http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45200 2026-04-05T16:46:54Z 2026-04-05T16:46:54Z Alzi'abi, Safi Eldeen http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45249 2023-01-11T02:40:59Z 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z

Arab Efl Learners’ Stress of Compound Words Alzi'abi, Safi Eldeen Compound words are ubiquitous in English. Stressing compounds is difficult for EFL learners and native speakers, especially when the meaning is not a sum of the constituent parts. This study explores Arab EFL learners’ stress strategies and outlines their difficulties. It examines whether any of these factors (a) word class, (b) orthography, (c) understanding of phonetics and phonology, (d) age and (e) grade point average (GPA) influence their behaviour and levels of success. It involves 130 second and third-year Jordanian English majors in reading 50 opaque non-frequent compound words, 25 with right-stress and 25 with left-stress. The majority opted for right-stress, producing about half of the stimuli correctly. They right-stressed more often in compound verbs, nouns and adjectives of all spelling forms. Their performance was slightly influenced by the study of phoneticsandphonology, training in stress and GPA. However, there was no noticeable relationship between their stress performance and age. Notably, the subjects needed more training in compound word stress production.

2022-12-29T00:00:00Z Nowacka , Marta http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45248 2023-01-11T02:41:05Z 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z

English Phonetics Course: University Students’ Preferences and Expectations Nowacka , Marta This paper examines the perspectives of Polish university students of English (n=110) on selected aspects after the pronunciation instruction they underwent during their phonetics course. It shows qualitative questionnaire results obtained by means of four open-ended statements. It sheds light on: English accent preference, reasons why they favoured and disfavoured the course and expectations from the course tutor. The students reported a positive impact of the training on their speaking and overall English/language skills, sounding native-like, good, and being understood. They admitted to disliking rules, theory of phonetics, unexpected pronunciation of words. In addition, the expected responsibilities of a pronunciation tutor comprised: correction of students’ pronunciation and helping them improve this skill. It confirms that the nativeness principle to pronunciation learning still prevails as the students wish to sound nativelike and expect the teacher to give them corrective accuracy-based feedback.

2022-12-29T00:00:00Z Červinková Poesová , Kristýna Lancová , Klára http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45246 2023-01-11T02:41:04Z 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z

Developing Unbiased Teacher Identity in Pluri-Accent Reality: Research-Based Classroom Activities Červinková Poesová , Kristýna; Lancová , Klára In the current pilot report, we draw on and further develop our previous research examining pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about accents, in which we proposed a pedagogical intervention reflecting certain aspects of our research outcomes, mainly the positive trend of embracing one’s non-nativeness. A set of four classroom activities, namely Nativeness perception test, Four corners, Bank of experiences and Sociodynamic teacher, were incorporated into three different online graduate courses in the winter and summer semesters 2020/2021 at the Department of the English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education in Prague. The piloting process was partly replicated in face-to-face classes of the following academic year. The overarching goal was to raise awareness of accent variation, especially in such a linguistically homogenous country as the Czech Republic and cultivate future teachers’ ability to address accent-related issues confidently, objectively and sensitively. The subsequent scrutiny of participants’ recorded discussions, written and/or oral feedback, submitted tasks as well as teachers’ observations indicated increased awareness of accent variability and a raised level of pedagogical confidence in approaching accent in the classroom context. Particularly, the respondents proved to be highly creative when devising adequate and supportive reactions to imagined negative comments related to accents or preventing them by specifically designing their lesson plans. Furthermore, the pedagogical intervention was appraised by the participating graduate students in their reflective assessment one year later.

2022-12-29T00:00:00Z Verbeni , Vincenzo http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45247 2023-01-11T02:41:02Z 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z

Speech Rhythm in English and Italian: an Experimental Study on Early Sequential Bilingualism Verbeni , Vincenzo The study investigates the dynamics of speech rhythm in early sequential bilingual children who have access to Italian-English immersion programs. The research focused on the Italian and English semi-spontaneous narrative productions of 9 students, aged between 6;7 and 10;11 and distributed across three different classes (Year 1, Year 3, Year 5). Their speech was recorded and subject to an interval-based analysis via computation of %V/ΔC, PVI and Varco metrics. The retrieved metrics underwent within-group and between-group one-way ANOVAs in order to identify valuable cross-linguistic variations among children of the same age and statistically significant differences between different age groups (Y1, Y3, Y5). The results appear to support a stress-centered interpretation of speech rhythm: according to this view, all languages could be arranged on a stress-timed continuum in which “syllable-timing” is marked by sparser occurrences of (regular) prominence due to the relative absence of vocalic elision and consonantal complexity. Indeed, the comparative analysis drawn between the normalized vocalic indexes of Y1, Y3 and Y5 students revealed a statistically relevant increase in vocalic variation phenomena both in Italian and in English. Moreover, Y1 and Y3 consonantal scores were comparatively higher in the Italian sample: it will be discussed how unpredictable stress-timed patterns can arise as a function of proficiency, speech-rate and age-related disfluencies.

2022-12-29T00:00:00Z