Differences of pronunciation practices:
A study of "Repeat with me" and "Repeat after me"
Katsumi NAGAI
Centre for Research and Educational Development in Higher Education,Kagawa University, 761-8521 Japan
Abstract:
Because repetition after a teacher and repetition with a teacher are the most widely used ways of pronunciation practice in a language classroom, the aim of this paper was set to measure the effectiveness of the two types of pronunciation practice, using four experiments which focus on the temporal factor. In Experiment 1, Japanese learners of English were asked to imitate English and nonsense syllables, and their reaction time was measured. Average latency before launching repetition fell between 600ms and 900ms, varying with the phonological length of the test words. In Experiment 2, pairs of nonsense and English words, which included difficult phonemic distinctions for Japanese learners of English such as between /l-r/ and /v-b/, were both a-repeated and w-repeated. In Experiment 3, pairs of English sentences, which had strong-weak and weak-strong stress patterns, were a-repeated and w-repeated. In both experiments, learners' practices were recorded and evaluated by British teachers of English. In Experiment 2, the results of nonsense words revealed that there was no significant difference in naturalness between a-repeat and w-repeat. However, a-repeat surpassed w-repeat in Experiment 3. In Experiment 4, subjects were presented the identical stress patterns of test sentences but reproduced with short sinusoid waves. The learners a-repeated and w-repeated the patterns by pronouncing the monosyllable "ta." The results showed no difference between a-repeat and w-repeat, which implies that repetition of sentences is different from that of nonsense words.
The naturalness of English sentences pronounced by learners was examined in Experiment 3, and the rhythm patterns, generated with spotted sine waves based on the power contours of the original test sentences, were investigated in Experiment 4. The results in Experiment 3 were based on naturalness scores given by native British listeners; the scores obtained in Experiment 4 were calculated from differences in time of speakers' productions. Comparison of the timing structure of the test sentences repeated by the participants in Experiment 3 with those of the results of Experiment 4 was done in order to ascertain to what degree is the timing structure of the original test sentences maintained by learners.
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Centre for Research and Educational Development in Higher Education, and
Faculty of Education,
Kagawa University, 760-8521 JAPAN