Aptitude, experience, and second language pronunciation proficiency development in classroom settings

Saito, Kazuya, Suzukida, Yui and Sun, Hui 2018. Aptitude, experience, and second language pronunciation proficiency development in classroom settings. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41 (1) 10.1017/S0272263117000432 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle, and end points of the project, analyzed for global, segmental, syllabic, prosodic, and temporal aspects of L2 pronunciation, and linked to their aptitude and experience profiles. Results indicated that the participants generally enhanced the global comprehensibility of their speech (through reducing vowel insertion errors in complex syllables) as a function of increased classroom experience during their first semester, and explicit learning aptitude (associative memory, phonemic coding) appeared to help certain learners further enhance their pronunciation proficiency through the development of fluency and prosody. In the second semester, incidental learning ability (sound sequence recognition) was shown to be a significant predictor of the extent to which certain learners continued to improve and ultimately attain advanced-level L2 comprehensibility, largely thanks to improved segmental accuracy.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
ISSN:	0272-2631
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	27 September 2022
Date of Acceptance:	1 March 2018
Last Modified:	08 May 2023 04:06
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/152877

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