FOREIGNER-DIRECTED SPEECH DURING EFL TRIADS:CASES FROM TAIWANESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

• Main Authors: RichardKonopka, 許富貴
• Other Authors: Dr. Hua-li Jian
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/53640942983468547141

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 98 === The purpose of this observational study was to examine changes in the affective behaviors and acoustic speech signals of 3 native English speaking adults occurring naturally when addressing English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL), university students under triadic circumstances. Adult native speakers of English show prosodic and acoustic differences in speech to non-native English speakers for reasons that are unclear in the literature. Moreover, these measurable differences comprise sets of distinguishing features, collectively known as foreigner-directed speech (FDS), that poorly generalize between studies and with other related forms of directed speech, notably infant-, pet-, and adult-directed speeches. An investigation of triadic FDS provides a distinct perspective that differs from the dyadic-centered FDS found in the literature and may offer alternate explanations for its appearance in task-based studies, absence in conversation-based studies, and ambiguous status in laboratory studies. The thesis used outspoken learners, i.e. students who demonstrate a propensity or natural tendency to engage people verbally in English, to define a high-communicative treatment group and a low-communicative control group to identify variations in FDS features. Of equal interest to the purposes of this study was describing the triadic coalitions that formed, in part, along examiners’ perceptions of outspokenness. Language samples were elicited across two triadic, conversational contexts (a two-way, task-based context and a three-way, conversation-based context). A compiled coding system based on coding systems in the existing literature and those that emerged from the data was used to analyze the language samples. In addition, the first and second formants for the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ were used to analyze the examiners’ audio samples. The specific aims of this were to answer: do native English speakers’ perception of outspokenness among EFL students play a significant role in affective behavior displayed within triads; what factors and their interactions in conversation contribute to hyperarticulation of native English speakers’ vowels in EFL triads. Results showed that all 3 participants exhibited significant, locally contingent differences in affective behavior between their respective high-communicative and low-communicative groups. These interactions imply examiners were willing to give the high-communicative group more control over the conversation than in the low-communicative group. Furthermore, the source of significant variation for vowel hyperarticulation in the treated group differed from the control group at examiners’ positive-coded utterances while at examiners’ introduction of new questions there was no difference. These data suggest that there was a need for examiners to be clear and for the students to be attentive at the introduction of a new question regardless of group membership since during these times hyperarticulation decreased in the low-communicative group and increased in the high-communicative group.