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Masaryk University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
and American Studies
Teaching English Language and Literature
for Secondary Schools
Bc. Jana Langrová
Stress and Intelligibility: Pronunciation of
Secondary School Students of English
Master's Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: PhDr. Kateřina Tomková, Ph.D.
2012
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
……………………………………………
Author’s signature
I wish to express my sincere thanks
to my supervisor PhDr. Kateřina Tomková, Ph.D.
for her valuable assistance, guidance and support.
Special thanks also belong to my students and the assessor.
Without their willingness to take part in the project,
the research would not have been carried out successfully.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ............................................................................................... 8
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 7
1.1 Motivation ................................................................................................. 7
1.2 Aims .......................................................................................................... 8
1.3 Methods .................................................................................................... 9
1.4 Resources .............................................................................................. 11
1.5 Structure ................................................................................................. 13
2 Theoretical section .................................................................................... 14
2. 1 What is stress ........................................................................................ 14
2.1.1 Characteristics ................................................................................. 16
2.1.2 Primary and secondary stress .......................................................... 18
2.1.3 Rhythm ............................................................................................. 19
2.2 Stress in English ..................................................................................... 20
2.2.1 Word stress ...................................................................................... 21
2.2.1.1 Stress in simple words ............................................................... 22
2.2.1.2 Stress in complex words ............................................................ 23
2.2.1.3 Stress in compounds ................................................................. 24
2.2.1.4 Shifting word stress ................................................................... 25
2.2.2 Sentence stress ............................................................................... 26
2.2.3 Weak forms ...................................................................................... 28
2.2.4 Rhythm ............................................................................................. 29
2.3 Stress in Czech ...................................................................................... 30
2.4 Importance of stress in intelligibility ........................................................ 32
2.5 Teaching stresses................................................................................... 34
2.5.1 Techniques ...................................................................................... 37
3 Practical section ............................................................................................ 41
3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 41
3.2 Procedure ............................................................................................... 42
3.3 Students ................................................................................................. 44
3.4 Assessor ................................................................................................. 47
3.5 Questionnaire ......................................................................................... 48
3.6 Teaching stresses................................................................................... 50
3.7 Data analysis .......................................................................................... 53
3.7.1 First recording .................................................................................. 54
3.7.1.1 Jan ............................................................................................. 55
3.7.1.2 Kateřina ..................................................................................... 56
3.7.1.3 Lucie .......................................................................................... 56
3.7.1.4 Vladimír ..................................................................................... 56
3.7.1.5 Jakub ......................................................................................... 57
3.7.1.6 René .......................................................................................... 57
3.7.1.7 Veronika .................................................................................... 57
3.7.1.8 Vojtěch ...................................................................................... 58
3.7.1.9 David ......................................................................................... 58
3.7.1.10 Filip .......................................................................................... 58
3.7.1.11 Lukáš ....................................................................................... 59
3.7.1.12 Tomáš ..................................................................................... 59
3.7.1.13 Common patterns .................................................................... 59
3.7.2 Second recording ............................................................................. 61
3.7.2.1 Jan ............................................................................................. 62
3.7.2.2 Kateřina ..................................................................................... 62
3.7.2.3 Lucie .......................................................................................... 63
3.7.2.4 Vladimír ..................................................................................... 63
3.7.2.5 Jakub ......................................................................................... 64
3.7.2.6 René .......................................................................................... 64
3.7.2.7 Veronika .................................................................................... 65
3.7.2.8 Vojtěch ...................................................................................... 65
3.7.2.9 David ......................................................................................... 66
3.7.2.10 Filip .......................................................................................... 66
3.7.2.11 Lukáš ....................................................................................... 67
3.7.2.12 Tomáš ..................................................................................... 67
3.7.2.13 Common patterns .................................................................... 68
3.7.2.14 Questionnaire for students ...................................................... 69
3.7.3 Third recording ................................................................................. 74
3.7.3.1 Jan ............................................................................................. 75
3.7.3.2 Kateřina ..................................................................................... 75
3.7.3.3 Lucie .......................................................................................... 75
3.7.3.4 Vladimír ..................................................................................... 76
3.7.3.5 Jakub ......................................................................................... 76
3.7.3.6 René .......................................................................................... 77
3.7.3.7 Veronika .................................................................................... 77
3.7.3.8 Vojtěch ...................................................................................... 78
3.7.3.9 David ......................................................................................... 78
3.7.3.10 Filip .......................................................................................... 79
3.7.3.11 Lukáš ....................................................................................... 79
3.7.3.12 Tomáš ..................................................................................... 80
3.7.3.13 Common patterns .................................................................... 80
Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 83
Summary .......................................................................................................... 88
Resumé ............................................................................................................ 89
Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 90
Primary sources ............................................................................................ 90
Secondary sources ....................................................................................... 97
Appendices .................................................................................................... 100
Appendix 1 .................................................................................................. 100
Appendix 2 .................................................................................................. 101
Appendix 3 .................................................................................................. 102
Appendix 4 .................................................................................................. 105
Appendix 5 .................................................................................................. 107
Appendix 6 .................................................................................................. 118
Appendix 7 .................................................................................................. 130
Appendix 8 .................................................................................................. 142
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Introduction
1.1 Motivation
The aim of every teacher is to teach their students something useful,
something they will benefit from in real-life situations. In today’s globalized and
interconnected world being able to communicate and being understood comes
to the fore more urgently than ever before. To be understood one needs to
master a foreign language. The rationale behind teaching languages is to teach
students to communicate effectively. That is inconceivable without teaching
them pronunciation. Unfortunately, in Czech schools teaching pronunciation is
often neglected while teaching grammar and vocabulary is preferred. This is
precisely why I have decided to pay special attention to pronunciation activities
focused on stress and test to what extent the students’ intelligibility improves.
This way I can both help my students and test the hypothesis whether it is
stress that influences the intelligibility most.
The reason why teachers often neglect teaching pronunciation is that
students do not like it. Students often argue they do not have to speak perfect
English, British English in particular, to communicate. They think – justifiably –
that there are more international English speakers than the actual number of
English speakers coming from the United Kingdom. The majority of people
speaking English do not have the command of English to such extent. What is
important is that the two people understand each other and are able to
communicate. While the author understands her students’ arguments and
- 8 -
agrees with them to a certain extent she tries to explain the importance of good
pronunciation skills. Furthermore, she tells them that in order to pass “maturita”
exam – the listening part in particular – they need to be able to understand and
distinguish certain sounds. And in order to understand – achieve a better
listening comprehension – they need to be taught and learn about the aspects
of pronunciation such as stress.
1.2 Aims
In the present thesis the author decided to focus on suprasegmental
features of speech, namely stress. As she has been a teacher at a Secondary
School of Civil Engineering for three years she chose to conduct a research in
teaching stresses to secondary school students and its impact on students’
intelligibility, as well as overall progress in their pronunciation competence.
Also, she believes the greater focus on pronunciation and practising during
lessons will have a positive effect on students, resulting in their greater self-
confidence in the command of English.
The reason she chose to dedicate her work solely to stress is that
significant number of scholars claim suprasegmental features, to which group
stress belongs, is of great importance in speakers' intelligibility. Moreover, for
Czech learners especially this fact may cause considerable problems as Czech
language is a syllable-timed language, while English is a stress-timed one.
Kateřina Tomková confirms the typical situation in Czech schools, stating that
most Czech learners' pronunciation only consists in segmental practice,
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neglects the dynamic character of English and thus results in poor
comprehension of authentic speech even after relatively long training
(Tomková, 3). Truly, students often feel discouraged by the fact they are either
not understood or, and more often, by their inability to understand recorded
speech, as this one is the most frequent one they have a chance to experience
during English lessons.
Therefore, the hypothesis of this thesis goes that suprasegmental
features of speech, stress in particular, are the most important factors
concerning the intelligibility of a speaker's speech.
1.3 Methods
The actual research will be carried out at a Secondary School of Civil
Engineering in Opava where the author has been teaching for three years now.
She decided to choose students of the third grade as they should demonstrate
quite a satisfactory command of English. A questionnaire was created to find
volunteers willing to participate in the research. The questionnaire may be found
in the appendices. All the questionnaires that are part of the research were
written in Czech so that it was not discouraging for students to answer them.
After questionnaires were collected twelve students were chosen. These
students were chosen according to the level of their pronunciation skills – four
with poor pronunciation skills and intelligibility problems, four without significant
pronunciation and intelligibility problems, and four somewhere in the middle
between the two aforementioned extreme points on an imaginary axis. Each of
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the students was recorded three times during a year – in October, December,
and February. To record the students an MP3 player with a digital voice
recorder was used. To ensure the results of the research were valid a native
speaker was chosen to assess students' recordings. His assessment was
based on a simple questionnaire. After the first recording, all students started
working on their pronunciation extensively, with special attention paid to
teaching stresses. The practise was carried out during English lessons.
The questionnaire the native speaker was going to fill in was designed to
assess the overall intelligibility of a particular student (question 1). Second
question tried to identify words causing the greatest intelligibility problems. The
third question, and the most important one, was designed to identify factors that
cause problems with intelligibility. The results from this question should support
the hypothesis of this thesis about stress being the most important factor in
intelligibility of a speaker's speech. Even though it is difficult to quantify how
intelligible a student's speech was, question number 4 was the only question
that could measure quantitatively to what extent a student progressed. At the
same time, it should prove that when more attention is paid to practising
pronunciation during English lessons students competence will improve
significantly. The last question in the questionnaire left space for the native
speaker to comment on anything he considered important to say.
One of the biggest obstacles in carrying out the research was to find a native
speaker willing to assess twelve students for three times, which is time-
consuming and possibly tedious, having to listen to the same text being read
twelve times, which, also, brings a question of the possible influence on the
assessor.
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1.4 Resources
As far as resources about what stress is are concerned, there is quite a
satisfactory number or reliable and well-acknowledge resources. These include
The Groundwork of English Stress by Roger Kingdon, The Stress System of
English by Alvar Nyqvist Göes, or English Words Stress by Erik Fudge to name
some of them. Where the research is insufficient, however, is the field of Czech-
English differences in the use of stress. Alena Skaličková has published a book
about the phonetic differences between Czech and English, yet the topic of
stress is dealt with only marginally. Another field that suffers from the lack of
resources is some kind of practical material helping teachers teach stress. It is
almost non-existent except for the useful material offered by Adrian Underhill.
In the thesis mainly the following resources were used. For the theoretical part,
where the thesis will be concerned with the definition of stress as well as its
characteristics, English Word Stress by Erik Fudge is of crucial importance.
Fudge's book offers an extensive source for writing about word stress, which is
the central part of the thesis. Not only does Fudge speak about the word stress,
though, he puts it in contrast, although only to a marginal extent, with sentence
stress, which must inevitably also be one of my interest during the writing of the
thesis. Fudge deals with stress in simple roots, prefixes as well as suffixes, and
compound words. He offers a rationale for the syllables being stressed.
As the thesis is concerned with teaching stresses to Czech students of
English, differences between Czech and English use of stress will appear. This
is supported by Alena Skaličková's Srovnávací fonetika angličtiny a češtiny
[Comparative phonetics of English and Czech]. Ludmila Urbanová in Přízvuk a
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rytmus v současné angličtině [Stress and rhythm in contemporary English]
follows up Skaličková's findings. Contrary to Skaličková, though, she devotes
her work solely to stress and rhythm. She investigates to what extent and if the
English rhythm is isochronous. This is important primarily due to the fact that
the realisation of stress in English is in close dependent relationship with
rhythm. Urbanová's work thus lead the autjor to include exercises on rhythm in
her teaching. Other works that strongly influenced and helped, mainly in the
practical part of the thesis, are English Stress Patterns by Leonard E. Tibbitts
and Sound Foundations by Adrian Underhill.
As mentioned above, these two sources represent one of the very few
practical sources teacher can make use of during their teaching. Adrian
Underhill is a well-established authority in the field of pronunciation and its
teaching. The heart of Underhill’s thought lies in the proposition of making
phonology learning physical, visual, auditory and creative. Sound Foundations
itself is divided into two parts called discovery toolkit and classroom toolkit. The
discovery toolkit describes sounds in isolation, words in isolation and finally
connected speech. The classroom toolkit has the same layout, yet the actual
chapters and subchapters offer ideas to help teachers teach both the sounds
and words in isolation and connected speech. The thesis will benefit from the
classroom toolkit in particular. It will be of use during teaching the students and
working with them on the aspects of pronunciation important for their
intelligibility.
Tibbitts offers a remedial practice material to teachers who are in
desperate need of such material. Written in 1967 it is even more striking that the
number of materials available has improved only insufficiently up until these
- 13 -
days. Tibbitts’s book is valuable in providing practice material that focuses not
only on stress patterns but on equally important rhythm. The material presented
is divided according to the number of syllables ranging from one syllable to
twelve syllable utterances. In the present thesis Tibbitts’s book is of particular
use for the students‘ training which the author is going to conduct during
lessons. Also, Tibbitts talks about the importance of stress in the speaker’s
intelligibility. The hypothesis of this work is based on this notion.
1.5 Structure
The thesis itself is divided into two sections, the theoretical one and
practical one. In the theoretical section the thesis first categorizes stress into the
frame of suprasegmental features of speech and subsequently tries to trace
what stress is and what characteristics it has. When talking about stress, it is
important to distinguish between word stress and sentences stress. Both will be
dealt with in subsequent chapters of the theoretical section. It is equally
important to mention the differences between Czech and English language
concerning stress system.
In practical section the selected methods will be justified and the
procedure of both recording students and assessing them will be explained. The
results of the questionnaires assessed by the native speaker will serve first to
analyse the progress of students individually. Secondly, the common patterns
that will emerge will be analysed.
- 14 -
The thesis is concluded with a summary of the findings of the research
and the hypothesis is tested.
2 Theoretical section
2. 1 What is stress
When it comes to talking about stress in the classroom students react
passionately. Not aware of what kind of stress the teacher is talking about, they
say that stress is something they know very well, something they suffer from 24
hours a day, seven days a week. Upon learning what stress really is, and how
different the English stress is to the Czech one it becomes yet another stressful
aspect of learning a foreign language. This might be one of the reasons why
teaching about stress is often neglected in Czech schools. However, not
teaching about it has far-reaching consequences. This thesis will try to confirm
it.
First of all, we need to have a look at what stress in fact is. When we
speak our speech is not monotonous. There has to be certain aspects present
that allow the listener understand the speech and thus communicate
successfully. In the locus stands a syllable. Marie Krčmová defines a syllable as
“the easiest and the most immediate articulatory unity of functional elements of
speech that is satisfactory for communication”. Peter Roach, an acclaimed
scholar in the field of phonetics and phonology, characterizes a syllable –
phonetically – as “consisting of a centre which has little or no obstruction to
- 15 -
airflow and which sounds comparatively loud (Roach, 1991, p. 67). For learners
it is often confusing to distinguish the phonetic foundation of a syllable as there
is always a certain amount of possible phonic combinations. The most important
feature of a syllable is the presence of voicing. “In a spoken language syllable is
thus able to bear prosodic features in relation to other syllables” (Krčmová,
2008). This is very important to realize if we want to define what stress is. It is
equally important to discuss the nature of syllables, meaning the difference
between strong and weak syllables. When talking about strong and weak
syllables we are talking about their phonetic characteristics. Using the
differentiation by Roach a strong syllable is a syllable that has “as its peak one
of the vowel phonemes” (Roach, 1991, p. 75). Weak syllable, on the other hand,
can have four types of peak – the vowel “schwa”; a close front unrounded vowel
in the general area of or i: and ɪ; a close back rounded vowel in the general
area of u: and ʊ; or a syllabic consonant (ibid). Compared to a vowel in a strong
syllable, the vowel in a weak syllable tends to be shorter, of lower intensity and
different in quality. Clearly, dividing syllables into strong and weak will help us
see better why a syllable is stressed.
As noted above, our speech is not monotonous. When people want to
communicate a certain message they have to use various means to achieve
their goal. Here, we talk about suprasegmental features of language – the force
or intensity of their voice, pitch, timber, pace and pausing. These means form
the base of speech modulation ways. In other words we are talking about how it
it possible to modulate our speech. These include word stress, sentence stress,
emphasis, and intonation. (Krčmová, 2008). The present thesis will restrict its
attention on word and sentence stress. Stress, word stress in particular, is an
- 16 -
inherent quality of speech. It is not something a speaker can change
deliberately in order to convey a message. There are, nevertheless, certain
options available to a speaker when it comes to sentence stress and its use in
communicating a message. This will be looked into in the subsequent chapters.
The history of the effort to define what stress is does not go very far
back. In 1958 Roger Kingdon talks about the field of English word stress as
"practically virgin soil" (Kindgon, 1958, p. xii). Kingdon's contribution to the field
of English word stress lies in showing how suffixes affect stress placement (see
Fudge, 1984, p. 10), although Kingdon's work suffers from the fact that he does
not distinguish 'strong' and 'weak' syllables. Other acclaimed scholars in the
field comprise A.C. Gimson, Alvar Nyqvist Göes, Noam Chomsky and Morris
Halle, or Erik Fudge. When trying to define stress, all the scholars agree that
stress is a prominence that is given to certain syllables in a word or a sentence
when pronouncing it. As already stated, stress belongs to a group of prosodic or
suprasegmental features of speech. These, as scholars claim, are of great
importance to the intelligibility of speakers. Yet, they are very often neglected as
far as teaching them is concerned. This has far-reaching consequences,
especially for Czech learners as the use of stress varies greatly in English while
in Czech it is relatively stable.
2.1.1 Characteristics
We will now investigate further what features render stress prominent. It
should be made clear that it is possible to look at stress from two possible ways
- 17 -
– from the perceptual one and from the point of production. From the point of
view of production, Roach mentions the greater muscular energy used for
stressed syllables as opposed to unstressed syllables. From the perceptual
point of view, it is prominence (1991, p.85-86). The question is what
prominence is. Scholars are generally in agreement that what makes a syllable
prominent are the following factors or components: loudness, length, pitch, and
a quality of a vowel. It is important to say that these factors complement each
other. They do not work in isolation. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult to
distinguish between them. However, not all of the factors are either equally
important or always present. Roach claims that the strongest effect on
recognizing a syllable as stressed is produced by pitch. Length is also a
powerful factor (1991, p. 86). The duration is especially important. It results in
the inequality in the duration of syllables, which is the basis of English speech-
rhythm. This is in sharp contrast to Czech in which stressed syllables occur at
approximately equal intervals of time. Czech, like French, Finnish or Italian, is a
syllable-timed language as opposed to English that is a stressed-timed
language. Moreover, “the imposition of syllable-timed rhythm on English is
probably far more detrimental to intelligibility than any distortion of vowel or
consonant pronunciation” (Fudge, 1984, p. 3). Apart from the factors mentioned
above, “various head or hand movement are likely to accompany prominence,
and this takes place in just about all languages (Fudge, 1984, p. 2)”.
Talking about the length of stressed syllables, we come to the functions
stress has. The longer duration of stressed syllables functions as a rhythmical
element. It can be made use of in prose or in a public speech as Krčmová
points out. Stress signals the boundaries of phonetic words, which is greatly
- 18 -
important as it helps listeners distinguish different words or different forms of
words with identical combination of phones. It can thus help to differentiate
words semantically or syntactically, as is the case with 'pɜːmit and pə'mɪt for
instance.
2.1.2 Primary and secondary stress
Primary stress and its placement in a word in particular will be dealt with
in detail in the following chapter. Let us, therefore, have a closer look at
secondary stress. The stress we have been talking about so far is in fact
primary stress, sometimes called nuclear. However, a word can also bear
another stress. This stress is called secondary stress. Secondary stress is, like
primary stress, a stressed syllable in a word. However, compared to primary
stress it is weaker in prominence. Gimson defines a syllable that bears
secondary stress as the syllable articulated with the second highest degree of
energy. He defines secondary stress as an accentuation that has no pitch
prominence (Gimson, 1967, p. 218). Pitch prominence is carried by primary
stress.
While in writing primary stress is often indicated by the mark ' before the
stressed syllable, for secondary stress the same mark is used but is placed at
the foot of the syllable in question. Secondary stress usually appears in longer
words such as pronunciation /prəˌnʌnsi'eɪʃn/ in English or /'nejopˌťi:ʒňejʃi:/ in
Czech.
It is also important to note that besides primary and secondary stress
there is 'unstress'. The stressed syllables, whether being stressed primary or
- 19 -
secondary, are only realized in contrast with syllables that are not stressed, are
'unstressed'.
2.1.3 Rhythm
So far, we have dealt with the level of words. We will now look at the
level of connected speech. This one and its peculiarities should concern us the
most as it is exactly connected speech that the suprasegmentals, stress in our
case, surfaces. Our speech does not consist of words that have been put
together. Roach introduces a story of how scientists, many years ago, tried to
develop machines that would produce speech from a set of pre-recorded words.
It obviously did not work as the speech was unnatural and practically
unintelligible (1991, p. 120). Putting words together and saying them in a
sentence or utterance, they acquire certain characteristics. We could name
assimilation, elision, or linking. We are not going to be concerned with these,
however. Rather, we are going to briefly look at an aspect of connected speech
that is in a close relationship with stress, this one being rhythm. Rhythm is an
aspect of connected speech that is created by "alternation of stressed and
unstressed syllables at the time interval" (Plavka, 2003, p. 55). As already
stated, the prominence stress bears is realized, next to other factors, by length.
The stressed syllable is comparatively longer in contrast with other syllables in a
word. In a speech, stressed syllables tend to occur in relatively regular intervals,
making the utterance rhythmical. We can thus see that rhythm is inseparable
from stress. In subsequent chapters rhythm, and the differences in rhythm in
English and in Czech, will be dealt with in detail. It is nevertheless good to point
- 20 -
out here, that “wrong stressing will inevitably lead to wrong and misleading
rhythm” (Fudge,1984, p. 4) and will thus distort the natural sound of English.
That is why, in teaching, one should not neglect this aspect and teach stress
hand in hand with rhythm.
To conclude the introductory chapter of the thesis, we have learnt that
what stress in general is. It is a prominence that is given to a certain syllable in
a word. It is characterised by change in pitch, length, loudness and a quality of
a vowel. In a word, we distinguish primary and secondary stress. The latter one
does not bear pitch prominence. On the level of speech production it is also
important to talk and learn about rhythm, the alternation of stressed and
unstressed syllables at a time interval.
2.2 Stress in English
Stress in English is a very complex phenomenon. Many scholars have
been occupied with efforts to identify the underlying rules for the placement of
stress. A pioneer in this field was Robert Kingdon who put forth a suffix-based
approach. It maintains that adding a suffix to a root influences where the stress
falls. He also holds that the stress placement is dependent on the origin –
Romanic, Greek or English type – of a word, or rather compounds. His
contribution nevertheless suffers from the fact that he does not distinguish
between strong and weak syllables. The suffix-based approach is generally
accepted nowadays. Likewise, it is generally acknowledged that if there are no
suffixes, it depends on the properties of various syllables where the stress falls
(Fudge, 1984, p.12).
- 21 -
Chomsky and Halle contributed to the field of English stress by claiming it
is possible to predict where stress will fall in an English word (see Fudge, p.11).
Their approach is referred to as generative phonology. Yet “from the purely
practical classroom point of view, generative phonology has little to offer and
could well create confusion” (Roach, 1991, p. 93). Chomsky and Halle's
approach will therefore not be discussed further in the thesis.
Erik Fudge is another crucial name in the field. In an eclectic way, he
adopts parts of both Kingdon's and Chomsky and Halle's approaches and
produces an extensive rationalization of where stress falls. His approach is
based on counting back a number of syllables from the end of a certain part of a
word which he calls the 'stressable portion'. The stressable portion “is what is
left of the word when certain suffixes and prefixes have been removed from it”
(Fudge, 1984, p. 17). After the suffixes and prefixes are removed it depends on
the structure of the stressable portion. For the purposes of this thesis, however,
Fudge's approach is too complex. It would better serve for academic purposes.
This thesis, however, tries to deal with the practical way of employment of
stresses, namely teaching them as well as about them. It will therefore benefit
more from stress placement rules as presented by Roach.
2.2.1 Word stress
Roach distinguishes four pieces of information necessary to decide on
the stress placement.
a) Whether it is morphologically simple or complex word.
b) The grammatical category (noun, verb, adjective etc.).
- 22 -
c) The number of syllables in the word.
d) The phonological structure of those syllables. (1991, p.88)
2.2.1.1 Stress in simple words
By simple words Roach means morphologically simple words, words
without any affixes, in other words. The rule for single syllable words is self-
evident so Roach discusses two-syllable and three-syllable words further. Most
of the rules he presents show stress “tending to go on syllables containing a
long vowel or diphthong and/or ending with more than one consonant” (1991, p.
90). This is the case for two-syllable verbs, adjectives, adverbs or prepositions.
apply /əˈplaɪ/ correct /kəˈrekt/
If, on the other hand, the final syllable contains short vowel and/or one
consonant, the first syllable will be stressed.
envy /ˈenvɪ/ lovely /ˈlʌvlɪ/
Concerning two-syllable nouns stress usually falls on the second syllable, with
the exception of the second syllable containing a short vowel. In this case the
stress falls on the first syllable (Roach, 1991, p. 89).
money /ˈmʌnɪ/ baloon /bəˈlu:n/
When we have a look at three-syllable words, we find out that verbs share the
same rule – last syllable containing a long vowel or diphthong and/or more than
one consonant – for the last syllable stressed with two-syllable verbs and
adjectives. However, if the last syllable contains a short vowel or has one
consonant, the stress will fall on the preceding, thus penultimate, syllable.
entertain /entəˈteɪn/ encounter /ɪŋˈkaʊntə/
- 23 -
If a three-syllable noun contains a short vowel or 'əʊ', and the preceding syllable
has a long vowel or diphthong, or it ends with more than one consonant, the
middle syllable will be stressed.
potato /pəˈteɪtəʊ/ disaster /dɪˈzɑ:stə/
If both the final and middle syllables contain a short vowel, and the middle
vowel has not more than one consonant, the first syllable in a three-syllable
noun will be stressed.
quantity /ˈkwɒntɪti/ cinema /ˈsɪnəmə/
Contrary to the rule about the stressed syllable having a long vowel or
diphthong and/or more than one consonant, the stress in three-syllable nouns
falls on the first syllable if the above mentioned rule applies to the final syllable.
Adjectives seem to follow the same rule (Roach, 1991, p. 90).
intellect /ˈɪntələkt/ opportune /ˈɒpətju:n/
It is necessary to note, however, that there exists numerous number of
exceptions to the rules that have just been described. They, as Roach adds,
apply mainly to major categories of lexical words, not to function words (1991.
p. 90).
2.2.1.2 Stress in complex words
Roach divides complex words – words that have more than one
grammatical unit, such as 'careful' for instance – further into words made from a
basic stem with the addition of an affix, which he calls 'affix words', and
compound words – words made of two independent English words (1991, p.
95).
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There are two kinds of affixes in English – prefixes, which come before
the stem (e.g. im-polite), and suffixes, which come after it (e.g. happi-ness).
There are many affixes in English, and therefore extensive number of rules
applying to each one of them, that it would be counter-productive to name them
all here. We will thus only generally note what possible effects on stress in
complex words affixes have.
a) The affix itself receives the primary stress (e.g. 'semi-' +
'circle' /ˈsɜ:kl/ → 'semicircle' /ˈsemɪsɜ:kl/; '-ality' +
'person' /ˈpɜ:sən/ → /pɜ:sənˈælɪti/).
b) The word is stressed just as if the affix was not there (e.g.
'pleasant' /ˈpleznt/, 'unpleasant' /ʌnˈpleznt/; 'market' /ˈmɑ:kɪt/,
'marketing' /ˈmɑ:kɪtɪŋ/
c) The stress remains on the stem, not the affix, but is shifted to
a different syllable (e.g. 'magnet' /ˈmægnət/,
'magnetic' /mægˈnetɪk/) (Roach, 1991, p. 96).
2.2.1.3 Stress in compounds
Compound words are words known as words that consist of two units, these
being created by independent English words. As far as stress placement in
compounds is concerned, compounds usually contain a single primary stress on
one element of the compound, the other element or elements carrying
secondary stress (Gimson, 1967, p. 224).
We will, again, adopt Roach's approach. Frequently, compounds consist
of two nouns. These usually have the stress on the first element (e.g. 'sunrise'
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/ˈsʌnraɪz/). Compounds comprising adjectival first element and the -ed
morpheme at the end receive stress on the second element (e.g. 'bad-
tempered' /ˌbædˈtempəd/). For compounds that have a number of some form
as the first element the stress will fall on the second element (e.g. 'second-
class' /ˌsekəndˈklɑ:s/). Compounds functioning as adverbs are usually final-
stressed (e.g. 'North-East' /ˌnɔ:θˈi:st/). Compounds that are final-stressed also
include those that function as verbs and have an adverbial as the first element
(e.g. 'downgrade' /ˌdaʊnˈgreɪd/).
2.2.1.4 Shifting word stress
“In English, the place of word stress within the word remains constant”
(Fudge, 1984, p. 4) with a few exceptions such as 'controversy' that has two
possible stress patterns. However, it does not necessarily mean the stress
pattern is always fixed and unchanging. There exist two-syllable words with
identical spelling, such as permit, present, or protest, to name a few, yet they
are stressed differently according to the word class they belong to. Nouns have
the first syllable stressed, while the second and at the same time final syllable is
stressed in verbs.
It is further useful to look at differences in stressing which concern the
difference between a phrase and a compound. Let's take the example of
'blackbird' – a compound – and 'black bird' – a phrase. Following the rule of
stressing a compound that is made up of two nouns, blackbird is stressed on
the first syllable and semantically, it is a type of bird. If talking about a phrase,
the second word is stressed and any kind of bird that is black is meant. Other
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examples include ˈblackboard (a board used in classroom) – blackˈboard (a
board painted black), or ˈdarkroom (a lightless room for developing
photographs) - dark ˈroom (a room with not much light in it).
It is good to note at this point that connected speech may influence
moving the stress to the preceding syllable, as is the case of 'bad-tempered'
/ˌbædˈtempəd/ that becomes 'bad-tempered teacher' /ˈbædtempəd ˈti:tʃə/. The
aspects of connected speech will be discussed in the following subchapter.
As we have seen the rules governing word stress are complex and
intricate. They have nevertheless been discussed here in order to show that
some rules in fact exist and stress placement is not something a speaker can
decide about deliberately. For the teaching purposes, however, an approach
proposing learning stress as the property of a word, and putting aside complex
rules governing the stress placement, will be adopted.
2.2.2 Sentence stress
Similarly to stressing certain syllables in polysyllabic words, during a
speech production some words are made more prominent. “The position of the
stress is determined largely by the meaning which the utterance is intended to
convey” (Plavka, 2003, p. 38). Fudge's example will be used to demonstrate
different intended meanings of a single sentence. Fudge presents an utterance
'John hasn't arrived' which can be uttered in three ways: 1) John hasn't arrived,
2) John hasn't arrived, and 3) John hasn't arrived, with the word shown in italics
being more prominent than the rest of the elements. The first utterance may be
said in a situation where it is known that John has set out to get here, but is not
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here yet. The second one may be a correction of someone who claims that
John has arrived. The last one will possibly try to convey that John was
supposed to have come but was not among the people that had come (Fudge,
1984, p. 1).
Whatever message we want to convey, however, there are certain rules
that indicate which words are possibly going to be stressed in an utterance and
which are not. According to Plavka, the following words are likely to carry stress
in an utterance: nouns; demonstrative, emphatic, interrogative and possessive
pronouns; adjectives proper; active and passive participles; lexical verbs;
adverbs; numerals; longer prepositions; two-word conjunctions; and
interjections standing alone. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. To
name one, when forming comparatives and superlatives, these are often
unstressed, e.g. We ˈneed more exˈperienced ˈworkers. When we do stress
'more' (We ˈneed ˈmore exˈperienced ˈworkers), it means that we need a
greater number of experienced workers. Words that are normally unstressed in
an utterance include: personal, reflexive, reciprocal and relative pronouns;
possessive adjectives; articles; auxiliary and modal verbs; monosyllabic
prepositions; one-word conjunctions; and interjections followed by emphatic
words. Here again, certain exceptions apply. To give the reader the idea, an
auxiliary verb can be stressed in the following utterance that seeks emphasis –
It ˈcan be done. I ˈdo believe you (Plavka, 2003, p.38-43).
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2.2.3 Weak forms
Before we go on to talk about rhythm, a phenomenon closely related to
stress, we should devote some time to look at forms of words that contribute to
rhythm. Certain words in English have two forms – a strong one and a weak
one. These words belong almost exclusively to the group of function, or
grammatical, words. Function words do not bear meaning like the content, or
lexical, words do. On the other hand, they signal a grammatical relationship with
other words in a sentence. Function words are mostly pronouns, prepositions,
auxiliary verbs or conjunctions. We can illustrate the weak form with a few
examples:
have /əv/ her /ə/ or /ər/
for /fə/ some /səm/
There, again, exist rules about when a weak or strong form should be used.
Briefly, when placed at the end of a sentence, it is pronounced strongly (e.g.
Who did you receive the letter from? /frɒm/). In other than final positions in a
sentence the weak form is preferred (e.g. I received it from Peter. /frəm/).
Weak forms are mentioned here as they contribute to the natural rhythm
of English and thus to the natural sound of speech. A native speaker will
understand a learner if they use strong forms, yet such a learner will sound
unnatural to other speakers. More serious consequence, however, is that such
a learner will “likely to have difficulty understanding speakers who do use weak
forms” (Roach, 1991, p. 102). The author can confirm this thesis based on her
own experience with students having great difficulties comprehending speech
containing the use of weak forms in her lessons, even though they are not only
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weak forms that cause comprehension problems in connected speech. It is
therefore advisable to teach weak forms to learners.
2.2.4 Rhythm
In speech production stressed and unstressed syllables alternate and
this alteration inevitably leads to the speech being rhythmic. “The stressed
syllables that come together are uttered in a relatively slower way than when
separated by unstressed syllables. The intervening unstressed syllables, on the
other hand, are compressed by being uttered the more rapidly the greater
number of them, which results in making the stressed syllables occur at roughly
equal interval of time” (Plavka, 2003, p. 56). This is why English is said to have
an isochronous stress and is thus called a stressed-timed language. This
isochrony may cause problems to learners as they have to squeeze in a
number of unstressed syllables.
An important fact in connection with rhythm has to be stated. Goës
claims that “rhythm as a whole organizes the chain of speech along a new
dimension, thus it contributes to increased depth of perception” (Goës, 1974, p.
105). In other words, as the stressed syllables occur at regular intervals, it is
predictable when the stress will appear, which thus facilitates perception. Goës
even uses the term stress-carried rhythmic system of English, meaning, that it is
stress that reinforces the overall rhythmic effect of English. It is thus clear that
stress and rhythm are phenomena that go hand in hand, they “serve as
integrated units” (Goës, 1974, p. 105). However, it should be noted that besides
stress, rhythm can be also carried by intonation change, length, segment,
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quality, alliteration, rhyme etc. (Goës, 1974, p. 103). Nonetheless, it is clear,
that “wrong stressing will inevitably lead to wrong and misleading rhythm”
(Fudge,1984, p. 4) and will thus distort the natural sound of English. Also, the
reason that causes great difficulties comprehending a speech for learners is
that “there is no break between individual syllables; they are knit together, thus
composing one continuum” (Plavka, 2003, p. 56). That is why, in teaching, one
should not neglect this aspect and teach stress hand in hand with rhythm.
In this chapter, we have discussed stress placement in words as well as
in a sentence. We have learnt the placement is a complex phenomenon to
which rules apply, yet there are numerous exceptions. This is why the rules
have not been looked into in greater detail. Rather, concerning teaching
stresses, a following approach proposing teaching word stress as an inherent
quality of individual words will be adopted. Having found out about the
importance and integrity of rhythm and stress in English, teaching rhythm will be
included in the practical section.
2.3 Stress in Czech
Both in English and Czech word stress is fixed. For the most part word
stress falls on a particular syllable in a word. A crucial difference between the
English and Czech stress system, however, is that in Czech word stress does
not fall on different syllables in a word. It always falls on the first syllable. In this
sense, it is stable, contrary to English word stress, which is variable. As
opposed to English word stress, which is characterized by change of pitch,
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length, loudness and change in vowel quality, in Czech there is no change in
vowel quality in the stressed syllable. It is possible to have a full long vowel in
an unstressed syllable (Hajkr, 2000, p. 12). Czech does not know of reduction
that appears in an English unstressed syllable, neither do there appear weak
forms in Czech. On the other hand, there is a similarity in Czech and English.
Similarly to English, primary and secondary stresses occur in Czech language.
Secondary stress usually appears in compounds (e.g. 'czechoslovakian',
'českoskovenský' /ˈ tʃeskɒˌslɒvenski:/).
As in English the word order is fixed, in an utterance English stress
functions as a signal to convey a message the speaker intends to deliver. In
Czech, there are other means. The function is taken over by word order. In
Czech, word stress has a delimitative function. In other words, it signals
boundaries between words. (Krčmová, 1996, p. 82). The delimitative function of
Czech word stress is not always the rule, however. Krčmová talks about the
existence of words in Czech that do not bear stress during speech production.
These are short forms of pronouns, form of an auxiliary 'be', conjunctions,
prepositions, or modal verbs. In other words, they are words whose constituent
of meaning is weakened. These words usually form a stress unit with the
preceding stressed word (Krčmová,1996, p. 140).
The alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables is essential for the
English rhythm, which is in turn crucial for the intelligibility of an utterance.
Contrary to English, which is a stress-timed language, Czech is a syllable-timed
language.
In this brief chapter, we have seen that English and Czech languages are
incomparable as far as stress, its characteristics and functions in particular, is
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concerned. It is therefore apparent Czech learners of English will likely to have
difficulties acquiring the command of such different systems. Furthermore, it is a
clear signal for teachers to include English stress as well as rhythm into their
teaching and work on these extensively.
2.4 Importance of stress in intelligibility
Over the years Robert Kingdon's anecdote about a German student
having troubles getting a ticket at an Underground station has become very
well-known. The student asked for a ticket to Camden Town, yet was given one
to Kensington. The source of the problem was in the incorrect use of stresses –
instead of /'kæmdǝn 'taun/, he said something close to /'kemdntaun/. The author
herself has a similar personal experience. When travelling on an Italian train,
she was asked about the place she was going to. She repeated the name of the
city Bologna several times, yet the Italian fellow-travellers did not seem to even
remotely understand. Unaware of the stress system in languages at that time,
the reason of the author's misunderstanding was, similarly to the German
student, the misplacing of the stress.
These two anecdotes prove that correct stress placement truly is of
utmost importance. “It can be quite difficult to understand English speech in
which the stress is either absent or wrongly placed, and learners whose mother
tongue tends towards syllable timing may find stress timing and the consequent
'crowding in' of unstressed syllables rather different and cumbersome”
(Underhill, 1994, p. 73), which is precisely the case of Czech language and
Czech learners of English. Furthemore, “comprehensibility depends on rhythm,
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and therefore the placing of stress within words can play a large part in
determining how well a native speaker will understand a foreign speaker”
(Fudge, 1984, p. 4).
The two languages being so different is not the only source of the
problem for Czech learners, however. There is yet another aspect – a cultural
one – that comes into play. As Tomková states “in Czech culture, it is not
considered appropriate to appear too emotional / extroverted / foolish in public
and subsequently to use rich intonation in everyday interaction. Many students
of English feel they would sacrifice their identity should they adopt stress and
intonation patterns taught to them” (Tomková, 2008, p. 46).
So far, we have neglected intonation as an important suprasegmental
factor in the intelligibility of speakers. The reason of not including intonation into
the researched area is that it would make the extent of the thesis too broad.
Nevertheless, the author is aware of the importance intonation has in the
speakers' intelligibility and recognizes the possibility that the mishandling of the
intonation patterns will have more serious implications for the intelligibility of
learners than the misplacing of stress. Whether it is stress or intonation that
plays more important role in the intelligibility of speakers is intricate to arbitrate.
Hills claims that “the native English listener reacts to the clues given by
intonation much more than those given by stress” (Hill, 1965, p. vii). Even
though, as Hill adds, stress and intonation work together in harmony, if
deliberately made the conflict, intonation will win (ibid.). Despite this fact,
teaching intonation is believed to be neglected even more than teaching stress.
As Hill notes, “to most teachers of English the field of stress and intonation
looks so vast and confused that they draw back from them in terror” (Hill, 1965,
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p. vi). Hill suggests that teachers select only the most important stress, and
intonation, common and useful patterns that can be used with safety in ninety
per cent of cases. Even though learners will still make mistakes, the mistakes
will be only occasional as compared to students who have been left to pick
stress, and intonation, up haphazard (ibid). On the other hand, as intonation is
said to be unconscious a thing, it is useful to begin by teaching stress and then
go on to intonation.
To conclude, it is clear that “stress and intonation are not luxuries but
vital parts of spoken English” (Hill, 1965, p. vi) and in teaching English as a
second language they should be approached as such.
2.5 Teaching stresses
As we have seen, English stress system is markedly different to its
Czech counterpart. It has different characteristics as well as functions and it is
thus crucial to both intelligibility of learners to other speakers, their active
command of English, as well as the learners' ability to comprehend English
utterances, their passive skills. It is clear, from the chapter 1.2, that English
word stress is very difficult to predict. Given a learner does not want, or a
teacher does not force learners, to memorize a complex set of rules with
numerous exceptions, it is best to “treat stress placement as a property of an
individual word, to be learned when the word itself is learned (Roach, 1991, p.
88). The author is convinced that the rules governing stress placement in
English are too complex and full of exceptions for a learner to comprehend that
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it is better to learn stress as an inherent quality of a word. Her teaching reflects
this opinion.
In compliance with current trends in teaching a second language a
multisensory, or holistic, approach shall be adopted. “Pronunciation is the
physical side of language, involving the body, the breath, the muscles, acoustic
vibrations, and harmonics. Learning pronunciation is thus best achieved when
making it physical, visual, aural, spatial, affective and intellectual (Underhill,
1994, p. xii). As already stated the rules and tendencies of stress placement in
English are too complex. “On their own tendencies clearly do not form a
comprehensive basis for the learning of stress placement, and so we need an
effective ways for learning the stress of each word individually while at the same
time developing the kind of inner criteria that native speakers have” (Underhill,
1994, p. 55). It is, therefore, not advisable to sidetrack learners by cognitive
rules with limited application. The best rule, in Underhill's opinion, is to “be alert
and notice what your are doing and what the language is doing, and to reflect”
(ibid.). Linguistic rules and tendencies must be used to enhance this process.
The author shares the opinion. To conclude the advantageous way to teach and
learn word stress, Underhill suggests it is best to:
a) work with each new word as it comes up, on its own terms, consulting
the teacher or coursebook or learner's dictionary;
b) to do so in such a way as to encourage the development of the
learners' intuitive learning faculties so that the underlying tendencies can
emerge within each learner without necessarily having to be described or
explained;
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c) to make use of rules and observations and explanations about
placement of word stress where they are useful, that is where they
contain some insight and when the learners are ready to integrate the
rule (p. 55).
The way to proceed in the acquisition of stress system, and not only the stress
system, is to 'receive, process, produce'. Firstly, awareness of syllable stress
should be raised. Underhill suggests the teacher says a word aloud several
times, shifting to a different syllable each time. The teacher then encourages
learners to identify which of the possibilities is correct. Even if they have not met
the word before, Underhill claims students will be able to discern the correct
English stress pattern (1994, p. 152). Once the correct stressing has been
established it is necessary to introduce a visual symbol that will indicate the
stress placement. There are many possible ways starting from using the symbol
/ˈ/ placed before the stressed syllable, underlining the stressed syllable, or
putting a circle or square above the stressed syllable. It depends on the teacher
which notation they shall adopt. Once used, however, the teacher should stick
to the notation and use it throughout their course.
As well as it is important to decide on the stressed syllable, it is equally
important to work on unstress in words, which for many learners is the same
challenge of learning as the articulation of stress. This is especially apparent for
Czech learners as there is no change in quality of a vowel or reduction in
unstressed syllables in Czech language. Unstressing syllables may thus seem
to Czech learners of English as a negligence. We can introduce a discovery
activity for a vowel reduction and the distribution of stress and unstress.
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Learners should pronounce the following utterances rapidly to find out about the
reduction.
You and me. /ˈju: ən mi:/
I wish you would tell me. /aɪ ˈwɪʃ jʊ wʊd ˈtel mɪ/
(Underhill, 1994, p. 62)
The following three pairs can serve to notice that the diphthong in the second
sentence is shorter and less clear than in the first sentence (Underhill, 1994, p.
63).
Go. vs Go out.
Go out. vs Go outside.
Why. vs Why not.
Since reduction is a feature of unstress, it is essential to teach weak forms
which in turn will work to produce natural rhythmic quality of an English
utterance.
2.5.1 Techniques
It is obvious there are numerous techniques available and we could
devote a lot of time to describing them. We will, however, name the most
interesting and at the same time the ones believed to be most efficient here.
Adrian Underhill's work Sound Foundations represents the most thorough and
extensive source that offers creative activities and will be thus of great use in
employing them in the classroom. A further strength of Underhill's approach
presented in the book lies in the fact that all the presented activities can
challenge and engage learners at all levels of proficiency. Most importantly, it
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offers various modifications of numerous activities, which will well serve to meet
the needs of various teaching styles. Teachers can therefore choose whichever
activity they find the best.
An interesting technique that Underhill introduces is called 'cuisenaire
rods'. He proposes using white and red rods to indicate stress. Each rod
symbolizes syllables, white ones unstressed syllables, red ones stressed
syllables. The students are invited to arrange the rods according the stress
pattern they find accurate. This way, the stress pattern is made visible, tactile as
well as changeable. It can also be used to give learners visual feedback by
placing the rods according the student's, correct or incorrect, pronunciation
(Underhill, 1994, p. 154-155).
Another technique makes use of fingers. Fingers represent either
separate sounds, syllables or even words. By putting the fingers apart and
together, the flow of sound, either in words or connected speech, is visually
indicated, as can be seen in the pictures below. This technique, however, needs
good physical coordination.
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(Underhill, 1994, p.161)
(Underhill, 1994, p.164)
It is further advisable to train learners to find pronunciation and word
stress information in a dictionary and note it down into their own dictionaries.
Furthermore, as well as on their own, a whole class exercise in which words
can be grouped in columns according to their stress pattern is expedient.
A useful technique includes providing rhythm for a given text. As time, in
teaching, is always of the essence, it is a technique that 'kills two birds with one
stone'. Students are presented with an excerpt from their textbook that has not
- 40 -
been studied yet and practise connected speech. This can be done via being
presented to a rod profile, or students can work the profile out themselves. A
different option is to identify the sense groups in the text. Also, a taped text can
be played and students have to identify stressed words first, then add the
unstressed ones. A further advantage of this technique is that while connected
speech is practised, when it comes to studying the meaning, students will
already have a fairly clear idea of the semantic organization of the passage
(Underhill, 1994, p. 187).
As each one of the mentioned activities would require a lengthy
explanation of all successive steps, only the rationale behind the activities were
mentioned here. If interested, the author encourages readers to search
guidance in Underhill's book.
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3 Practical section
3.1 Introduction
As already stated in the theoretical section the author the leading
scholars' opinions about the crucial importance of suprasegmental features in
the intelligibility of speech. At the same time, unfortunately, she believes
pronunciation in general, let alone suprasegmental features, suffers from the
lack of attention paid to it by teachers. Consequently, Czech learners of English
often struggle either with understanding a speech production, mostly recorded
one, or their own speech production is not intelligible to others. And this is a
common phenomenon even after several years of training. Unfortunately,
students find out only later that they are incomprehensible, once they have an
opportunity to speak to a foreigner. For the time being, for the majority of
students the teacher is the only person who they speak to in English. Therefore,
as the students do not have any comparative experience, they will often view
the teacher as obsessed with pronunciation. When corrected by the teacher
they will say “Didn't I just say the exact thing?” and think this is yet another thing
the teacher can pester them about. Of course one cannot generalize about this
experience, yet it is very common at least at the school where the author
teaches. Tomková adds, “the interference of mother tongue with what is
perceived as its clear pronunciation makes understanding English a major
problem. (...) The less gifted (or less psychologically disposed) do not make this
effort and as a consequence, are asked to repeat their utterance again and
again” (Tomková, 2008, p.59), which is particularly frustrating.
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As a teacher, the author has often witnessed the frustration and therefore
decided to help her students further by paying attention to pronunciation more
and increase the amount of time dedicated to practising pronunciation, stress
patterns and rhythm in particular, during the English lessons. She hopes that
the increased time will have a positive impact on students' performance, which
will be evaluated by a native speaker.
3.2 Procedure
In this chapter we are going to have a look at how the research has been
carried out. First of all, the author needed volunteers who would be willing to be
recorded. After careful consideration she decided to turn to students who are in
their third year of studies. Not only should they display satisfactory command of
English, they are also comparable as far as their age is concerned. Also, the
author teaches three groups of the third year students and had thus many
potential candidates to take part in the project.
At the beginning of October 2011 the third year students were informed
about the research, its aims as well as necessary steps that needed to be
undertaken, and were given a questionnaire to ask about their willingness to be
part of the research. The questionnaire, as well as any other following ones,
were produced in Czech so that there was no misunderstanding and the
students were not discouraged right at the beginning. For the purposes of the
thesis, however, the questionnaire has been translated to English. Each student
got the questionnaire with his/her name already stated so as they took it
seriously and the author got all of the questionnaires back. The first question
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was created according to Likert scale, which is a commonly used rating scale.
The issue of anonymity has been addressed in the following question. In case
students agreed to be part of the project they were to state whether they agree
with using their full name in the project. If not, they could choose a nickname. It
was interesting to see how the consent or refusal of the students' name's usage
was to a greater extent influenced by the students' self-assessment as to their
command of English is concerned. Students who generally feel quite confident
about their command of English opted for using their full name. Those who do
not feel that confident chose a nickname or simply asked the author to use their
first name only.
After the questionnaires have been collected twelve students were
chosen according to their pronunciation skills as perceived by the teacher. Four
of the students were students with poor pronunciation skills and intelligibility
problems, four without significant pronunciation and intelligibility problems, and
four somewhere in the middle between the two aforementioned extreme points
on an imaginary axis. The feasible way how to measure students' skills and
progress was to record them and subsequently have the recordings evaluated
by a native speaker. Finding a native speaker proved to be one of the very
difficult tasks. The author searched for someone who is not influenced much by
foreign accents and is not a native speaker of English living in the Czech
Republic. In the end, a native speaker willing to assess the recording was
found. Information about him will be provided in chapter 3.4. It was unfortunate
there was only one assessor as the evaluation may therefore be biased.
To measure the students' progress it was decided to carry out three
rounds of recordings. Each of the students was recorded three times during a
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year – in October, December, and February. After the first recording, all
students started working on their pronunciation extensively, with special
attention paid to teaching stresses. To record the students an MP3 player with a
digital voice recorder was used. Except for one recording, the quality of the
recordings' sound seemed to be satisfactory.
As a lot of students would have been discouraged were they asked to
record their off-hand speaking skills, reading a text was opted for. In order to be
comparable the same text for one round has been chosen. The disadvantage of
such choice, nevertheless, might be that the native speaker gets used to the
text, which will in turn influence his objectivity. The reading texts were chosen
mainly according to the topic the students could be interested in. As the
students study civil engineering and architecture the first text dealt with graffiti
as a form of art. After the first recording, the author realized the text might have
been too long for students and carefully chose the subsequent texts. At the
request of one student and his fellow students' approval, the second reading
text was about rock and roll. A part of the text was taken out from wikipedia and
adapted. The last reading text was concerned with the question whether
dreams can influence our lives and, likewise, was adapted to suit the students'
skills better.
3.3 Students
As stated in the previous chapter, twelve students willing to take part in
the research have been chosen. Some of them, having been asked for their
informed written approval, opted for their full names to be used, others asked
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the author to use their first names only. Four of them were from class 3.B.
These students study Architecture. The other eight students are from class 3.G
and they study Geodesy. Students from 3.B are Lucie Barešová, Kateřina
Hoffmannová, Vladimír Kováč and Jan Schleider. Students from 3.G are
Veronika Seberová, Vojtěch Lelek, Jakub, René, Tomáš, Filip, Lukáš, and
David. The last six named students expressed the wish not to state their full
names in the research.
Students from 3.B all belong to the group of students who demonstrate
good command of English, pronunciation included. Lucie and Kateřina are both
diligent students and excel in all subjects they study, not only in English. They
are nevertheless modest girls who do not talk very much and are not that
confident speaking in English as, given their perfectionism, they are concerned
they might make mistakes. Vladimír and Jan are also very good students of
English. They are very communicative and are self-confident about their
command of English. They both seek opportunities to communicate in English
outside the classroom, which positively affects and further reinforces both their
competence and performance. Nevertheless, Vladimír, due to the first language
interference, occasionally struggles with expressing himself correctly or clearly.
He also finds it hard to understand the differences between the way the two
languages treat certain linguistic phenomena.
Veronika Seberová, Vojtěch Lelek, Jakub and René form another group, one
with average pronunciation skills. Veronika could serve as an inspiring example
of what positive effect intrinsic motivation has. When the author started teaching
Veronika, Veronika, like most of her classmates, did not consider English as an
important subject. As a matter of fact, a lot of students chose the school as a
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form of escape from learning foreign languages. They, then, did not know they
would have to sit Maturita exams in a foreign language. Veronika did not pay
any attention and her results looked accordingly. A year and a half later,
however, there has been a change in her attitude to English and she started to
have good learning results1 and, more importantly, she started to be more self-
confident about her competence in English. Nevertheless, a bit of insecurity can
still be traced in her performance. Vojtěch and René are both good students of
English, although it takes them more time and effort to do things right. They are
interested in the language and often ask intriguing questions to find out how the
language works. Jakub is the last one who belongs to the group of the average
students. He is a vivid example of unfulfilled potential. If he made more effort,
he could have better learning results and be more self-confident about his
competence in English. Together with David, Lukáš, Tomáš and Filip, Jakub is
a student who struggles painfully with other subjects, mainly the technical and
specialized ones. Unfortunately, their main aim is to pass the subjects. It takes
them a great deal of effort to pass and it is often discouraging for them to find
out that the effort they have invested into passing did not pay off to the extent
the would wish for. They are often not aware of the fact it takes small steps to
acquire a language and even if they are they have difficulties realizing they
have made some. After being praised by the author at the end of the project, as
they truly made some progress, it was nevertheless obvious they were really
pleased.
1 It should be noted that by 'results' we do not mean grades students are evaluated with. Rather,
the word comprises acquiring new chunks of language and improving student's skills.
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3.4 Assessor
Besides the author's students who took part in the research, there was
another person crucial to the project – the assessor, or evaluator. It seems
important to give the reader some information about his background as the
information might influence the evaluation of the recordings.
Che Macolino, the assessor, is a born and bread Londoner who comes
from middle to working class. He has two brothers and a sister and he is the
eldest of them. When he was a child his mum was fairly strict about how her
children spoke and encouraged what she would call 'good English'. Che states
that “over the years I have adopted a more relaxed and possibly lazy way of
speaking” (personal communication, January 9, 2012). He adds that his family
have always been talkers and thinkers. He says he is not highly educated but
has always liked reading and is generally very sociable and loves meeting new
people, which he views as an important factor in contributing to his good usage
of English and ability to communicate. Furthermore, over the years he has
travelled “a fair bit” and has made many friends from around the world. This
could have influenced his listening and understanding people who do not speak
English as their first language.
As far as his job is concerned, he mainly works as a carpenter and
builder but he also works part time with teenagers and has now done so for
about seven years. He is aware of the fact that this may influence his evaluation
for, as he states, “I try to listen to what is said rather than how it is spoken and
have quite lot of patience with young people”. He confesses he has always
loved listening to people's different accents and is not sure whether he would
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make a very good English teacher as he lets things slip on account of the fact
that he likes hearing it the way people say it.
3.5 Questionnaire
Designing a questionnaire was another crucial task to accomplish to
make the results of the research as valuable as possible. The main aim was to
create an 'assessor-friendly' questionnaire. Too long and detailed a
questionnaire would make the assessor's work even more tedious.
The essential criterion for the evaluation of the recordings was obviously
its intelligibility. This criterion was meant to be assessed by the first question. By
answering it, the assessor indicated whether the particular student was easy or
hard to understand. The second question tried to analyse words that caused the
greatest problems with intelligibility. The following question, and the most
important one in the face of the thesis hypothesis, was intended to be in close
relationship with the second question and was supposed to determine which
variable or variables were the source of intelligibility problems. The following
variables have been proposed: mispronouncing of phonemes, intonation,
stress, rhythm, loudness, and speed. The assessor could also add any other
variable he considered important. Unfortunately, the assessor did not indicate
which variable was the most prominent one and therefore caused some
ambiguity as for the possible hypothesis confirmation or rejection is concerned.
Moreover, this fact also rendered the second question to a certain extent
inapplicable.
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So far, the questions were qualitatively oriented. A minor hypothesis
stated that the extended time devoted to pronunciation practise will have a great
positive effect on the students' pronunciation competence and performance. In
this case, we are concerned with the quantitative results. The fourth question
thus sought to identify to what extent the student in question was intelligible in
per cents. This way, the students' progress could be measured. The assessor,
nevertheless, felt a bit uncomfortable with assigning students percentage and
expressed his concern that “having never heard these people talk in real life its
difficult to know accurately how they would speak when not in a test type
situation and when not reading out loud” (Che Macolino, personal
communication, January 9, 2012).
The last question left space for any comments the assessor might feel
important to unfold. The author was glad the assessor provided some further
and valuable feedback that helped to clarify things as well as it helped to
counterbalance the fact the the assessor did not mark which problem with
pronunciation caused the greatest problem with intelligibility.
At first, the author also intended to include in the questionnaires a
question that would ask for putting students in order. However, the native
speaker did not feel like doing it as he thought “it would have added an element
of judgement or competition, which I do not think is relevant” (Che Macolino,
personal communication, November 14, 2011). In the end, it was a right
decision as it would not have much contribution to the research question.
Moreover, assigning percentage to each students contributed in a way to
answering this question. Finally, the questionnaire, blank as well as filled ones,
can be consulted in the appendices.
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3.6 Teaching stresses
Teaching pronunciation should be an integral part of teaching a foreign
language. It is true that as Nováková states “pronunciation teaching tends to be
done as correction to classroom errors rather than a proactive attempt to
understand the nuances of speech” (Nováková, 2007, p. 32). Another aspect, or
difficulty, is caused by the neglect of teaching and training pronunciation at
primary schools, which leads to acquiring bad pronunciation habits. This in turn,
is very difficult to eliminate. The author can mention an example from her own
teaching experience. Students often find themselves at surprise once they
encounter a familiar word, yet it is pronounced differently than they know – were
taught – and are corrected by the teacher. Their surprise shows implications
that there surely must be something wrong with the author's approach in her
teaching as they had never encountered these aspects of language in their
previous studies and, after all, they had been taught different pronunciation of a
particular word. Furthermore, during the author's school placement at a different
school, the author observed the teacher mispronouncing words as well as
misplacing stress. It was even more striking that this was a case with the word
'hotel' and it happened at a school where students study hotel business.
The author tries to approach teaching English pro-actively, bearing in
mind teaching pronunciation is an integral part of teaching a foreign language.
As stated in the theoretical part, rather than teaching about the stress system,
stress placement in new vocabulary is being acquired as an inherent quality of a
word and rules, observations and explanations about placement of word stress
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are made use of where they are useful. Along with teaching stresses, it is
inevitable to teach rhythm.
An unfortunate situation appeared with the third year students, the year
from which the participants of the research were selected. When they started
studying at the school they used a textbook Eurolingua, which is a textbook that
fails to meet today's requirements for second language acquisition. As the
author herself started teaching at the school the same year she had no choice
but to use the textbook in question. As the students started to use the textbook
it was not possible to change it in the course of their studies. Usually, textbooks
offer dialogues and other possibilities to base the pronunciation practice on.
With the Eurolingua textbook, however, the teacher would have to introduce
additional materials, which in turn would take more time already missing in
accomplishing the curriculum. This drawback was therefore compensated for
the use of Tibbitt's material that offers remedial practice in rhythm. Except for a
few cases, rhythm was practised at the beginning of every lesson. The book
starts with practising rhythm in one and two-syllable utterances and gradually
arrives at more complex structures. The practise was carried out in the form of
drill – students listened to a modelled utterance and chorally repeated it. It took
only a few minutes, yet the author believes students benefited from the practise
to a satisfactory extent. However, it would be immensely advantageous and
profitable if the students continued their practise at home. Tibbitt's book offers
the most extensive source for practical use in classroom. Yet, one of the
negative aspect is that it does not offer contextualized exercises.
To start with, however, students' attention needed to be drawn to what
syllable is, so some discovery activities have been carried out. It goes without
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saying that students had been acquainted with IPA chart and its symbols,
already at the beginning of their studies. After it has been clear what a syllable
is, stressed syllables could be identified. Without much explanation, it was clear
that a stressed syllable is pronounced with more force. What sometimes caused
more troubles were the unstressed syllable. It was difficult for the students to
change the vowel quality, make reductions. Furthermore, weak forms seemed
rather unnatural to them. Underhill suggests teacher says a word aloud several
times, shifting the stress to a different syllable each time. Students will
supposedly be able to discern the correct pattern. At first, the author suspected
this technique would not be effective if put in practise. She was surprised,
however, that students really were able to discern the correct pattern.
To make pronunciation physical, the author suggested assigning steps to
individual syllables. In case of the stressed syllable students had to make a
longer step. At first, students felt a bit insecure and at odds with this exercise.
Later on, they started to like it, even though it was evident some struggled with
coordination.
Instead of Cuisenaire rods, which the author thought students would
consider a bit childish, black dots were introduced to symbolize syllables. Small
dots symbolize unstressed syllables, while the big ones indicate stressed
syllable. These were cut out of paper and students could move them on the
blackboard with the help of blu-tac. This way, pronunciation has been made
both visual and tactile, in accordance with Underhill's approach.
After four months of practising, before the third round of recordings has
been carried out, students were asked to fill in a simple questionnaire about
their view of the the importance of pronunciation and their preparation prior to
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recording. Unfortunately, the questionnaires showed that even though the
students had been informed about the importance of correct pronunciation, and
at the same time trained in pronunciation, some of the students were still not
convinced pronunciation is important. The questionnaire and its results will be
discussed further in chapter 3.7.
3.7 Data analysis
In this crucial chapter of the thesis, the results yielded by the evaluated
questionnaires are going to be analysed. Firstly, progress of individual students
will be monitored throughout the three rounds of recordings. Secondly, the
emergence of common patterns are going to be examined. To simplify the
categorization, the group of four students with the best pronunciation skills is
going to be referred to as the 'first group'. It follows that the 'second group' will
be a group of students with average pronunciation skills and the 'third group' are
going to be students with the lowest pronunciation skills.
The level of pronunciation skills Names
First group
Jan
Kateřina
Lucie
Vladimír
Second group
Jakub
René
Veronika
Vojtěch
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Third group
David
Filip
Lukáš
Tomáš
3.7.1 First recording
The first recording took place in October 2011. Teaching pronunciation
has always been an important part of the author's teaching. Yet, after the first
recording has been carried out, extensive and structured attention was brought
to it, and students started with a comprehensive practise of stress patterns as
well as the practise of rhythmic patterns. The first recording and results of the
evaluated questionnaires by the native speaker serve as the starting point of the
analysis. It also functions as the basic, even though not thoroughly
comprehensive, characteristic or assessment of individual student's
pronunciation skills.
Three main criteria were monitored, namely the overall intelligibility, the
main problems with intelligibility and the last one monitored to what extent the
students were intelligible, as expressed in percentage. Although present in the
questionnaires, the words that were identified as not comprehensible will only
be taken into account to a lesser extent in the analysis as they do not provide
for a helpful testing of the hypothesis.
The following table puts the acquired data together. Numbers in the 'main
problems' column symbolize the following: 1. mispronunciation of phonemes, 2.
problems with intonation, 3. problems with stresses, 4. problems with rhythm, 5.
- 55 -
the inadequate loudness, 6. speed, 7. any other problems with intelligibility.
Students were arranged into groups. Within the groups, they were lined up in
the alphabetical order.
overall
intelligibility
intelligibility problems
percentage
Jan easy N/A 98
Kateřina easy 1 98
Lucie easy 1,2,4 95
Vladimír easy 2,4,1 90
Jakub easy 1 95
René easy 1,4,6 95
Veronika easy 1,2,4 90
Vojtěch easy 1,2 90
David hard 1,2,3,4,6,7 N/A
Filip easy 1,2,4,6 85
Lukáš easy 1,3,6 90
Tomáš easy 1,2,4 90
3.7.1.1 Jan
Jan, together with Kateřina, received the highest percentage from the
native speaker. According to the questionnaire he read very clearly and his
pronunciation was very good. By pronunciation, Macolino (see Appendix 6)
probably thinks the articulation of sounds as he separates it from intonation. He
says that Jan had a very good intonation as well. In addition, Jan's reading
demonstrated good understanding of the subject and text. He paused where
appropriate and used emphasis to reinforce meaning. That is why no problems
- 56 -
with intelligibility were indicated. When he mispronounced some phonemes, he
was able to correct himself each time.
3.7.1.2 Kateřina
As stated, Kateřina and Jan were the best speakers. They did not have
any problems with comprehensibility, Kateřina only mispronounced a few
phonemes, namely in 'rebel' and 'local'. She read very clearly and with good
intonation.
3.7.1.3 Lucie
Lucie received 95% and was the third best. She mispronounced a few
phonemes and struggled a bit with intonation. Also, her rhythm was a little bit
mechanical but overall her pronunciation was said to be very good.
3.7.1.4 Vladimír
Vladimír, the last one from the first group, scored 90% as far as the
intelligibility of his speech is concerned. His main problems with intelligibility
were the intonation and rhythm. He also mispronounced a few words but not too
drastically. Vladimír belongs to quite a numerous group of students who
frequently mispronounce voiced labiodental fricative /v/. Czech learners will
often replace it with voiced labio-velar approximant /w/.
- 57 -
3.7.1.5 Jakub
Jakub's evaluation was a surprise. Originally categorized in the group of
students with average pronunciation skills, he would get ahead of Vladimír, who
belongs to the 'first group '. Jakub's percentage was equal to that of Lucie. They
both scored 95%. According to the native speaker Jakub only struggled with
mispronunciation of phonemes. Macolino (see Appendix 6) also mentioned that
Jakub has quite a strong accent but this did not cause a problem with
understanding him. He was clear and read at a good speed.
3.7.1.6 René
René was another surprise as he was also better than Vladimír. Macolino
(see Appendix 6) says René's reading was very good, his pronunciation was
excellent. The only problems with the intelligibility of his speech was the rhythm,
which was a bit irregular, and the fact that he read a little bit fast.
3.7.1.7 Veronika
Veronika confirmed her position in the second group with 90%. However,
to the native speaker she sounded as if she was still processing the language
as she read. She often hesitated and her rhythm and intonation were not strong.
She mispronounced a few words. Nevertheless, eventually she was able to
pronounce most words correctly.
- 58 -
3.7.1.8 Vojtěch
Vojtěch only mispronounced some words and he would need to work on
his intonation. Overall, though, his reading was clear throughout and he
comfortably fitted into the second group with 90%.
3.7.1.9 David
David is considered to be a student with the greatest difficulties in
English, not only in pronunciation. After the author has consulted his teacher of
Czech language, she found out that David generally has problems with
languages. He was the only student who has been determined as hard to
understand and therefore has not been assigned a percentage. It also follows
that he had problems with all the components, except for loudness, in the
second column. Macolino (see Appendix 6) further commented on David's
recording that he understood what David was saying but his overall
pronunciation and control of English was not strong as was not his awareness
of punctuation.
3.7.1.10 Filip
Filip was easy to understand, yet after David, he was the least intelligible
student with 85%. His reading caused intelligibility problems with intonation. His
rhythm and speed were irregular and he also mispronounced phonemes. The
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native speaker suggested he would benefit practising reading out loud (see
Appendix 6).
3.7.1.11 Lukáš
Lukáš, together with David, were the only two students whose incorrect
stressing caused problems with intelligibility. Lukáš also struggled a bit with the
correct pronunciation of phonemes. His speed of reading was a little irregular.
Interestingly, despite the above mentioned problems he received 90% from the
native speaker, which is comparable to the second group students'
performance.
3.7.1.12 Tomáš
Even though Tomáš's accent was viewed as quite strong, he
mispronounced several words continuously and he had problems with
intonation and rhythm, the native speaker did not have any serious problems
understanding him and Tomáš thus received 90%.
3.7.1.13 Common patterns
As shown in the graph below, it is clear that the first round of recordings
confirmed that rhythm is an important factor in the intelligibility of a speaker's
speech, as the majority of students' recordings were classified as having
problems with correct rhythmic patterns. Also, it is clear that suprasegmental
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features play an important role in the intelligibility of speech. However, the first
round of recordings did not confirm the hypothesis that it is stress that is the
most important factor in the comprehensibility of speech. Rather, it was
intonation that caused major problems with understanding. Notable is also the
fact that almost 100% students struggled with the correct pronunciation of
phonemes in words. Macolino (see Appendix 6) suggested, however, that it was
not the major problem in understanding the students.
11
7
2
7
0
4
10
2
4
6
8
10
12
students
phonemes
mispronunciation
intonation stress rhythm loudness speed other
intelligibility problems
First recording
As far as the division of students into groups is concerned, it was
surprising to find out that almost all students were evaluated as almost equal.
As compared to the categorization as devised by the author, the division based
on the percentage students received from the native speaker indicates that
Jakub and René share the same figure with Lucie and would thus belong to the
first group. Vladimír, on the other hand, would move to the second group. The
division between the second and third group is somewhat blurred as only Filip
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received 85% and David was not intelligible enough. All the other students
would be comparable as they were awarded 90% of comprehensibility.
Except for Jan and possibly Kateřina, all students had problems
pronouncing certain words. The most frequent ones were 'local', 'rebel', 'very',
'culture', 'society'. In the case of 'rebel' and 'society' the author believes the
misunderstanding has been caused by the incorrect stress placement rather
than the mispronunciation of phonemes.
3.7.2 Second recording
The second recording took place in December 2011 and students read a
brief text about the history of rock and roll. After the first recording has been
carried out, an extensive practise of pronunciation with the emphasis on
stresses and rhythm was realized. The resulting pieces of information from the
evaluated questionnaires have been, like in the previous case, collected and
are presented in the following table.
overall
intelligibility
intelligibility problems
percentage
Jan easy 1 90
Kateřina easy N/A 85
Lucie easy 1,2,3 75
Vladimír easy 1,2,4 75
Jakub easy 1,2 82
René easy 1,3,4 85
Veronika easy 1,2,4 78
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Vojtěch easy 1,2,4 85
David hard 1,2,3,4 70
Filip easy 1 70
Lukáš easy 1,2,3 80
Tomáš easy 1,2,4 78
3.7.2.1 Jan
For a better transparency of the difference between the students'
performance in the first and second recording, the data for individual students
are presented in a table.
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems N/A 1
percentage 98 90
As we can see, there has been a drop in Jan's performance. He is
nevertheless still evaluated as the best speaker out of the twelve students. His
pronunciation is very clear, he has good rhythm and intonation and overall is
very easy to understand.
3.7.2.2 Kateřina
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1 N/A
percentage 98 85
- 63 -
Again, we can see there has been a drop concerning the student's
performance. However, Macolino (see Appendix 7) evaluates Kateřina's reading
positively, saying that she reads clearly and fluently, although a bit quickly. Her
rhythm and intonation were good as well.
3.7.2.3 Lucie
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4 1,2,3
percentage 95 75
Lucie's evaluation expressed in percentage has dropped significantly, by
20%. As the mispronunciation of phonemes and intonation were the problems in
the first recording, so were they in the second one. This time, in addition, her
use of stresses was indicated to cause problems with intelligibility. Her
pronunciation has been evaluated as mechanical.
3.7.2.4 Vladimír
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 2,4,1 1,2,4
percentage 90 75
In the second recording, Vladimír had the same problems as in the first
one. In the first one, Macolino (see Appendix 7) indicated that the
mispronunciation of phonemes was of minor importance. Rather, the intonation
and rhythm caused greater intelligibility problems. This time, it was the case
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again. Vladimír's speech was evaluated as clear, although his intonation and
rhythm were a bit mechanical at times. Nevertheless, this fact could have been
caused by the nature of the reading text. The performance of both Vladimír and
Lucie declined significantly as they would be classified to belong to the third
group based on the percentage they received.
3.7.2.5 Jakub
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1 1,2
percentage 95 82
Similarly to other students, Jakub's intelligibility has also dropped. His
intonation was indicated as needing to be worked on a little and his main fault
was pronouncing 'ed' at the end of a verb, although this particular aspect of
pronunciation has been practised, as it is a common problem for the students.
3.7.2.6 René
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,4,6 1,3,4
percentage 95 85
René was evaluated as being 85% intelligible, which again meant a
decrease in his performance as compared to the first recording. He experienced
problems with mispronunciation of phonemes and rhythm in both recordings.
René was aware of the fact that his speed of reading was too fast the first time,
- 65 -
so he worked on it and it was not a problem the second time. However,
incorrect stressing was evaluated as a problem in the second recording.
Overall, though, his reading was viewed as very good.
3.7.2.7 Veronika
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4 1,2,4
percentage 90 78
Veronika demonstrated the same problems in intelligibility as in the first
recording, yet the extent to which she was intelligible decreased. It might have
been caused by the fact that her recording demonstrated problems with the
quality of sound, induced by some background noise. She started speaking
clearly, yet became harder to understand as she went on. The author believes
this was partly caused by her being diffident and unsure about her competence.
3.7.2.8 Vojtěch
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,2 1,2,4
percentage 90 85
Vojta's performance also dropped, yet not to such extent as in the
previous cases. He was said to be clear and easy to understand. He
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nevertheless struggled with intonation and rhythm, which is somewhat
surprising as it became a problem only after rhythm has started to be practised.
3.7.2.9 David
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,3,4,6,7 1,2,3,4,7
percentage N/A 70
Although David was again evaluated as hard to understand, he was the
first one who achieved some progress. He obtained 70% and his performance
was thus comparable to that of Filip. David is also a student who is not
confident about his competence and this is perceptible in his speech. He
therefore sounded hesitant and nervous and his reading was mechanical and
difficult to follow.
3.7.2.10 Filip
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4,6 1
percentage 85 70
The percentage and indicated intelligibility problems assigned to Filip, do
not in fact correspond to the comments made by the assessor. He says that
Filip's pronunciation was clear as was his rhythm and intonation. He struggled
- 67 -
with only a couple of words but on the whole had a good flow and apparent
understanding of the text.
3.7.2.11 Lukáš
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,3,6 1,2,3
percentage 90 80
Lukáš did not experience problems with rhythm and improved his speed
of reading. He frequently mispronounced words and had also problems with
correct stressing.
3.7.2.12 Tomáš
First recording Second recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4 1,2,4
percentage 90 78
Tomáš, similarly to David, frequently mispronounced many words and his
intonation and rhythm were not always strong. Also, he mispronounced the 'ed'
at the end of verbs.
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3.7.2.13 Common patterns
It was a great disappointment to see that, except for David, all students'
performance as expressed in percentage has dropped significantly despite the
fact that extensive practise had been carried out since October. Several
possible explanations are offered to interpret the decline in students'
performance. First of all, the text might have been more difficult for students
compared to the first one. Secondly, when the first reading was recorded
students did not have much to lose. The second recording, however, was aimed
to prove that there has been some progress in students' pronunciation as they
had practised it during English lessons. They, therefore, might have suffered
from performance anxiety. Naturally, this would not apply to all of the students,
yet, the author believes it influenced the performance of some students.
Unfortunately, a more plausible explanation, than the two above mentioned
ones, seems to apply and this is the native speaker's bias. Nevertheless, if we
detached ourselves from the percentage, the order of students based on their
performance in the second round would be comparable to that of the first one,
with the exception of Lucie and Vladimír, whose performance declined
significantly. On the other hand, it is possible that due to the growing number of
people who speak English as their second language, the importance of stress
and other suprasegmental features has decreased, as the native speakers have
to deal with foreign speakers' accents and varieties.
As for the hypothesis that stress is the major factor in the intelligibility of
speech, the mispronunciation of phonemes again played an important part. Yet,
it was implied that this factor is not of major importance. Rather, it was
- 69 -
inaccurate intonation and rhythm that induced comprehensibility problems.
Compared to the results from the first recording, however, the number of
students who struggled with intonation and rhythm has dropped. Stress, on the
other hand, was interestingly indicated to cause problems with higher number of
students than in the previous recording. You may consult the results in the chart
below.
11
8
46
0 0 10
2
4
6
8
10
12
students
phonemes
mispronunciation
intonation stress rhythm loudness speed other
intelligibility problems
Second recording
3.7.2.14 Questionnaire for students
After the results from the second round showed to be very unsatisfactory,
given the students were practising their pronunciation extensively, the author
has decided to look for the root of the problem. Another explanation of the
students' decline in performance might have been caused by their negligence in
paying attention and making an effort during the practise at school or practising
their pronunciation further at home. Also, it is important whether they read the
text beforehand at least once and aloud. In an attempt to answer these
- 70 -
questions a questionnaire has been designed. The questionnaire may be found
in the appendix 4. The aim of the questionnaire was, firstly, to try and trace the
causes of the students' progress not being satisfactory, and secondly, an
attempt to raise their awareness further and make them realize their
responsibility in progressing. As one of the students was not present at school
for several days, eleven students out of the twelve filled the questionnaire in.
The filled in questionnaires may be consulted in Appendix 5. The results are
presented in the charts below. It should be made clear that that students could
and did fill the questionnaire anonymously. This way veracious answers could
have been expected.
Pronunciation is important for intelligibility
8
2
1 0
strongly agree
somew hat agree
somew hat disagree
strongly disagree
First of all, it was important to find out students' motivation. The author's
conviction is that if a student believes pronunciation is important for the
intelligibility, he or she will make an effort during the practise at school and will
read the text, preferably aloud, when given it the day before the recording is to
be carried out. Also, after the importance of pronunciation in intelligibility has
been justified by the teacher, giving specific examples, it would be peculiar for
the student to think of pronunciation as not important. Indeed, except for one
- 71 -
student who does not really think pronunciation is important, the rest of them
think pronunciation is important, with eight of them being strongly in favour of
the opinion. Also, ten students were satisfied with the extent of practise carried
out during English lessons. One student thought the extent of practise was
somewhere between satisfactory and unsatisfactory.
Besides practising at school, it was also important to find out whether
students practise pronunciation at home. As seen in the chart below, one
student claims to practise pronunciation several times a week, three students
practise once a week, two occasionally and five students do not practise
pronunciation at home at all. Interestingly enough, three students who replied
that they practise pronunciation at least once a week, replied also to the
following question that sought the reason for not practising. They stated they do
not practise since they do not have enough time. There are two possible
explanations. Either students thought that practising once a week is not
satisfactory enough and they would need more time to practise more often, or
they did not reply to the question about the frequency of their practise truthfully.
Also, there is an example of a person who agrees that pronunciation is crucial
to the intelligibility, yet he or she does not practise at home since he or she is
not interested.
- 72 -
I practise pronunciation at home
0 1
3
2
5daily
several times a w eek
once a w eek
occassionally
never
Even more striking appears the fact that in students' opinion, practising at
home would take tolerable amount of time or little time. One would expect that
the reason why students do not practise is that they do not have enough time
and at the same time are convinced that the practise would take a lot of time.
Unfortunately, as the results prove, even though students do not think practising
would take a lot of their time, they are not willing to work on improving their
pronunciation.
Practise would take
0
3
6
a lot of time
little time
tolerable amount of time
- 73 -
One of the most important questions to indicate why the students'
performance dropped so significantly after the second recording was the last
question asking about the reading text. Students were always given the text one
day before the actual recording and were encouraged to go through it, look up
unknown words and try to read it out loud. In case they did not read it and they
saw the text for the first time as they recorded it, it would be clear that their
performance would not be satisfactory. The results show the following. One
student does not read the text at all before recording it. Four of them read it
once but only silently, while three of the students read it once out loud. Three
students replied they read the text out loud for several times before the
recording. The results could thus confirm the hypothesis about why the
performance has dropped. The results of the questionnaire further show the
discrepancy in students' opinions. On one hand, they are basically in agreement
as far as the importance of pronunciation is concerned. On the other, they are
not willing to devote time to practising, even though they think it would not take
much time. More importantly, the majority of them read the text only once,
which in turn has a considerable influence on their actual performance.
- 74 -
Reading text
1
4
3
0
3
I do not read
I read it once silently
I read it once aloud
I read it several times silently
I read it several times aloud
3.7.3 Third recording
The third and final recording was carried out in February 2012. It was
hoped that the questionnaire given to students after the second recording would
urge students to start taking the practise more seriously, which would results in
their improved performance.
overall intelligibility
intelligibility problems
percentage
Jan easy 1 99
Kateřina easy 3 99
Lucie easy 2,3,4 90
Vladimír easy 3,4,7 96
Jakub easy 2,4 95
René easy 1,2,4 95
Veronika easy 1,2,3,4 93
Vojtěch easy 1,3,4 93
David easy 1,2,3,4,6 80
Filip easy 2,4 90
Lukáš easy 1,2,3 94
Tomáš easy 1,2,3,4 75
- 75 -
3.7.3.1 Jan
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems N/A 1 1
percentage 98 90 99
Jan achieved a near perfect pronunciation with 99% and improved
compared to the first and second recordings. He was evaluated as pronouncing
clearly and speaking at a natural speed with good rhythm. He only
mispronounced one phoneme in 'lead'.
3.7.3.2 Kateřina
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1 N/A 3
percentage 98 85 99
Both Kateřina and Jan have continuously been evaluated as the best
speakers and the third recording confirmed the trend, with both showing even
more progress. Kateřina's pronunciation skills were assessed as excellent. She
was clear, as was her intonation and emphasis, and spoke at a natural speed.
The only mistake was the misplacement of stress in 'researchers'.
3.7.3.3 Lucie
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4 1,2,3 2,3,4
percentage 95 75 90
- 76 -
Compared to the second recording, Lucie improved her performance.
However, were the third recording compared to the first one, Lucie received
lower percentage. Her recurrent problems with pronunciation were appropriate
use of intonation, stress and rhythm. Nevertheless, she was said to speak
clearly and well.
3.7.3.4 Vladimír
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 2,4,1 1,2,4 3,4,7
percentage 90 75 96
Vladimír's pronunciation improved significantly compared to both
preceding recordings. Words 'interpretation' and 'conducted' caused some
intelligibility problems, possibly due to the misplacement of stresses. He
nevertheless spoke with good speed and was clear. There was one thing the
assessor mentioned Vladimír should watch for. According to Macolino (see
Appendix 8), Vladimír sometimes reads as if implying a question rather than
reading a statement.
3.7.3.5 Jakub
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1 1,2 2,4
percentage 95 82 95
- 77 -
Jakub, after the performance decline in the second recording, reached
the same percentage as in the first round. He definitely proved that he can be a
good student and belong to the first group with best pronunciation skills. He only
struggled a bit with intonation and slipped up on the 'ed' ending of words.
Overall, he was evaluated as speaking clearly and at a natural speed.
3.7.3.6 René
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,4,6 1,3,4 1,2,4
percentage 95 85 95
Despite the extensive practise that in the end centred on practising
rhythm, René still struggled with it, as well as with intonation. He nevertheless
spoke clearly and improved the speed of his speech as it was a major problem
of his at the beginning of the research. He also ranked high and could easily be
included in the first group.
3.7.3.7 Veronika
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4 1,2,4 1,2,3,4
percentage 90 78 93
Overall, based on the percentage Veronika received, she improved her
pronunciation skills. She would nevertheless still need a further work on her
rhythm and stress.
- 78 -
3.7.3.8 Vojtěch
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,2 1,2,4 1,3,4
percentage 90 85 93
Vojtěch closes in the second group with all the members ranking high
and improving their pronunciation and thus basically blurring the division
between the first two groups. Vojtěch only mispronounced a few words and
despite the practise of 'ed' endings, continued to make the mistake. He could
also benefit from further practise in rhythm and stresses.
3.7.3.9 David
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,3,4,6,7 1,2,3,4 1,3,4,6
percentage N/A 70 80
David was finally evaluated as easy to understand and was the only
student who achieved the greatest progress. However, he is still not that
confident about his pronunciation and would need an individual approach. He
would need to work on his speed, rhythm and intonation. He nevertheless
serves as an encouraging example how a student's pronunciation can improve
in quite a short time.
- 79 -
3.7.3.10 Filip
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4,6 1 2,4
percentage 85 70 90
Filip's pronunciation also improved and with a little more practise, of
intonation and rhythm in particular, would easily fit to the group of students with
high pronunciation skills.
3.7.3.11 Lukáš
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,3,6 1,2,3 1,2,3
percentage 90 80 94
Lukáš is another student who is not confident about his skills in English.
He was therefore very happy to find out that he had improved and would thus
sign up for another round of recordings. Even though the assessor indicated he
struggled a bit with intonation and stress, in the comments Macolino (see
Appendix 8) adds that Lukáš's stress, rhythm and intonation are good. He
nevertheless struggled, to a greater extent, with the correct pronunciation of
phonemes in words like 'truth' where he substituted the phoneme /u:/ for /ʌ/, or
in the word 'even' he pronounced /e/ instead of /i:/.
- 80 -
3.7.3.12 Tomáš
First recording Second recording Third recording
intelligibility problems 1,2,4 1,2,4 1,2,3,4
percentage 90 78 75
Tomáš, and Lucie unfortunately, were the only students whose
pronunciation did not improve, at least as evaluated by the assessor. He made
similar mistakes as Lukáš in 'even' and 'truth' and frequently mispronounced the
'ed' endings. Firstly, he should therefore study the correct pronunciation of
phonemes in sometimes basic words and then proceed on to intonation, stress
and rhythm.
3.7.3.13 Common patterns
The first round or students' performance was generally evaluated in
positive light and only then did the native speaker start to be a bit more critical.
Therefore, before the third and last round of recording there was much hope
and expectation as for the improvement to occur. There might have been the
need of longer stretch of time for the improvement of students' pronunciation to
surface. And this truly occurred after the last round of recordings.
The difference in pronunciation skills between the first and the second
group have been blurred. Firstly, pronunciation skills of the members of the first
group had already been very good so there could not have been a marking
comparable difference in their performance between the first and the last
recording. Where the difference could have been significant was the group of
- 81 -
students with average pronunciation skills. This has proved to be true. Students
from the second group reached the level of the students from the first group and
can easily be comparable.
Additionally, the sub-hypothesis that students would greatly benefit from
the extensive practise carried out during lessons has been confirmed. There
were two students from the second group, namely René and Jakub, whose
level of pronunciation skills stayed the same in the first and third recording.
Nevertheless, their first recording was a surprise as they would easily fit to the
first group of students. There were only two students – Lucie and Tomáš –
whose evaluation of the intelligibility expressed in per cents has dropped since
the first recording. The remaining eight students' pronunciation has improved,
stretching from the improvement by 1% for students who had already had a
near perfect pronunciation at the beginning of the research to 6%. For David,
the greatest improvement took place as he was the only student hard to
understand at the beginning. In the end, he achieved 80% of intelligibility.
78 8
9
01 1
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
students
phonemes
mispronunciation
intonation stress rhythm loudness speed other
intelligibility problems
Third recording
- 82 -
Overall, the importance of the mispronunciation of phonemes in the
intelligibility has dropped since the first recording. However, despite the fact that
rhythm has been practised extensively, at the beginning of each lesson, the
importance of correct rhythm in the intelligibility has risen compared to the first
recording. Likewise, suprasegmental features of language have proved to play
more important role in students' intelligibility, with stress becoming considerably
more significant in the intelligibility as compared to the results of the first
recording. The hypothesis of the importance of stress in the intelligibility of
speakers has therefore been confirmed.
- 83 -
Conclusion
The present thesis aims to test the following hypothesis. Suprasegmental
features of speech, stress in particular, are the most important factors
concerning the intelligibility of a speaker's speech. The motivation behind is the
fact that stress in English varies greatly to stress in Czech. Therefore, it often
constitutes problems for Czech learners even after relatively long training.
The theoretical section deals with the essential linguistic background. It
seeks to explain what stress is, what characteristics and functions it has and
how different the stress systems are in Czech and in English. As stress is
closely related to rhythm, this factor is not neglected in the theoretical section
either. As the thesis deals with the influence of teaching stresses to secondary
students' pronunciation and intelligibility, a chapter on teaching stresses is
included.
Especially for Czech learners, English stressing is difficult, as stress in
Czech language always falls on the first syllable, while in English there are
various stress patterns. To test the above mentioned hypothesis as well as help
the students that the author teaches, a research in teaching stresses to
secondary school students and its impact on students’ intelligibility, as well as
overall progress in their pronunciation competence has been devised. The
research was carried out from October 2011 through February 2012. During
that period of time, third year students received an extensive training of
pronunciation with the emphasis on stresses and rhythm.
The greater focus on pronunciation and practising during lessons is
believed to have a positive effect on students, resulting in their greater self-
- 84 -
confidence in the command of English. Twelve students volunteered to take
part in the project and they were recorded for three times during the suggested
time period. Students were divided into three groups – one with a high level of
pronunciation skills, one with average pronunciation skills and one with poor
pronunciation skills. For each recording a reading text was chosen. The
recordings were then evaluated by a native speaker who assessed whether the
students were easy or hard to understand, to what extent they were intelligible
and what the major problematic factors in students' intelligibility were.
The first round of recordings that was carried out in October confirms
what has been stated in the theoretical section. Rhythm is an important factor in
the intelligibility of a speaker's speech as it organizes the chain of speech along
a new dimension and thus contributes to increased depth of perception The
nature of rhythm in English – its isochrony – does cause problems to learners
as they have to squeeze in a number of unstressed syllables.
It also becomes clear that suprasegmental features play an important
role in the intelligibility of speech. However, the first round of recordings does
not confirm the hypothesis that it is stress that is the most important factor in the
comprehensibility of speech. On the other hand, as stated in chapter 2.2.4
wrong stressing inevitably leads to wrong and misleading rhythm. Given rhythm
proves to be a significant factor in students' intelligibility, we may state that
students struggled with correct stressing.
After the first round of recordings it is intonation that causes major
problems with understanding. This fact confirms Hills assertion, mentioned in
chapter 2.4, that although stress and rhythm work in harmony, the native
- 85 -
English listener reacts to the clues given by intonation much more than those
given by stress” (see chapter 2.4).
Furthermore, the majority of students struggle with the correct
pronunciation of phonemes in words, which however is a factor of minor
importance for the intelligibility. A further surprise is that almost all students'
pronunciation is evaluated as almost equal despite the devised differences.
The results from the second round of recordings prove to be of great
disappointment. Except for David, all students' performance as expressed in
percentage has dropped significantly despite the fact that extensive practise
had been carried out since October. Possible explanations of the decline are
offered. The text might have been more difficult for students compared to the
first one, students might have suffered from performance anxiety or the decline
could have been caused by the biased native speaker's perception. It is also
argued that, generally, the importance of stress and other suprasegmental
features have decreased. With English increasingly becoming lingua franca, the
number of people speaking English as their second language increased as well.
Increasingly, native speakers have to deal with many foreign speakers' accents
and varieties and are therefore more tolerant and patient to other speakers'
pronunciation.
In the second round of recordings, the mispronunciation of phonemes
again plays an important part. Yet, it is implied that this factor is not of major
importance. Rather, it is the inaccurate intonation and rhythm that induce
comprehensibility problems. Compared to the results from the first recording,
however, the number of students who struggle with intonation and rhythm has
- 86 -
dropped. Stress, on the other hand, is interestingly indicated to cause problems
with higher number of students than in the previous recording.
After the results from the second round showed to be very unsatisfactory,
given the students were practising their pronunciation extensively, the author
has decided to trace the root of the problem by giving students a questionnaire.
The questionnaire provides some valuable answers. Except for one student
who does not really think pronunciation is important, the rest of them think
pronunciation is important, with eight of them being strongly in favour of the
opinion. Also, ten students were satisfied with the extent of practise carried out
during English lessons. One student thinks the extent of practise was
somewhere between satisfactory and unsatisfactory. The questionnaire also
demonstrates the discrepancy in students' opinions. On one hand, although
they do not think practising pronunciation at home would take a lot of time, they
do not practise it. Out of eleven students, who filled the questionnaire in, only
three of them read the text several times aloud before the actual recording.
Another three read it aloud, yet only once, and four of them read it only once
silently. One student even admits he or she does not read the text at all before
the recording. Students were asked to fill in the questionnaire with the hope
they would contemplate on their approach and take responsibility in their own
learning.
The third recording shows that the difference in pronunciation skills
between the first and the second group has been blurred. The sub-hypothesis
that students would benefit from the extensive practise carried out during
lessons has been confirmed. Except for two students and two whose
pronunciation stays the same after the third recording as at the beginning, all
- 87 -
the other students improve. Overall, the importance of the mispronunciation of
phonemes in the intelligibility has dropped since the first recording. However,
despite the fact that rhythm has been practised extensively, at the beginning of
each lesson, the importance of correct rhythm in the intelligibility has risen
compared to the first recording. Likewise, suprasegmental features of language
have proved to play a more important role in students' intelligibility, with stress
becoming considerably more significant in the intelligibility as compared to the
results of the first recording. The hypothesis of the importance of stress in the
intelligibility of speakers has therefore been confirmed.
- 88 -
Summary
In the present thesis the author decided to focus on suprasegmental
features of speech, namely stress. The research in teaching stresses and its
impact on students’ intelligibility, as well as overall progress in their
pronunciation competence has been carried out at a Secondary School of Civil
Engineering in Opava.
Twelve students agreed to take part in the project. They were recorded
three times from October 2011 through February 2012. During that time an
extensive attention was paid to teaching pronunciation, stress and rhythm in
particular, during English lessons. The students' performance was subsequently
evaluated by a native speaker.
The thesis is divided into two sections – a theoretical one and a practical
one. The theoretical section discusses what stress is in general. It goes on to
describe the features and functions of stress in English. Stress in Czech cannot
be omitted. The theoretical section aims to explain and illustrate why stress is
one of the most important features in the intelligibility of speech. As the thesis is
concerned with teaching pronunciation, a final chapter of the theoretical part is
dedicated to ways to teach stresses.
The practical section analyses the questionnaires the native speaker
filled in after having listened to the students' recordings. First, it analyses the
progress of individual students. Then, it seeks to trace the common patterns in
students' performance. Overall, the thesis aims to confirm the hypothesis that
the correct use of stresses is an important factor in a speaker's intelligibility.
- 89 -
Resumé
Předkládaná magisterská diplomová práce se zaměřuje na
suprasegmentální jevy jazyka, zejména na přízvuk. Výzkum byl proveden na
Střední průmyslové škole stavební v Opavě a zaměřil se na výuku výslovnosti s
důrazem na přízvuk. Byl sledován dopad na srozumitelnost řeči studentů, stejně
tak jako na celkový pokrok ve výslovnosti studentů.
Výzkumu se zúčastnilo dvanáct studentů. Ti byli v průběhu října 2011 až
února 2012 třikrát nahráváni. Během tohoto období se v hodinách angličtiny
podrobili intenzivnímu tréninku výslovnosti, zejména procvičování přízvuku a
rytmu. Nahrávky studentů posléze ohodnotil rodilý mluvčí.
Práce je rozdělena na dvě části – teoretickou a praktickou. Teoretická
část se snaží definovat přízvuk jako takový. Dále popisuje vlastnosti a funkce
přízvuku v angličtině. Neopomíná také zmínit vlastnosti přízvuku v češtině.
Práce se snaží vysvětlit a ilustrovat, proč je přízvuk jedním z nejdůležitějších
prvků ve srozumitelnosti mluvčího. Vzhledem k tomu, že se práce dotýká i toho,
jak učit přízvuk, je závěrečná kapitola teoretické části věnována možnostem, jak
přízvuk vyučovat.
Praktická část předkládané práce se zabývá analýzou dotazníků, které
vyplnil rodilý mluvčí, poté, co si poslechl nahrávky studentů. Nejprve analyzuje
pokrok jednotlivých studentů a následně se snaží vysledovat společné znaky.
Cílem práce je poté potvrdit hypotézu, že správné použití přízvuku je důležitým
faktorem ve srozumitelnosti mluvčího.
- 90 -
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Macolino, Che (February, 2012). Lucie's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (October, 2011). Lukáš's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (December, 2011). Lukáš's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (February, 2012). Lukáš's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (October, 2011). René's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (December, 2011). René's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (February, 2012). René's questionnaire.
- 95 -
Macolino, Che (October, 2011). Tomáš's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (December, 2011). Tomáš's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (February, 2012). Tomáš's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (October, 2011). Veronika's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (December, 2011). Veronika's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (February, 2012). Veronika's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (October, 2011). Vladimír's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (December, 2011). Vladimír's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (February, 2012). Vladimír's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (October, 2011). Vojtěch's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (December, 2011). Vojtěch's questionnaire.
Macolino, Che (February, 2012). Vojtěch's questionnaire.
- 96 -
René (18 October 2011). “Street Art”. [recorded by Jana Langrová]. Opava,
Czech Republic.
René (December 8, 2011). “Rock'n'Roll”. [recorded by Jana Langrová]. Opava,
Czech Republic.
René (February 15, 2012). “Are There Hidden Truths in Dreams?”. [recorded by
Jana Langrová]. Opava, Czech Republic.
Schleider, Jan (October 18, 2011). “Street Art”. [recorded by Jana Langrová].
Opava, Czech Republic.
Schleider, Jan (December 6, 2011). “Rock'n'Roll”. [recorded by Jana Langrová].
Opava, Czech Republic.
Schleider, Jan (February 14, 2012). “Are There Hidden Truths in Dreams?”.
[recorded by Jana Langrová]. Opava, Czech Republic.
Seberová, Veronika (October 20, 2011). “Street Art”. [recorded by Jana
Langrová]. Opava, Czech Republic.
Seberová, Veronika (December 8, 2011). “Rock'n'Roll”. [recorded by Jana
Langrová]. Opava, Czech Republic.
- 97 -
Seberová, Veronika (February 23, 2012). “Are There Hidden Truths in
Dreams?”. [recorded by Jana Langrová]. Opava, Czech Republic.
Tomáš (October 18, 2011). “Street Art”. [recorded by Jana Langrová]. Opava,
Czech Republic.
Tomáš (December 8, 2011). “Rock'n'Roll”. [recorded by Jana Langrová].
Opava, Czech Republic.
Tomáš (February 15, 2012). “Are There Hidden Truths in Dreams?”. [recorded
by Jana Langrová]. Opava, Czech Republic.
Secondary sources
Fudge, Erik (1984). English Word Stress. London, UK: George Allen & Unwin
Ltd.
Gimson, A. C. (1967). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. London,
UK: Edward Arnold Ltd.
Goës, Alvar Nyqvist (1974). The Stress System of English. Stockholm: K.L.
Beckmans Tryckeri.
- 98 -
Hajkr, Petr (2000). Comparative Analysis of Czech and English Pronunciation.
Pronunciation Mistakes of Czech Speakers. Masaryk University Brno, CZ.
Hill, Leslie A. (1965). Stress and Intonation. Step by Step. London, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Kingdon, Roger (1958). The Groundwork of English Stress. London, UK:
Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd.
Krčmová, Marie (2007). Fonetika. Retrieved from
http://is.muni.cz/elportal/estud/ff/js07/fonetika/materialy/index.html
Nováková, Petra (2007). Stress and Rhythm in English and Czech. Masaryk
University Brno, CZ.
Plavka, Rudolf (2003). Aspects of English Pronunciation. Havlíčkův Brod, CZ:
Fragment.
Roach, Peter (1991). English Phonetics and Phonology (2nd ed.). Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Skaličková, Alena (1974). Srovnávací fonetika angličtiny a češtiny. Praha, CZ:
Academia.
- 99 -
Tibbitts, E. Leonard (1967). English Stress Patterns. Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer
& Sons.
Tomková, Kateřina (2008). Perception of Non-Native Pronunciation of English
by Native Speakers. (Doctoral dissertation). Masaryk University Brno, CZ.
Underhill, Adrian (1994). Sound Foundations. Oxford, UK: Heinemann Ltd.
Wells, J.C (1971). Practical Phonetics. London, UK: Pitman Publishing.
- 100 -
Appendices
Appendix 1
Questionnaire – Participation in the research
Name:
Circle the correct answer:
I strongly agree I agree I disagree I strongly disagree
with participating in the research.
In case I intend on participating, I agree/disagree with using my full name.
In case I disagree with using my name, I choose a nickname:
Date: Signature:
Jméno:
Zakroužkuj hodící se odpověď:
Se svou případnou účastí ve výzkumu:
souhlasím spíše souhlasím spíše nesouhlasím nesouhlasím
V případě, že souhlasím si přeji / nepřeji v práci uvést své celé jméno.
V případě, že si nepřeji uvést své celé jméno, volím přezdívku:
Datum: Podpis:
- 101 -
Appendix 2
Questionnaire template – Evaluation of recordings
Student’s name:
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents?
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
- 102 -
Appendix 3
Reading texts
First reading text
Street Art - New Culture of the Cities
Street Art is a very popular form of art that is spreading quickly all over
the world. You can find it on buildings, sidewalks, street signs and trash cans
from Tokyo to Paris, from Moscow to Cape Town. Street art has become a
global culture and even art museums and galleries are collecting the work of
street artists.
Street art started out very secretly because it is illegal to paint public and
private property without permission. People often have different opinions about
street art. Some think it is a crime and others think it is a very beautiful new
form of culture.
Art experts claim that the movement began in New York in the 1960s.
Young adults sprayed words and other images on walls and trains. This
colourful, energetic style of writing became known as graffiti. Graffiti art showed
that young people wanted to rebel against society. They didn’t want to accept
rules and travelled around cities to create paintings that every one could see. In
many cases they had trouble with the police and the local government.
Street artists do their work for a reason. Some of them do not like artists who
make so much money in galleries and museums. They choose street art
because it is closer to the people. Some artists try to express their political
opinion in their work. They often want to protest against big firms and
corporations. Others like to do things that are forbidden and hope they don’t get
caught.
In today’s world the Internet has a big influence on street art. Artists can
show their pictures to an audience all over the world. Many city residents,
however, say that seeing a picture on the Internet is never as good as seeing it
- 103 -
live. The street art movement lives with the energy and life of a big city. There it
will continue to change and grow.
Adapted from: English-Online (n.d.). Street Art – New Culture of
the Cities. Retrieved from: http://www.english-online.at/art-
architecture/street-art/graffiti-street-artists.htm
Second reading text
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in
the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a
combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music.
Though elements of rock and roll can be heard in country records of the 1930s,
and in blues records from the 1920s, rock and roll did not get its name until the
1950s.
In the earliest rock and roll styles, either the piano or saxophone was
often the lead instrument, but these were generally replaced by guitar. The beat
is essentially a blues rhythm. Classic rock and roll is usually played with one or
two electric guitars, a string bass or an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit.
Rock and roll began achieving wide popularity in the 1960s. The massive
popularity and eventual worldwide view of rock and roll gave it a widespread
social impact.
Far beyond simply a musical style, rock and roll, as seen in movies and
on television, influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes, and language. It went on
to generate various sub-genres that are now more commonly called simply
"rock music" or "rock."
Adapted from: Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia (n.d). Rock and
roll. Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_and_roll
- 104 -
Third reading text
Are There Hidden Truths in Dreams?
Imagine waking up after dreaming about a horrible plane crash. The next
day you plan to make a plane journey that you have planned long before. Will
you get on the plane?
A survey shows that you may not cancel your trip but your dream will
probably influence your thoughts just as if there had been a real plane accident.
The study says that dreams are a window to the mind and they may influence
what we are really doing while we are awake.
The interpretation of dreams is still an unclear area. A team of researchers at
Harvard University are entering a new field of studies: Do dreams influence our
behaviour?
They have conducted studies in different cultures and found out that
dreams contain hidden truths. People from Boston, for example, said that
dreams affected the way they live and work.
Researchers, however, warn that dreams may also lead to trouble as
well. If you dream that your husband or wife is cheating on you, you may be
influenced by this so much that it could cause problems in your relationship or
even provoke an affair.
Adapted from: English-Online (n.d). Are There Hidden Truths in
Dreams? Retrieved from:
http://www.english-online.at/science/dreams/hidden-truths-
unconscious.htm
- 105 -
Appendix 4
Questionnaire template – Pronunciation progress
Please underline the appropriate answer Pronunciation is important for intelligibility
• strongly agree • somewhat agree • somewhat disagree • strongly disagree
Pronunciation is practised enough during our lessons - agree - disagree
I practise pronunciation at home
- daily - once a week - occasionally - never
I do not practise pronunciation because
• I am not interested in it • I do not have time • other
In my opinion, practising would take
• a lot of time • little time • tolerable amount of time
After being given the text that is going to be read
• I do not read • I read it once
• silently • aloud
• I read it several times • silently • aloud
- 106 -
Prosím podtrhněte/zakroužkujte hodící se odpověď.
Výslovnost je důležitá pro porozumění.
• naprosto souhlasím • spíše souhlasím • spíše nesouhlasím • naprosto nesouhlasím
Procvičování výslovnosti se v hodinách věnujeme...
• dostatečně • nedostatečně
Procvičování výslovnosti se sám/sama věnuji doma
• denně • několikrát týdně • jednou týdně • nevěnuji se
Nevěnuji se z důvodu
• nezájmu • nedostatku času • jiné:
Myslím, že procvičování doma by to zabralo
• málo času • hodně času • ani moc, ani málo času
Když den předem dostanu text, který bude nahráván…
• nepřečtu si ho • přečtu ho jednou
o potichu o nahlas
• zkouším ho číst vícekrát o potichu o nahlas
- 107 -
Appendix 5
Pronunciation progress questionnaires
- 108 -
- 109 -
- 110 -
- 111 -
- 112 -
- 113 -
- 114 -
- 115 -
- 116 -
- 117 -
- 118 -
Appendix 6
Evaluated questionnaires, October 2011
Barešová Lucie
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Collection, society, graffiti, create
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 95
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Very good pronunciation in general. Her intonation was good as was clarity and
speed. However sometimes the rhythm and intonation was a little bit
mechanical. I think practise will allow her to relax and therefore flow more
easily. One or two words were incorrectly pronounced. Suggestion is to listen to
English being spoken and keep practising. On the whole: Very good !
- 119 -
David
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
culture, from, all, sidewalk, colourful, opinions .....
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress *
- rhythm*
- loudness
- speed *
- other *
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents?
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
David was intelligible. I understood what he was saying but his overall
pronunciation and control of English was not strong. His awareness of
punctuation was not very good.
- 120 -
Filip
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Very, all, culture, private, 1960s, known, showed, adults, images, energetic,
many, police, firms, caught, grow
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed *
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 85
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Filip tried hard and kept a clear voice. His main problem was with pronunciation
and he struggled often. His rhythm and speed were irregular as was his use of
phonemes. Overall I could understand him but I think he would benefit just
practising reading out loud.
- 121 -
Hoffmannová Kateřina
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Rebel, local
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 98
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Hoffmannova’s reading was excellent, very clear with good intonation, slightly
mispronounced two words but overall very good.
- 122 -
Jakub
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
illegal, others, culture, caught
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 95
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Jakub’s reading was good. He was clear and read at a good speed. He has
quite a strong accent but this did not cause a problem with understanding him.
His pronunciation was a little incorrect on a few words but again this didn’t
cause a real problem.
- 123 -
Kováč Vladimír
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Very, private, writing, rebel, audience, political
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes* 2
- intonation * 1
- stress
- rhythm * 1
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Kovac’s reading was clear but he struggled a little bit with rhythm and
intonation. Possibly he is not that comfortable reading outloud. He
mispronounced a few words but not too drastically and overall he did well.
Practise will help.
- 124 -
Lelek Vojtěch
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Signs, trash, culture, secretly, private, very, 1960s, they‘ re, society
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Lelek mispronounced a few words but was clear throughout. A bit of work
needed with intonation but overall good.
- 125 -
Lukáš
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Very, building, trash, culture, illegal, opinion, energetic, showed, paintings, with,
they’re, show
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress *
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed *
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Lukas was clear but struggled with several words. His pronunciation was a bit
incorrect sometimes. His speed of reading was a little irregular too. Overall
though well done.
- 126 -
René
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Society, “ what are” instead of “that are“
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed *
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 95
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Rene’s reading was very good. His pronunciation was excellent. He read a little
bit fast and the rhythm was a bit irregular a couple of times but overall very
good.
- 127 -
Schleider Jan
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Schleider pronounced his words very well. A few slip ups with the reading but
he corrected himself each time.
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 98
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Schleider read very clearly, had very good pronunciation and intonation. His
reading demonstrated good understanding of the subject and text. He paused
where appropriate and used emphasis to reinforce meaning . Excellent
- 128 -
Seberová Veronika
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Very, Tokyo, private, rebel, society, they’re, caught, life, firm
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Seberova read well but it sounds as though she is still processing the language
as she reads. Her rhythm and intonation is not strong and hesitation is often.
However she is able to carry on and does eventually pronounce most words
correctly. With practise she will speak good English .
- 129 -
Tomáš
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Artists, culture, galleries, illegal, private, about, movement, known, audiences,
caught
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Tomas read fairly well but his intonation and rhythm wasn’t always good. He
mispronounced several words continuously: artists, culture being the main two.
Overall though no problem understanding him. His accent is quite strong.
- 130 -
Appendix 7
Evaluated questionnaires, December 2011
Barešová Lucie
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Early, lead, began, originated
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress*
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Lucie read well and was clear to understand but could improve her intonation,
stress and rhythm. Her pronunciation was clear but a little bit mechanical.
Generally very good though.
- 131 -
David
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Genre, early, replaced, popularity, got ..
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress *
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other: possibly David was nervous reading and as a result he tried to rush
a bit and also hesitated, sometimes in mid word
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 70
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
As mentioned above David struggled with pronunciation and sounded hesitant
and nervous. His reading was mechanical and quite difficult to follow. He started
fairly well but sounded like as he went on his confidence dropped.
- 132 -
Filip
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Evolved, heard, flow, nineteen, written, bass, widespread, achieving
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 70
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Filip read pretty well. His pronunciation was clear as was his rhythm and
intonation. He struggled with only a couple of words but on the whole had a
good flow and apparent understanding.
- 133 -
Hoffmannová Kateřina
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
None but she mispronounced bass
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 85
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Katerina read quickly but very clearly and fluently. Her pronunciation was good
as was rhythm and intonation.
- 134 -
Jakub
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Genre, evolved, replaced, bass, achieving, called
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 82
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Jakub read with clarity and at nice comfortable speed, occasionally his
intonation could be worked on a little. His main fault is pronouncing „ ed „ at the
end of a verb other than that he read well.
- 135 -
Kováč Vladimír
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Genre, bass, spread
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 75
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Vladimir read quite quickly but was clear and pronunciation was good. His
intonation and rhythm was a bit mechanical at times but overall very clear.
- 136 -
Lelek Vojtěch
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Genre, nineteen, bass, subgenre
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 85
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Vojtech was clear and read well he mispronounced a few words but was easy to
understand. He could work on rhythm and intonation.
- 137 -
Lukáš
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Originated, evolved, primarily, during, essentially, with, sharing, widespread,
various
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress *
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 80
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility? Lukas spoke very clearly with generally a good speed. He
mispronounced quite a few words but on the whole was easy to understand.
- 138 -
René
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Hardly any but he said bass wrong
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress *
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 85
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Rene read very well however his rhythm wavered a bit here and there. Overall
very good though.
- 139 -
Schleider Jan
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
bass, subgenre
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Jan's pronunciation was very clear. He has good rhythm and intonation and is
very easy to understand.
- 140 -
Seberová, Veronika
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Early, 30s, bass, various
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 78
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Veronika was fairly clear to start but became harder to understand as she went
on. There was a lot of background noise which interfered with the sound quality.
Overall I think she spoke quite well.
- 141 -
Tomáš
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Genre, originated, evolved, primarily, early, during, bass, achieving, got, simply,
influenced, various
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 78
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Tomas read well but his intonation and rhythm was not always strong. He
struggled a bit with some pronunciation and mispronounced the „ ed „ at the end
of verbs
- 142 -
Appendix 8
Evaluated questionnaires, February 2012
Barešová Lucie
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
interpretation
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation *
- stress *
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Lucie speaks clearly and well. She could improve a little on rhythm and
intonation
- 143 -
David
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Plane, influence, thoughts, interpretation, relationship.
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress *
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed *
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 80
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
David reads carefully but is not that confident yet with his pronunciation. His
speed, rhythm and intonation need to be worked on too. Overall though he was
clear and with practise will speak well in English.
- 144 -
Filip
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Researchers, behaviour, conducted
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation*
- stress
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 90
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Filip speaks well in English. His pronunciation is good however a bit of work is
needed with intonation and rhythm.
- 145 -
Hoffmannová Kateřina
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
researchers
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation
- stress *
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 99
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Katerina speaks very well. Her pronunciation is excellent, as is her intonation
and emphasis. She is clear and speaks at a natural speed.
- 146 -
Jakub
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Influenced, journey, interpretation, learnt
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation *
- stress
- rhythm*
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 95
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Jakub has very good pronunciation and speaks clearly and at a natural speed.
He struggled a couple of times with intonation. Also he slipped up on the „ed“
ending of words. But overall was very good.
- 147 -
Kováč Vladimír
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Interpretation, conducted
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes
- intonation
- stress *
- rhythm *
- loudness
- speed
- other: *
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 96
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Vladimir speaks with good speed, has very good pronunciation and intonation.
One thing to watch for is that sometimes he read as if implying a question rather
than reading a statement. Overall he was very good and easy to understand.
- 148 -
Lelek Vojtěch
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Influenced, conducted, hidden, it.
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation
- stress *
- rhythm*
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 93
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Vojtech speaks well with good pronunciation most of the time but he
mispronounced a few words and made the ED ending mistake a couple of
times.
- 149 -
Lukáš
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Planned, accident, conducted,truth, influenced, even
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation *
- stress *
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 94
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Lukas has good pronunciation, stress, rhythm and intonation. He made
mistakes with „ed“endings a couple of times and mispronounced „truth „ like UP
instead of like ROOF and „even“ like EGG instead of like CHEESE However
overall he speaks very well.
- 150 -
René
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Planned,t houghts, interpretation
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes*
- intonation*
- stress
- rhythm*
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 95
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Rene could practise a little bit on his rhythm and intonation but overall he
speaks clearly and at a good natural speed.
- 151 -
Schleider Jan
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
lead
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes*
- intonation
- stress
- rhythm
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 99
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Jan speaks very well. Pronounces clearly and speaks at a natural speed with
good rhythm.
- 152 -
Seberová, Veronika
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Interpretation, truths, even, influenced
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation*
- stress*
- rhythm*
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 93
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Veronika spoke fairly well but needs work on her rhythm and stress. She made
the same mistake as Lukas with „truth“ and „even“ and the ED endings .
- 153 -
Tomáš
1. Please underline the suitable option.
The student was easy / hard to understand.
2. Which word(s) caused the greatest problems with intelligibility?
Hidden, truth, imagine, even, accident, journey, mind, interpretation, planned,
researches, effect, lead,cause, relationship
3. What do you think the source of the words/speech not being intelligible
enough was? Please underline. You can underline more of these. If you
do, please indicate which one was the most prominent one.
- mispronouncing of phonemes *
- intonation*
- stress*
- rhythm*
- loudness
- speed
- other:
4. How intelligible was the student in per cents? 75
5. Do you have any other comments concerning student’s pronunciation
and intelligibility?
Tomas needs to study the pronunciation of words. He made similar mistakes as
others with „even“and „truth“ and the ED endings but also as mentioned with
many other words . He should practise phonemes, intonation and stress.
