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Devise A Pronunciation Experiment | ||
Tags: Scientific Research | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 33 of 49 05 April 2013 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | ||
shit... when I had written a lot of that, it got lost somehow :((( I have no time to redo it. Please go find the article and read it yourselves!! /Olle 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 34 of 49 05 April 2013 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow! I found the article as pdf.
And a summary. And the first author's home pages with lots of more recent references. Cheers! /Olle Edited by okjhum on 05 April 2013 at 1:46pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 35 of 49 05 April 2013 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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As for how I personally think that this "deliberate practice" in the realm of language learning should be done, I have summarized it in my article Accent Addition: Prosody and Perception Facilitate Second Language Learning , in O. Fujimura, B. D. Joseph, & B. Palek (Eds.), Proceedings of LP'98 (Linguistics and Phonetics Conference) at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, September 1998 (Vol. 2, pp. 373-398). Prague: The Karolinum Press. Edited by okjhum on 05 April 2013 at 1:56pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 36 of 49 05 April 2013 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Among all the interesting findings by Ericsson & al, please contemplate this:
"Even in music there is evidence for improved skill. When Tchaikovsky asked two of the greatest violinists of his day to play his violin concerto, they refused, deeming the score unplayable (Platt, 1966). Today, elite violinists consider this concerto part of the standard repertory. The improvement in music training is so great that according to Roth (1982) the violin virtuoso Paganini 'would indeed cut a sorry figure if placed upon the modern concert stage'..." So, dear folks, whatever you'd like to be able to do, go and practice it! :) You want to be an elite performer? Go and practice it intensely for 10 years! :) /Olle 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 37 of 49 05 April 2013 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | ||
My recent comments and references above lead me to this answer: Yes a trained phonetician (or speech therapist, or anybody with appropriate training) should be able to help a learner achieve that in 1 hour -- as a "starter", but more practice than that is obviously needed for "maintenance". I sometimes give 1-week long full-day very-intensive courses in "Swedish pronunciation renovation" for immigrant doctors who are dissatisfied with their pronunciation and feel they are stigmatized and hampered in their contacts with patients and colleagues. And in the way I do it, a 10-12 member group and choral practice is far, far more effective than one-to-one sessions. The participants are then consistently surprised how much they have achieved already after the first lesson (and get sooo angry with their previous teachers who failed them on this surprisingly easy task). During the whole week, we almost only practice "deliberately" on the participants' own addresses. After all, any short-short text is very representative of the whole language, a too-long text would entail less practice per part, and their addresses contain a very high, inherent motivation factor. But despite such a seemingly "boring" week (as many language teachers tend to think that "pronunciation" is), in the course evaluation after the week, many participants write that they think the course was too short!! :) Can you imagine that!? Top achievers like MDs, licenced to work in Sweden, with very vast vocabularies and being language-wise fully functional in their craving daily jobs, think that practicing almost only their address for 35 hours during one week is "too short"!! :) /Olle Edited by okjhum on 05 April 2013 at 3:17pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 38 of 49 05 April 2013 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I suspected that it would be possible to get a large 'award' through some precise counseling - and that's why I mentioned it as an appropriate research field.
As language learners we can essentially try to absorb an humungous amount of unrelated pieces of grammatical information, or we can try to find patterns. And it seems logical to try the same thing with phonetics. You shouldn't primarily spend time on teaching people how to pronounce specific words, but rather go for series of words that point to some general problem - which for instance could be that all /i/ sounds are too flat, or that some ending shouldn't be pronounced clearly unless you are spelling the word out to a foreigner. Unfortunately that's difficult to do in a group setting. As a teacher in that situation you have to send out a cloud of informations, which may or may not be relevant for any specific pupil. And as a result of hearing so much irrelevant noise they don't get the advice which would be relevant for them personally. And just letting them hear some excelent native speech can't garantee that they pick up what they themselves make differently. Teaching languages in a group setting is as dangerous as operating patients by throwing knives and scalpels around the operating theater in the hope that they hit someone in just the right spot. I am not sure pronouncing nothing but my own address in Danish (or for that matter Swedish) could keep me attentive and responsive for a whole week, but I'm fairly sure that 1 hour used intelligently is better than 10 spent without aim and purpose in the company of 9 random and uninterested co-students. Edited by Iversen on 05 April 2013 at 4:09pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 39 of 49 05 April 2013 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Iversen, "Teaching languages in a group setting is as dangerous as operating patients by throwing knives and scalpels around the operating theater"
I can't agree less, having experience of both teaching and operating! :) The target pronunciation is the same for everyone, the tools for attaining it (the speech apparatus) is the same for everyone, the effect of listening to one another's road to success can't be underestimated, etc. This is an effective listening practice, where they learn to detect the "center of gravity", as it were, for when the pronunciation is "correct", and when it deviates too far. Actually, "correct" pronunciation is *never* a point, as in IPA, but more like electron clouds of allophones with statistical centers for each phoneme. Just like any quality control procedure with specified tolerance ranges. During the process, they practice a zillion times to also get that electron cloud feeling motorically through what I call the "audio-motor memory", which will enable them to monitor their own speech and compensate for various external factors just as native speakers can do; so-called compensatory articulation. Which is automatic and subconscious for natives, but rather non-existent for L2 learners having suffered ordinary language classes with minimal pronunciation practice. In my 4 decades of experience, chorus practice alternating with individual exercises in groups of 8 people or more outperformes one-to-one instruction by several orders of magnitude. Also it puts less strain on the teacher and students, so we can do it all day without fatigue. Quite magically, 7 or less is too few. It's a clear step function at 8. (Indeed, I was told the same thing by amateur quoir singers - when they meet to sing and are fewer than 8, it's less fun.) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 40 of 49 05 April 2013 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||
It's easy to agree on the usefulness of deliberate practice, but the idea of setting up a 10-year plan would discourage even the most enthousiastic of students, not to mention that it's also difficult to reconcile with any suggestion that quick results are possible. The details you offer about the 1-week sessions you give are encouraging. However, students tend to be easily motivated by even the most minute improvement, and this is no guarantee that this would have any real effect on their overall pronunciation. Better enunciation of your address may indeed be considered encouraging, but will students be easier to understand in conversation the following day? Likely not. And when they realize that, their motivation will probably sink back to where it was before. 35 hours spent working on your address sounds like too much focus on too little, for too little return. I'm curious as to why you chose to organize 35-hour sessions: do you feel that this is more effective than 35 separate one-hour sessions? 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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