortis) in Korean and phonetic modulation of the phonological contrast driven by information structure. VOT and F0 of the stops produced by children (4-5, 7-8, 10-11 year-olds) and adults in broad, narrow, and contrastive focus conditions were measured. Results indicated that only the 7-8 year-olds showed the three-way distinction using VOT under (phonemic) contrastive focus, while the other two children groups and adults did not. As for F0, adults made a three-way distinction using F0 in all focus conditions, while the 7-8 and the 10-11 year-olds did so only under limited focus conditions. The 4-5 year-olds did not show the three-way distinction in any focus condition. The results suggest that children build up their phonological awareness and fine-tune phonetic realization in their developmental pathway in conjunction with different functions of information structur
Enhancing pronunciation teaching in the tertiary EFL classrooom: A Vietnamese case study
No full textRecent years have seen increasing research interest in the teaching of pronunciation in English as a second/foreign language classes (Thomson & Derwing, 2014), with particular strands of this research focused on understanding how pronunciation is represented in instructional materials and actual teaching practices in a range of settings and in teacher cognition (e.g., Couper, 2017; Derwing, Diepenbroek, & Foote, 2012; Foote, Trofimovich, Collins, & Urzúa, 2016). The study reported in this dissertation extends this research by investigating pronunciation teaching in a context where it has hitherto been under-researched, namely tertiary EFL in Vietnam.
The research involved two phases. Phase 1 was an introductory situation analysis which investigated pronunciation teaching practices of six Vietnamese tertiary EFL teachers teaching six intact classes at a Vietnamese university. First, the representation of pronunciation features in prescribed textbooks and supplementary materials of the EFL programme were analysed. Six ninety-minute lessons (one from each of the teachers) were then observed, and the teachers and 24 students across the six groups interviewed. The teacher interviews included both stimulated recall and general questions probing their beliefs about pronunciation teaching. Students were interviewed in focus groups (four each) regarding their teachers’ pronunciation teaching and their own pronunciation needs. The focus of Phase 1 was on how the teachers taught pronunciation, the factors shaping their pedagogical choices, and the students’ beliefs about their teachers’ pronunciation teaching and their instructional needs. The findings revealed that pronunciation was largely absent from course books and curriculum documents and that the teachers’ beliefs were in contrast with what they actually did in class. The teachers reported that they would follow deliberate steps if they taught pronunciation explicitly such as listening discrimination followed by explaining places of articulation and then practice. However, in the observed lessons, they only corrected their students’ pronunciation errors through recasts and/or prompts, with little if any explicit or pre-planned pronunciation teaching. In the interviews, the teachers confirmed that they never used any other techniques and that this was typically the only way they taught pronunciation in class.
The teachers’ pronunciation teaching was textbook-driven and was shaped by contextual factors including the curriculum and the learners. Decision making by all the teachers reflected a general commitment to strictly follow the mandated curriculum, with little evidence of pronunciation being taught explicitly. All the teachers reported a lack of initial training and professional learning in pronunciation pedagogy. In addition, there was a mismatch between the teachers’ and students’ preferences and beliefs about pronunciation teaching. Whereas the teachers believed error correction through recasts and/or prompts was effective, the students did not, and expressed a strong need for more explicit, communicative teaching of pronunciation. This pronunciation instructional need and the teachers’ lack of initial training and PL in pronunciation pedagogy motivated the Phase 2 study.
Phase 2 was an intervention study conducted with the same teachers teaching different classes. At the beginning of Phase 2, the teachers attended a teacher professional learning (TPL) workshop in which they were introduced to a pedagogic framework for teaching English pronunciation communicatively proposed by Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010). The teachers then planned communicative pronunciation teaching (CPT) lessons using this framework, and were subsequently observed implementing these lessons in their classes. Both the workshop and subsequent classes of this phase were audio-video recorded. A total of seven lesson plans and 24 classroom observations were made across the six teachers (four observations each). Right after the classroom observations, the teachers were interviewed to obtain their views of the TPL workshop and their implementation of the CPT lessons. Twenty-four students across the six groups were interviewed to reflect on their experience with the CPT lessons.
Observational data showed that the teachers understood and were able to translate what they learned about CPT from the workshop into actual classroom practice as reflected in their lesson planning and subsequent teaching. The lesson plans designed by the teachers closely followed the principles of the communicative framework. Interview data showed that the CPT model was favoured by both teacher and student participants. On the basis of the teachers’ implementation of the CPT lessons, both the teachers and students were confident that CPT has the advantages for promoting learners’ pronunciation knowledge, fostering their phonological ability, and developing their oral communication skills. They also reported that CPT can arouse learners’ interest and engagement in classroom learning.
Taken as a whole, this research highlights the need for pronunciation to be given a more explicit place in teaching and learning in tertiary EFL programmes in Vietnam, and for teachers to be better equipped for teaching pronunciation. Findings from interviews with teachers and learners in the study suggest that they would be receptive to such changes
Liminality as a lens on social meaning: A cross-variable analysis of gender in New Zealand English
No full textThe variationist sociolinguistic enterprise has been successful in developing models of structural (i.e., language-internal) drivers of variation and change, but one of the barriers preventing the development of a parallel model accounting for social drivers is the difficulty in operationalising salience. Using a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews collected in Auckland, New Zealand between 2013 and 2015, this project examines the relationship between language variation and gendered identity, and proposes an analytical approach of liminality – of examining the linguistic practices of people who have crossed a culturally-reified category boundary – as a possible solution to the problem of identifying socially salient variables.
The participants in this study are straight, queer, and transsexual native speakers of New Zealand English (NZE), representing two age groups that straddle the period of social change in the 1980s that saw a destabilisation of traditional gender roles in New Zealand. Variation in three linguistic systems is examined: adjectival modifiers (intensifiers and moderators), sibilants (/s/, /z/ and /ʃ/), and the vowels of NZE. The project uses established variationist and sociophonetic methodologies, as well as introducing a new metric for making comparisons across the vowel space as a whole. The findings show that speakers are able to encode their gendered identity across multiple variables, and that subtle linguistic signals can be used to affiliate with (or distance from) particular groups. The two most ‘distant’ groups are older straight men and younger [straight, queer, and transsexual] women, which this thesis argues is a reflection of the general societal criticism directed at young women by hegemonic masculinities. There is also evidence that the mainstreaming of queer identities in the wake of the 1986 decriminalisation of homosexuality has decreased the linguistic distance between straight and queer urban New Zealanders, demonstrating the relative rapidity with which social changes can be incorporated into the linguistic system.
This study highlights the utility of studying variation across linguistic systems rather than in variables in isolation, and proposes a typology of variation based on the boundedness and dimensionality of the linguistic systems under investigation. The framework of liminality is found to be productive with respect to the role of gender in language variation, although future research will have to test whether this framework can be generalised to other dimensions of social identity that are perceived as categorical (e.g., ethnicity and heritage culture in immigrant communities)
The Anticlockwise Checked Vowel Chain Shift in modern RP in the twentieth century:Incrementations and diagonal shifts
No full textThis paper presents evidence for a chain shift in the checked vowel sub-system of modern RP over one hundred years, based on LMER analysis of over 10000 vowels from 108 speakers with birthdates from 1883 to 1990. The data confirms previously identified gender-differentiated change in F1 and F2 of TRAP, as well as date-of-birth driven incremental change in F1 of KIT, F1 of STRUT, F2 of FOOT, and, for DRESS, an (F2-(2xF1)) diagonal shift by date of birth that follows TRAP’s path. We also present evidence for an active female-driven change in the LOT vowel, an (F2-(2xF1)) diagonal shift towards the close central area of the vowel space. The paper demonstrates differing statistical patterns in these shifts over time, and suggests a possible origin in changes to TRAP early in the 20th century. All data and additional figures for this study are available via OSF.io. on application to the author
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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