http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45201 2026-04-05T16:46:30Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45255 Use of L2 Pronunciation Techniques in and Outside Classes: Students’ Preferences Kusz , Ewa; Pawliszko , Judyta The present study describes the level of effectiveness of both traditional and computer-assisted second language pronunciation techniques from the students’ perspectives. By traditional techniques we mean those activities which make use of phonetic alphabet, including transcription practice, detailed description of the articulatory systems, drills (e.g. minimal pair drills), reading aloud, tongue twisters, rhymes, etc. (Hismanoglu and Hismanoglu 2010: 985). On the other hand, computer-assisted techniques include activities based on listening and imitating tasks, which use technology, such as self-imitation practice, recordings of L2 learner’s, visual aids, and automatic speech recognition tools. The main aim of this study does not aim to classify L2 pronunciation methods by allocating them to previously mentioned categories but rather attempts to examine the intricate relationship between students’ knowledge, perceptions, attitudes and their most preferable practices which, in their opinion, result in improvement of their L2 pronunciation. 118 study subjects were asked to complete four main questions, within which tasks based on the Likert-scale items gathered data about the students’ most preferable L2 pronunciation teaching and learning techniques. The students were asked to create their own list, starting from the most useful to the least beneficial techniques. The last task was an open-ended question about other techniques than mentioned in the questionnaire. The analysis of the obtained data involved a two-stage process: a) data segmentation; and b) techniques categorisation. The first step was to select pronunciation learning techniques in terms of their frequency and use and to adjust them to the research group. The second stage, techniques categorisation, was based on a careful analysis of the answers given by the students in the questionnaire. Following that, five categories were distinguished: (1) traditional and used only in the classroom, (2) traditional but also used in distance learning, (3) computer-assisted but used only in the classroom, (4) computer-assisted and also used in distance learning, (5) innovative: combining students’ needs and available online.Highlighting the prominence of pronunciation in acquiring communicative competence, the authors propose their own, innovative suggestions for the future creation of teaching materials. 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45254 Microsoft Reading Progress as Capt Tool Molenda , Marek; Grabarczyk , Izabela The paper explores the accuracy of feedback provided to non-native learners of English by a pronunciation module included in Microsoft Reading Progress. We compared pronunciation assessment offered by Reading Progress against two university pronunciation teachers. Recordings from students of English who aim for native-like pronunciation were assessed independently by Reading Progress and the human raters. The output was standardized as negative binary feedback assigned to orthographic words, which matches the Microsoft format. Our results indicate that Reading Progress is not yet ready to be used as a CAPT tool. Inter-rater reliability analysis showed a moderate level of agreement for all raters and a good level of agreement upon eliminating feedback from Reading Progress. Meanwhile, the qualitative analysis revealed certain problems, notably false positives, i.e., words pronounced within the boundaries of academic pronunciation standards, but still marked as incorrect by the digital rater. We recommend that EFL teachers and researchers approach the current version of Reading Progress with caution, especially as regards automated feedback. However, its design may still be useful for manual feedback. Given Microsoft declarations that Reading Progress would be developed to include more accents, it has the potential to evolve into a fully-functional CAPT tool for EFL pedagogy and research. 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45253 Englishville: a Multi-Sensorial Tool for Prosody Costille , Kizzi Edensor Research has shown that prosody plays an important role in the intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness of non-native discourse (Munro and Derwing, 1995, 1998). Yet prosody is deemed difficult to teach (Setter et al., 2010). Previous studies have used software such as PRAAT (Setter et al., 2010, Olson, 2014, Imber et al., 2017,) but they can be complex to use (Setter et al., 2010; Setter and Jenkins, 2005). Could a more comprehensive tool be useful to L2 learners? Englishville is a website where it is possible for the learner to see a real-time 3D spectrogram. An experiment was set up to determine whether multi-sensorial input, available via Englishville can help learners of English. Eight French students enrolled in a BA in English took part in this initial trial experiment (2 per group). They were divided into four groups. The corpus is divided into 2 parts. The first focuses on lexical word stress (72 words) and the second on intonation in 30 short sentences. The corpus was recorded by a female native British speaker. All participants had one trial at the beginning of the experiment to familiarise themselves with the tool and they all read and recorded the words and phrases as they appeared on the screen. The first group only had access to this text (no input) before recording their own productions whereas the other 3 groups received supplementary input. Group 2 read the text and heard the corresponding audio (audio input), group 3 read the text and saw the corresponding 3D spectrogram (visual input) and group 4 read the text, heard the audio and saw the corresponding 3D spectrogram (multi-sensorial input). An auditive analysis leads us to believe that both hearing speech and seeing the corresponding spectrogram is beneficial, especially for intonation. Positive results came from the students’ feedback; they generally found the tool useful, easy to use, fun and interesting. 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/45252 Correlations Between Positive or Negative Utterances and Basic Acoustic Features of Voice: a Preliminary Analysis Stolarski , Łukasz The major aim of this paper is to establish possible correlations between continuous sentiment scores and four basic acoustic characteristics of voice. In order to achieve this objective, the text of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens was tokenized at the sentence level. Next, each of the resulting text units was assessed in terms of sentiment polarity and aligned with the corresponding fragment in an audiobook. The results indicate weak but statistically significant correlations between sentiment scores and three acoustic features: the mean F0, the standard deviation of F0 and the mean intensity. These findings may be useful in selecting optimal acoustic features for model training in multimodal sentiment analysis. Also, they are essential from a linguistic point of view and could be applied in studies on such language phenomena as irony. 2022-12-29T00:00:00Z