Non-Native Prosody

Non-Native Prosody
Author: Jürgen Trouvain
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2008-09-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110198754

Non-Native Prosody: Phonetic Description and Teaching Practice is a response to the increasing interest in the field of prosody in second language acquisition and teaching. The volume presents an overview of the state of the art in second language prosody learning and teaching and brings together linguistic research on the description and modelling of non-native prosodic structures with L2 teaching methods and practices. The first part comprises descriptions of non-native prosodic structures (including intonation, stress and speech rhythm) as well as methodological considerations of research in second language acquisition written by experts in the field. These overviews of current theoretical models and results from empirical studies are presented in a format accessible to language teachers. In the second part, some of the leading teaching practitioners and developers of phonological learning materials present a variety of methods and exercises in the area of prosody. The accompanying audio examples make a useful addition illustrating the descriptions and exercises for various target and source languages. They could be found under "additional material" on this webpage (previously on the CD sold with the book).

Native and Non-Native Teachers in English Language Classrooms

Native and Non-Native Teachers in English Language Classrooms
Author: Juan de Dios Martinez Agudo
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2017-05-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501504142

Despite being highly debated in applied linguistics and L2 teaching literature, the controversial issue of (non)nativeness still remains unresolved. Contemporary critical research has questioned the theoretical foundations of the nativeness paradigm, which still exerts a strong influence in the language teaching profession. Written by well-known researchers and teacher educators from all over the world, both NSs and NNSs, the selected contributions of this volume cover a great variety of aspects related to the professional role and status of both NS and NNS teachers in terms of both perceived differences and professional concerns and challenges. The strongest aspects of this volume are the global perspectives and the implications for future research and teacher education. It is precisely this international perspective which makes this volume illustrative of different realities with a similar objective in mind: the improvement of second language teaching and teacher education. In today's world, being a NS or NNS should not really matter but rather teachers' professional competences. This publication thus provides a forum of reflection and discussion for all L2 educators who need to be aware of how much they might offer to their future students.

Pragmatics and Prosody in English Language Teaching

Pragmatics and Prosody in English Language Teaching
Author: Jesús Romero-Trillo
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2012-03-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9400738838

This volume explores the elusive subject of English prosody—the stress, rhythm and intonation of the language—, and its relevance for English language teaching. Its sharp focus will be especially welcomed by teachers of English to non-native speakers, but also by scholars and researchers interested in Applied Linguistics. The book examines key issues in the development of prosody and delves into the role of intonation in the construction of meaning. The contributions tackle difficult areas of intonation for language learners, providing a theoretical analysis of each stumbling block as well as a practical explanation for teachers and teacher trainers. The numerous issues dealt with in the book include stress and rhythm; tone units and information structure; intonation and pragmatic meaning; tonicity and markedness, etc... The authors have deployed speech analysis software to illustrate their examples as well as to encourage readers to carry out their own computerized prosodic analyses.

Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers

Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers
Author: Halszka Bąk
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2016-09-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 331944042X

This volume provides the first systematic and data-driven exploration of English emotional prosody processing in the minds of non-native speakers of the language. Over the past few decades emotional prosody has attracted the interest of researchers from a variety of disciplines such as psychiatry, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and linguistics. Although a considerable collective body of empirical evidence exists regarding emotional prosody processing in native speakers of various languages, non-native speakers have been virtually ignored. This constitutes a knowledge gap of increasing relevance, as we approach 2050, the year when the global population of non-native speakers of English is estimated to overtake that of native speakers of the language. This volume aims to fill this gap and provide insights into how emotions are processed on multiple levels while also presenting novel methodological solutions. Crucially, Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers: Towards an Integrative Emotion Paradigm begins by providing a conceptual background of emotion research, and then demonstrates a novel, workable, completely integrative paradigm for emotion research. This integrative approach reconciles theories such as the dimensional view of emotions, the standard basic emotions view, and the appraisal view of emotions. Following this theoretical section is an empirical exploration of the topic: the volume explores those views via experimental tasks. The insight into overall processing such a multiple-level approach allows a comprehensive answer to the question of how non native speakers of English process emotional prosody in their second language. By offering a critical, data-driven, integrative approach to investigating emotions in the minds of non-native English speakers, this volume is a significant and timely contribution to the literature on emotion prosody processing, bilingual research, and broadly understood emotion research.

Prosodic and Rhythmic Aspects of L2 Acquisition

Prosodic and Rhythmic Aspects of L2 Acquisition
Author: Anna De Meo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-02-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443846856

In recent years, prosodic competence has become increasingly important in second language acquisition studies, as it is a crucial element in the identification of non-native pronunciation and message understanding. This volume is the first attempt to provide a survey of interlanguage prosody research in L2 Italian. It begins with an overview of the possible approaches to the study of rhythmic-prosodic skills acquisition in an L2. The second part of the book emphasizes the relationship between the mother tongue and a second language, and investigates the presence of transfer in prosody interlanguage development. The third part illustrates prosody’s role in the interpretation of pragmatic meaning in native-non-native interaction, and its influence on message persuasiveness. And in the fourth part, technology meets prosody in the areas of second language teaching and speech synthesis.

Automatic Assessment of Prosody in Second Language Learning

Automatic Assessment of Prosody in Second Language Learning
Author: Florian Hönig
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3832545670

Worldwide there is a universal need for second language language learning. It is obvious that the computer can be a great help for this, especially when equipped with methods for automatically assessing the learner's pronunciation. While assessment of segmental pronunciation quality (i.,e. whether phones and words are pronounced correctly or not) is already available in commercial software packages, prosody (i.e. rhythm, word accent, etc.) is largely ignored--although it highly impacts intelligibility and listening effort. The present thesis contributes to closing this gap by developing and analyzing methods for automatically assessing the prosody of non-native speakers. We study the detection of word accent errors and the general assessment of the appropriateness of a speaker's rhythm. We propose a flexible, generic approach that is (a) very successful on these tasks, (b) competitive to other state-of-the-art result, and at the same time (c) flexible and easily adapted to new tasks.