|
Dòng
|
Nội dung
|
|
1
|
Do Native Speakers of North American and Singapore English Differentially Perceive Comprehensibility in Second Language Speech?
/ Kazuya Saito, Natsuko Shintani
// Tesol quarterly 2016, Vol50, N.2 p421-p446 The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10 Singaporean raters for overall comprehensibility and then submitted to pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, and grammar analyses. Whereas the raters’ comprehensibility judgements were generally influenced by phonological and temporal qualities as primary cues, and, to a lesser degree, lexical and grammatical qualities of L2 speech as secondary cues, their linguistic backgrounds did make some impact on their L2 speech assessment patterns. The Singaporean raters, who not only used various models of English but also spoke a few L2s on a daily basis in a multilingual environment, tended to assign more lenient comprehensibility scores due to their relatively high sensitivity to, in particular, lexicogrammatical information. On the other hand, the comprehensibility judgements of the Canadian raters, who used only North American English in a monolingual environment, were mainly determined by the phonological accuracy and fluency of the L2 speech
|
|
2
|
The Incidental Grammar Acquisition in Focus on Form and Focus on Forms Instruction for Young Beginner Learners / Natsuko Shintani.
// TESOL Quarterly Volume 49, Issue 1, March 2015. 2015pages 115–140. ncidental grammar acquisition involves learners “picking up” a grammatical feature while their primary focus is on some other aspect of language—either message content or another language feature that is taught directly. This article reports a study of children s incidental grammar acquisition of two grammatical features—plural -s and copula be—in two types of instruction—focus on form (FonF) and focus on forms (FonFs). The two features were not directly taught, but opportunities for learning them occurred in classroom interactions. Thirty young beginner Japanese learners were divided into two groups (FonF and FonFs) and received nine repeated lessons over 5 weeks. The study examined learners acquisition of the two structures as measured by tests and sought explanations for the results in terms of the differences in interactions that arose in the two instructional contexts and, in particular, opportunities for attending to the two grammatical features in these interactions. The children in the FonF classroom demonstrated acquisition of plural -s but not of copula be. Neither structure was acquired by the children in the FonFs classroom. Analysis of the classroom interactions show that there was a functional need to attend to plural -s (but not copula be) only in the FonF classroom.
|
|
|
|
|