Univerzita Pardubice Fakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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Publikace detail

Two reading aloud formats revealing inter-reader and intra-reader variability of Czech university students

Autoři: Ivanová Jaroslava

Rok: 2015

Druh publikace: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	Two reading aloud formats revealing inter-reader and intra-reader variability of Czech university students	This presentation discusses the format of reading aloud and explores which segmental features receive the lowest difficulty indices (i.e. cause most problems) in reading aloud of 230 Czech university students of English in two different periods, 112 subjects in 2013 and 118 subjects in 2014. The focus is on the front open vowel ash, the weak central mid vowel schwa, the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives, the bilabial approximant /w/, the velar nasal, and the pronunciation of word-final voiced consonants /g/ and /d/. The informants (n=112) were tested by means of two reading aloud subtasks: a 153-word text, and a wordlist containing 24 words. The results (2013) showed the lowest difficulty indices in the wordlist and text respectively: the plosive /d/ (pi=29.30; pi=78. 30), the velar nasal (pi=32.37; pi=54.42) in word final positions, the schwa (pi=63.39; pi=32.19), the voiced dental fricative (pi=65.2; pi=30.4), and the front open vowel (pi=53; pi=45,1). The data indicate that not only are pronunciation errors due to differences between phonemic inventories in Czech and English (the schwa; the front open vowel ash (e.g. LAMP); the voiced dental fricative (e.g. THE) in any word position), but also stem from differences in their realizations in various distributions. Thus the plosive /d/ tends to be enunciated as /t/ at word ends thanks to the loss of voicing in Czech and the velar nasal in –ING is not pronounced adequately even if Czech learners pronounce it without any difficulty in HANKA in the middle of a word, and the unvoiced dental fricative does not occur as frequently as its voiced counterpart.	reading aloud; EFL; English phonemes; tertiary level; Czech students; pronunciation errors