Teachers of English: L1 and L2 Articulation Rate Correspondence

• Thesis title in Czech: Učitelé angličtiny: Korespondence artikulačního tempa v L1 a L2
• Thesis title in English: Teachers of English: L1 and L2 Articulation Rate Correspondence
• Key words: artikulační tempo|intonační fráze|run
• English key words: articulation rate|intonation phrase|run|phrase-final lengthening
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2022/2023
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of the English Language and ELT Methodology (21-UAJD)
• Supervisor: doc. Dr. phil. Eva Maria Luef, Mag. phil.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 17.03.2023
• Date of assignment: 17.03.2023
• Administrator's approval: approved
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 29.04.2023
• Date and time of defence: 04.09.2023 11:00
• Date of electronic submission: 10.08.2023
• Date of proceeded defence: 04.09.2023
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Barbora Bulantová

Guidelines

Articulation rate in any given language often has a profound effect on the evaluation of the speaker’s proficiency in it, since the swiftness of speech production can (along with other factors) mark a confident orientation in the language’s system of grammar, in its lexicon and its sound patterns. Though it has been sufficiently proved that there is a link between speech (or articulation) rates in the speaker’s mother language and in languages acquired later in life, this paper aims to cover an area crucially important for the teaching of English in the Czech environment, one which has been explored rather limitedly. The similarities found in articulation rates of the two languages may prove to be a more peculiar (and not so conspicuous) way of tackling foreign language speech production difficulties in the minds of non-native speakers. Based on monologue recordings of approximately five native speakers of Czech (all high-school teachers of English in the Czech Republic) taken from the “Teachers of English Corpus” (conducted by third-year students of the English for Teacher Education bachelor programme and supervised by PhDr. Tomáš Gráf, Ph.D.), the text will in separate stages examine the influence of L1 (Czech) on the articulation rate of the speakers’ L2 (English). The recordings consist of two, approximately three to five-minute long monologues in Czech and English. Metadata (such as age, gender, education, language certificates, frequency of contact with English, stay in an English-speaking country, etc.) collected during the interviews are taken into account and closely inspected for any possible relevance for the articulation rate proximity. None of the recorded speakers were informed of the exact research purpose before conducting the recording to ensure maximal spontaneity. The analysis will focus primarily on semantically related passages (clauses/phrases/words) in the monologues, with the main goal being the determination of a (relatively) fixed relationship (or pattern) between the speakers’ articulation rates in Czech and English. The results of the measurements (conducted in Praat) will then indicate whether individual attributes of the speakers account for a discrepancy/proximity between the two rates, or whether there is an approximative pattern applicable to all speakers. These findings are to be confronted with secondary sources consisting mainly of previous research done in this field (measuring art. rate in Czech and English), with a possible emphasis on sociolinguistic factors.
Práce bude vypracována v anglickém jazyce.

References

Crystal, Thomas H. and Arthur S. House. “Articulation Rate and the Duration of Syllables and Stress Groups in Connected Speech.” In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 88, no. 1 (July 1990): 101-112. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.399955
Dankovičová, Jana. “Articulation Rate Variation within the Intonational Phrase in Czech and English.” In Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. San Francisco (August 1999): 269-272.
Dankovičová, Jana. “The Domain of Articulation Rate Variation in Czech.” In Journal of Phonetics 25, no.3 (July 1997): 287-312
Kendall, Tyler. Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus Sociophonetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
Weingartová, Lenka and Jan Volín. “Temporální charakteristiky.” In Fonetická identifikace mluvčího. Praha: Filozofická fakulta, Univerzita Karlova v Praze (2014): 95-103.