ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the acceleration of technological changes in language education in universities as well as in other educational levels. Technology has been of great use in the case of online or hybrid English teaching, but most importantly to support classroom practice during short confinement periods or to practice oral skills without a mask out of the classroom. This chapter describes five activities to enhance students' pronunciation and phonological awareness in OneNote. The activities were put into practice with a group of twenty-one future teachers in the course English Phonetics over a period of 12 weeks. After that, their performance and their perceptions on the tasks were explored by means of an ad hoc post-questionnaire composed of open answer questions, together with multiple and single response ones. The results indicate that in general the tasks that were designed were perceived as positive in terms of support of classroom practice, but also in connection with error detection, phonological awareness purposes or access to feedback. Furthermore, participants' views related to the future applicability of the tasks were optimistic. © Peter Lang GmbH. International Academic Publishers Berlin 2023. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
We propose an Arabic talking face called Badr to teach the language vocabulary for young students under COVID-19 pandemic. Badr is built on the previous talking face Baldi (e.g., an American English talking face) with many enhancements in interaction and words pronunciation. It can complement the work of instructors who can get tired and bored when teaching online for long hours. It can pronounce standard Arabic vocabulary accurately and interact with learners in natural manner. Listening and observing Badr improve the learners' ability to understand speech in a noisy background. We tested Badr with Qatar University students, and we show its effectiveness and usefulness in introducing smoothly new vocabulary. Badr can act as an independent tutor for different categories of learners including those with learning difficulties, slow learners, and non-Arabic speaking learners. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Remote learning has been in the spotlight since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, notably boosting the development of distance learning in the last two years;as universities were obliged to close worldwide and lecturers had to teach online during lockdown, the use of Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (SCMC) started to prevail. Pronunciation instruction was not an exception. Indeed, in-person lectures had used technology to support face-to-face (F2F) education by using videos and articles in class. However, educators had to adapt rapidly to teach through video -based platforms. Although much investigation has been conducted on Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT), and researchers currently show more and more interest in the use of new technologies within the pronunciation classroom, little research has been done regarding the teaching methodologies applied in teacher-guided online pronunciation instruction. Along these lines, this study examines English undergraduates' insights who took pronunciation courses remotely at Rovira i Virgili University during the COVID-19 crisis. Findings show that participants were highly satisfied with the adaptation of the course, rating all the activities and methods used above 4 on a scale of 5. Thus, pronunciation can be taught effectively via SCMC, although a larger sample is needed to reach more conclusive results.
ABSTRACT
The abrupt emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 forced tertiary professors to urgently adapt the face-to-face courses they were lecturing to emergency remote teaching. Researchers of different fields have started to investigate and share their thoughts on which are the best methodologies to guarantee a high-quality learning experience while coping with students' anxiety and teachers' lack of technical background. The present study examines the adaptation of an English pronunciation course at Rovira i Virgili university to the online setting imposed by the outbreak of the pandemic. The students who took the course were asked to fill in a satisfaction survey containing multiple choice, Likert scale and open questions on the different measures taken and the general progress of the course. Results show that students were higly satisfied with the adaptation of the course to the online context, and that the methods adopted and tools provided were useful and sufficient to continue with the adequate functioning of the course. Hence, this study is a sample of how to teach pronunciation remotely in particular, and how to successfully adapt a face-to-face university course to emergency remote teaching in general, guaranteeing students' learning and engagement.
ABSTRACT
This pilot experimental study pursues a number of goals. Firstly, it aims to assess the phonetic attainment of selected English vowels among twelve Polish students of English philology after one term of intensive online pronunciation training in pandemic conditions. Secondly, it looks at potential differences between production outcomes in two experimental contexts, that is, reading and imitation. Finally, it seeks to determine if there is any correlation between musicality and target attainment with a view to identifying a broader scope for potential future research questions. For this purpose, recorded samples of read and imitated English words containing vowels in a uniform context /h_d/ were assessed by six raters using a 5-point Likert scale. The results, including those of an online musicality test, were analysed and subjected to statistical testing. The majority of total scores exceed the assumed acceptability benchmark of 50%. The study yielded a number of unexpected results. Firstly, female participants performed significantly better than male ones in the reading experiment, but not in imitation. Secondly, a stronger correlation was found between the reading results and musicality than between imitation results and musicality.
ABSTRACT
The shift to online instruction brought about by the novel coronavirus exacerbated language teaching and learning constraints already highlighted by foreign language (FL) research. However, it is important that FL courses keep preparing learners for global careers and interactions with native speakers-whether courses take place in-person, remotely, or hybrid, by enabling them to become more intelligible. This study examined whether an online approach to explicit pronunciation instruction could support the development of intelligible and comprehensible French pronunciation of students attending class in-person, and if the effects were similar on students attending class remotely. Six prerecorded pronunciation lessons were assigned as homework. Descriptive statistics on pre/post read-aloud and picture description tests revealed that online pronunciation instruction supported pronunciation learning overall. It was also found that there was no difference between remote and in-person students. Online pronunciation instruction can thus potentially foster the acquisition of French pronunciation.
ABSTRACT
It is often pointed out that pronunciation instruction, unlike many other aspects of language learning, is a very physical activity. In teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language, face-to-face tuition with an experienced, phonetically trained instructor remains the best option. But the COVID pandemic and the shift to online teaching which universities in Bulgaria had to make virtually overnight about two years ago, forced course instructors to adapt very quickly both their teaching materials and resources as well as their teaching methods and practices to the new realities of life in / with the epidemic. The present paper addresses the question of teaching English pronunciation at tertiary level during the COVID pandemic. It discusses briefly the advantages and disadvantages of a number of digital resources which university students have found useful both in class and for individual work outside the virtual classroom on various segmental and suprasegmental aspects of the pronunciation of the foreign language.
ABSTRACT
This research project tries to investigate the influence of the Moth stories in the development of the speaking English skill. This is an experimental representation of the learning in form of storytelling method. This study had the participation of 39 students from the second semester “A” of Pedagogía de los Idiomas Nacionales y Extranjeros program at Technical University of Ambato. The whole experimental group (EG) was allowed to use online resources such as stories taken from The Moth web page to practice and complete some speaking tasks. To assess the speaking skill, a mock-up Key English Test (KET) speaking part was used as a pre and post-test. The speaking criteria were stated in the rubric provided by Cambridge which consisted of Grammar and Vocabulary, Pronunciation and Interactive Communication. The experiment was designed with the use of with the use of online stories according to student’s age and needs and obviously taking into consideration the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to analyze the experimental data that were represented in the paper, the SPSS program was used to apply a T-Student test. To conclude, the results showed that online stories taken from The Moth web page had positive effects on the development of the students’ speaking skill. Its interface, resource, structure, and methodology were engaging for students so they improved mainly the pronunciation and its branches which are the intelligibility, word-stress, intonation and phonological features. Thus, the positive effects of using online storytelling strategies were obvious in this research. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The global pandemic caused a storm of cancellations of professional conferences and professional travel, but the storm has also had technological silver linings in opportunities for professional development including greater numbers of webinars, virtual conferences, and new uses of videoconferencing. We expect that many of these new expansions of professional development will continue in the field of L2 pronunciation. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ABSTRACT
This review aims to examine the discrimination and prejudices toward the accent of non-native English speakers and cyberbullying as the ripple effect of these negative consequences. Following Arksey and O'Malley's framework of conducting a scoping review, 60 studies from 2012 to 2021 were retrieved from the ERIC and Google Scholar databases. The studies were reviewed from two aspects: (1) psychological impact on speakers with a non-native English accent, (2) attitudes toward non-native English accents from the victim's and perpetrator's perspectives. The findings suggested that speaking with a non-native English accent drew negative cognitive, affective, and behavioral experiences. Biases toward non-native English accents were due to the general derogatory perception of an accent and the comprehensibility of speakers' accent and pronunciation. "Accent acceptability" can be inculcated at all levels of education, not only through multicultural education but also through the concerted effort of policy makers and practitioners to seriously address this social issue. Accent awareness can dispel unwarranted and undesirable judgements of non-native English accent speakers. Future studies should be conducted on the effects of social and mental health experiences, particularly of non-native ESL and EFL teachers, given that this may be the only profession required to teach "live" during the pandemic and thus be subjected to public praise or ridicule.