Search results for "accentedness"

L1 listeners’ perception of L2 pronunciation : effect of prosody on accentedness ratings in Swedish

2017

Middle School Students’ Perceptions Towards Linguistic Diversity in the Classroom

2014

In 2010, a heated political controversy centered on the Arizona Department of Education's desire to prohibit "heavily accented or ungrammatical teachers” from teaching English Language Learners (Blum & Johnson 2012; Jordan 2010). However, although an administrative practice such as this would greatly affect students’, their attitudes towards linguistic diversity in the classroom have been largely neglected. By surveying 94 middle school students in a public school district in the southwestern United States, this study sought to understand students’ attitudes regarding teachers’ and classmates’ accents and the factors that may influence them, such as their language background and the presenc…

Second language comprehensibility and accentedness across oral proficiency levels : A comparison of two L1s

2021

Second language comprehensibility and accentedness are highly complex phenomena, and numerous studies have been conducted to better understand these constructs. However, research has seldom addressed L2 comprehensibility and accentedness in relation to speakers' proficiency in the target language. This study explores L2 English comprehensibility and accentedness across three proficiency levels. The speakers were 60 teenaged Finns, half of them speaking Finnish as their L1 and half speaking Finland-Swedish as their L1. Using 20-s speech samples, the comprehensibility and accentedness of the speakers were rated by 34 English-speaking teenagers on a 9-point scale. Comparisons were made regardi…

L1 listeners’ perception of L2 pronunciation: effect of prosody on accentedness ratings in Swedish

2018


 
 
 This paper reports on a study in which L1 speakers (n = 53) of Swedish rated the accentedness of read-aloud sentences produced by L2 speakers (n = 6) of Swedish. The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of certain prosodic features on the accentedness ratings. These features include Swedish tone accents and and deviant speech rhythm (e.g. lack of primary stress, and realization of multiple stresses). The results reveal that utterances with deviant speech rhythm yielded perceptions of stronger foreign accent than utterances with target-like rhythm. As for the tone accents, their effect on the scores were non-existent or only marginal. As missing tone accents ha…

Does spoken language proficiency reflect foreign accent and ease of understanding?

2021