Volume 31, 2020

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https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/112743

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Browsing Volume 31, 2020 by Subject "language acquisition"

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 31, Fall 2020
    (2020-11-19) Nikolić, Dušan; Daniel, Adam D.; Nelson, Brett C.; Oguz, Metehan; Xu, Kang
    The editors of this issue, Dušan Nikolić, Adam D. Daniel, Brett C. Nelson, Metehan Oguz, and Kang Xu, are pleased to present the thirty-first issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics published by the Department of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Calgary. The papers published here represent works in progress and as such should not be considered in any way final or definitive.
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    Exploring L2 English Learners’ Articulatory Problems Using a Read-Aloud Task
    (2020-11-19) Kang, Shuo
    Although the irregular pause in oral production is a common problem in the speech of language learners, it is unclear what factors cause the pauses and to what extent learners’ native language affects the oral fluency of their target language. This study investigated the anomalous pauses made by English learners who speak Mandarin Chinese as their mother tongue, with attempts of finding out why these pauses occur in the articulation process of their speech productions. 36 learners and 36 native English speakers participated in a read-aloud task (124 English texts with 26081 words for each participant), which was recorded for further analysis. Based on previous research into oral fluency, the anomalous pause in this study is operationalized to have a long duration (over 1s) and occur in the formulaic sequences or in a single sentence. That is, any pauses that conform to both long silent intervals in formulaic sequence and long silent intervals in a sentence where there is no formulaic sequence, count as anomalous pauses in this study. The results demonstrated that L2 learners made significantly more anomalous pauses when reading aloud English texts and they had difficulty articulating the phonemes /b/, /d/, /g/, /dʒ/, /z/ and /ð/. More importantly, no difference was found in the frequency of anomalous pauses between advanced and less advanced learners, indicating that even proficient learners have difficulties in L2 pronunciation. The reasons why these articulatory problems cause irregular pauses and related pedagogical implications are discussed.