1st Student's Major
Geography
1st Student's College
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students' Professional Biography
John Zehnder, a native of Mankato, Minnesota is a senior at Minnesota State University, Mankato. John is majoring in Geography, with minors in Linguistics and Teaching ESL. John’s future aspiration in academia is to pursue a PhD in Linguistics with emphasis on phonology and language change.
Mentor's Name
Karen Lybeck
Mentor's Email Address
karen.lybeck@mnsu.edu
Mentor's Department
English
Mentor's College
Arts and Humanities
Abstract
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.
Recommended Citation
Zehnder, John
(2012)
"Second-Language English Fluency Change in Native-Speaker Context,"
Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato: Vol. 12, Article 14.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56816/2378-6949.1022
Available at:
https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/jur/vol12/iss1/14
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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