Teaching Reduced Forms to Children of English as a Foreign Language

• Main Authors: Hsiu-Wen Chang, 張秀吻
• Other Authors: Marilyn Baker
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/21844766177453551656

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系研究所 === 92 === Teaching Reduced Forms to Children of English as a Foreign Language Graduate Student: Shiu-Wen Chang Advisor: Dr. Marilyn Baker The Linguistics Graduate Program of Department of English Language, Literature, and Linguistics of Providence University 92nd School Year Abstract This study examines the effects of teaching reduced forms to children of English as a foreign language in terms of listening ability and affective filters to real life English and pronunciation development. Reduced forms refer to words or phrases that are shortened or weakened when they are not the important words to convey the sentence meaning or they are the unstressed function words in sentences. They are the crucial elements of relaxed, casual and natural spoken English used by native speakers in most daily interactional conversations in real life. In many previous studies, real life English is mainly taught to intermediate or advanced level students. Even though children are the better learners of listening and pronunciation, and they also learn interactional English in their early years of learning, they are seldom taught the real life English. Instead, schools tend to teach children the particularly slow, artificial English enunciated with precise articulation for each single word. The subjects in this study were 20 elementary school students aged 11-12 in the 6th grade. They all had received 2-3 years of English teaching in school. They were exposed to the natural spoken English and received the instruction of 9 reduced forms presented in the selected published recorded materials in 10 weeks. The results show that teaching reduced forms did help children significantly better understand the casual speech with reduced forms. The affective filters, their motivations and self-esteem were raised, the misconceptions of learning English are reduced. Finally, their pronunciations have been improved after receiving the instruction of reduced forms, and students were overall more relaxed when they speak English. They were able to control the precision of articulation, emphasize the stressed syllables and speak more naturally than before.