Second-Language English Fluency Change in Native-Speaker Context

This study examines the influence of social context on oral proficiency change among English language learners on the campus of an American university. Speech samples were taken from 2 rounds of interviews with 9 East Asian women. These were analyzed using the phonetic analysis program Praat in order to determine each speaker’s rate of stressed syllables at the beginning and end of the study. The change in these rates was used as a proxy for fluency change. This was then compared with each speaker’s social context. The results suggested that English language learners improve their fluency when they have at least one English-speaking friend and do not have a partner who shares their own native language. 2 Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato, Vol. 12 [2012], Art. 14 https://cornerstone.lib. mnsu.edu/jur/vol12/iss1/14 3 Zehnder: Second-Language English Fluency Change in Native-Speaker Context Published by Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato, 2012 Introduction As our world becomes ever more interconnected, people from different language backgrounds are increasingly required to communicate with each other. This means that it is more important than ever before to find ways to improve the learning of English as a second or foreign language within specific environments. The importance of social context, as part of the language learning process, however, is often neglected throughout the research literature (Tarone, 2007). Social context includes an individual’s social network and current social surroundings, as well as background culture (Barnett & Casper, 2001). In a study to fill this gap, Lybeck (2002) found that a social context that includes a social network comprising supportive native speakers correlates with more native-like pronunciation for nonnative speakers. However, this previous research only analyzed pronunciation improvement through specific phonological features, such as /r/, word stress, syllable length, as well as other segmental features. However, other research suggests that prosodic features, such as intonation, sentence stress, pausing, and speaking rate, may be better predictors of language fluency (Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler, 1992; Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998). Furthermore, this type of research has not been performed with nonnative speakers using English in the U.S. The goal of this new study is to build upon this previous research by focusing on international students and the composition of their immediate social support networks in an American university context. Instead of measuring specific segmental features, the rate of stressed syllables was measured as a proxy for global language fluency. For each participant, fluency change was calculated over the course of the study, and this was subsequently compared 4 Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato, Vol. 12 [2012], Art. 14 https://cornerstone.lib. mnsu.edu/jur/vol12/iss1/14 with social support network data. The analysis generated some idea of the kinds of social situations that were most conducive to language learning. Literature Review Lybeck (2002) investigated the change in Norwegian language abilities of American women living in Norway to determine the affect of social context on pronunciation improvement. She performed interviews over a six month period in which participants were asked questions in Norwegian about their social networks and acculturation progress. The portions of the interviewee’s responses given in Norwegian were then analyzed at the segmental level. The realizations of segmental features such as word stress, syllable length, and /r/ were compared with those expected from native speakers. Change in pronunciation accuracy over the study was then compared with the qualitative interview responses. Lybeck found that the language learners showed larger improvement when their social contexts included social networks of supportive friends to assist them. It turns out that the women rarely experienced this ideal situation. Local Norwegians were often indifferent to the needs of the language learners and typically their social networks were difficult to enter. Although Lybeck’s study used the production of individual segmental features to measure language ability, prosody may actually be a better measure of oral language proficiency. Segmental features include the discrete units of speech that occur in a linear sequence, such as vowels and consonants (Crystal, 2003). In contrast, prosody is considered to be “suprasegmental” because its various sub-features occur over streams of segments (Wennerstrom, 2001). It is also non-linear because its components may be overlapping. The role of prosody is to convey secondary semantic and pragmatic information not otherwise encoded by grammar or vocabulary. 5 Zehnder: Second-Language English Fluency Change in Native-Speaker Context Published by Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato, 2012 To fulfill this purpose, it employs a diversity of features, including sentence stress, rhythm, pausing, and intonation. The strength of prosody in predicting oral competence was strongly demonstrated by Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, and Koehler (1992) when they performed a study of pronunciation among English language learners (ELLs). In that study, native speakers rated nonnative speakers for overall pronunciation accuracy. The researchers found this to be most strongly correlated with prosody, rather than segmental accuracy or correct syllable structure. Derwing, Munro, and Wiebe, (1998) showed related results when they ran a study of educational techniques. In their study, they divided a cohort of ELLs into three groups and taught each with a different instructional method. They then enlisted the help of ESL teachers to rate the learners for fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness. Not only did they find that fluency and comprehensibility are linked, but that a global language teaching technique emphasizing fluency does the best job of improving students’ comprehensibility. These studies both indicate that fluency is one of the strongest measures of global language proficiency. However, it is difficult to define what exactly makes someone sound fluent. To clarify the meaning of this term, Kang, Rubin and Pickering (2010) performed a study that managed to highlight a number of prosodic features associated with fluency. In their study nonnative speakers were assigned passages to summarize and were simultaneously recorded. Then native speakers rated these speech segments for fluency. Finally, these fluency ratings were correlated with various prosodic features. It turned out that the features most strongly associated with fluency were the number of syllables per second, the articulate rate, the length of speech runs, the rate of stressed syllables, as well as the use of high-rising intonation, mid-rising intonation, and mid-falling intonation. 6 Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato, Vol. 12 [2012], Art. 14 https://cornerstone.lib. mnsu.edu/jur/vol12/iss1/14 Despite being particularly strong predictors of perceived fluency, intonation patterns are exceedingly difficult to measure and harder still to quantify. Pickering (2004) compared the intonational patterns of native speaker graduate teaching assistants with nonnative ones. She found that the nonnative speakers failed to use certain predictable patterns that would have made their lectures more comprehensible to native speakers. She could make this determination because all of the lectures were introductions or directions for chemistry lab sessions. Being identical in content, they were thus directly comparable. She also made no attempt to score participants based on their intonational accuracy. This rendered her methodology inapplicable to the current study because the current sought to quantitatively score fluency so that changes over time could be tracked accurately. Even more vexing, researchers cannot typically identify what intonational patterns speakers should be using because it is impossible to analyze the speakers’ thoughts to determine what meaning they were trying to communicate (Brazil, 1997). Pickering’s research also demonstrated the difficulty of transforming sound data into discrete intonation contours. This task is beyond the scope of most common speech software (see figure 1). Fortunately, a study performed by Kormos and Denes (2002), addressing the linguistic features associated with fluency, demonstrated that an analysis of intonation may not be necessary to determine fluency. They asked nonnative English speakers to craft narratives to fit cartoon strips. Then a team of ESL professors rated these narratives for fluency. A number of different features were correlated, but one of the best overall indicators was rate of stressed syllables. This value is especially significant because it is relatively easy to measure. In sum, past research has demonstrated that fluency is one the best ways to gauge oral language proficiency. Recent studies have also shown how it is possible to quantitatively measure language learners’ fluency by recording their rates of stressed syllables. The current 7 Zehnder: Second-Language English Fluency Change in Native-Speaker Context Published by Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato, 2012 study attempts to use this recent research to better address the role of social context in language learning. The specific aspect of social context being addressed is participant’s social networks. The first goal of the study is to find out how fluency levels in a group of international students at an American university change over nine months. The second goal is to find out how this fluency change is related to the composition of pa