The purpose of this study is to develop a model of teaching and learning of English vowels for Korean middle school students through emphasizing English vowels for speech intelligibility. Although there are many good models of teaching and learning of...
The purpose of this study is to develop a model of teaching and learning of English vowels for Korean middle school students through emphasizing English vowels for speech intelligibility. Although there are many good models of teaching and learning of English vowels for Korean students and teachers, they still have difficulty producing and perceiving English vowels correctly, which play linguistically crucial roles in efficient communication with English native speakers. Vowels are the sounds carrying emotional messages that cause some misunderstanding or embarrassing situations between Korean English speakers and natives. So this author attempts to propose a better way to acquire, produce and differentiate various English vowels by developing such a special training program with manipulated vowel sounds to recognize, differentiate and produce the vowel sounds more efficiently and to improve Koreans' communication and conversation skills.
Five native speakers participated in a perception test to find out the most intelligible combination of suprasegmental features(duration, pitch, and intensity) after manipulating the features by 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6 times. Thirty Korean middle school students participated in the experiment to measure the student's English listening achievement. They were subsequently divided into 2 groups of 15 students each: an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG). The CG was trained in a normal model of teaching and learning of English vowels for Korean middle school students. EG was trained in a model of teaching and learning of English vowels for Korean middle school students through emphasizing English vowels for speech intelligibility.
The experimental condition consisted of a training program in the recognition, differentiation, and production of various vowel sounds. The program spanned an eight-week period with 5 days a week and 50 minutes per lesson. The materials for the protocol were composed of audio recordings professionally recorded at a recording studio by acoustic engineers. The audio materials consisted of 12 English vowels produced in isolation, in words and in sentences. Each vowel, within a word or a sentence was read once by an English native speaker. The duration and intensity of the vowels were then manipulated to have values 1.2 times greater by Praat 4.4.2 to enhance their intelligibility. Such intelligibility enabled Korean students of English to be exposed to more intelligible environments of a particular vowel sound. It was hypothesized that such an exposure to more intelligible environments would enable the subjects to recognize, differentiate, and produce the vowel sounds more efficiently.
The major findings of this study were as follows:
First, in the perception test, it was shown that the most intelligible combination of acoustic features is the duration and intensity with various manipulating scales.
Second, in the pre- and post-test of the students' English listening achievement, EG obtained higher scores in the post-test than they did in the pre-test, and the difference between the two scores was significant in the t-test. Also, the CG obtained higher scores in the post-test than they did in the pre-test, and the difference between the two scores was significant in the t-test. However, the degree of improvement in EG was higher than that in CG. This means that the intelligibility of speech sounds contributed to the improvement of the students' English listening achievement.
Third, in the EG the improvement of tense vowels /i, u, ɔ/ whose vocal tract was held relatively constant was higher than that of lax vowels in any combination of suprasegmental features and manipulating scales.
In conclusion, the intelligibility of speech sounds had a considerable influence on the Korean students' English listening achievement especially, in the basic level of phonemic awareness. So, the model of teaching and learning of English vowels for Korean middle school students by emphasizing English vowels for speech intelligibility provides a great solution for teachers looking for various teaching and learning styles for their students. Putting these findings into practice, however, inevitably involves more researches on increasing the intelligibility of speech sounds in various environments.
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