scholarly journals PRONUNCIATION ERRORS AMONG MALAYSIAN UNDERGRADUATES IN ENGLISH FOR ORAL COMMUNICATION COURSE

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (43) ◽  
pp. 40-48
Author(s):  
Chelster Sherralyn Jeoffrey Pudin ◽  
Nik Zaitun Nik Mohamed ◽  
Wardatul Akmam Din ◽  
Eugenia Ida Edward
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Competence ◽  
First Language ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Oral Proficiency ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Communication Course ◽  
Effective Strategies ◽  
Professional Needs ◽  
Teaching Pronunciation ◽  
Esl Learners

In a country where there is a diverse range of races and cultures, the influence of the first language comes almost naturally when using English as a second language. This influence has created a negative transfer which has affected learners’ communicative competence as well as performance. This study intends to investigate the pronunciation errors among undergraduates in a Malaysian university and explain the mispronunciations by comparing the phonetic system of English and Malay It is hoped that the results of this study will eventually provide some insights to producing effective strategies for teaching pronunciation that can help ESL learners to improve their oral proficiency skills and thus meeting their personal and professional needs.

scholarly journals Developing Communicative Competence in Students of Higher Medical Schools

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Zhura ◽  
J. Rudova
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Cultural Awareness ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Medical Schools ◽  
Professional Needs ◽  
Teaching Goals ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Speech Events

Abstract Communicative competence has been the central point of a great number of English for specific purposes (ESP) studies. However, its relevance to second language acquisition by medical students and attainability are still to be established as the critical evaluation of the present findings may help to create a valuable inventory for practical use in a classroom. The review set out to explore the present-day concept of communicative competence with regard to ESP teaching and ways of its development in students of medical universities. It analyzed the structure of the concept of communicative competence generally viewed as comprising both linguistic and extralinguistic constituents. Special emphasis was placed on the aspect of enhancing competitive competence through students’ involvement in oral communication. One of the most effective ways of developing communication skills in ESP classes in medical schools is exposure to authentic communication using Internet facilities. The videos should be thematically adjusted to the students’ professional needs and correlate with their level of linguistic and professional expertise. This approach helps to accomplish a number of teaching goals such as providing students with the information about the framework of speech events iterative in medical and academic spheres, communication patterns used in them, and raising their professional and socio-cultural awareness. It also aims to develop their ability to perform speech activities within a wide range of professional and academic contexts. The review made it possible to identify efficient reproductive and productive teaching methods to be employed.

scholarly journals Beyond the Horizon: Visitor Meaning-Making and the Vatican Frescoes

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Brodie
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
First Language ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Esl Learners ◽  
Outcomes Based Education

The re-birth of South Africa in 1994 has brought the implementation of effective educational policies. Simultaneously, the Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) approach has been introduced to advance teaching and learning of the Learning areas in schools in South Africa. This article focuses on the learning of English as a Second Language (ESL) in Grade eight. The focus is furthermore on schools from the Black township areas, called previously disadvantaged schools. The introduction of OBE in South Africa heralds an era of meaningful teaching. The use of OBE strives to root out the last vestiges of Apartheid education. With an OBE approach, teaching and learning activities have the aim of empowering learners to succeed in the real life after leaving school. One of the main aims of using a language, for example English, is to develop communicative competence. Communicative competence is the ability to linguistically apply the language correctly in authentic situations. English though is the first language of only 9% of South African citizens (Van der Merwe & Van Niekerk, 1994). The qualitative research method was employed for this study, using semi-structured interviews and observations as research tools. The research study on ESL teaching and learning for Grade eight classes has shown that deficiencies and ineffectiveness occur in most of the classrooms. The findings confirm that Grade eight ESL learners experience problems with ESL due to insufficient use of advanced strategies for teaching and learning by the educators.

scholarly journals Why Is English Pronunciation Ignored by EFL Teachers in Their Classes?

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abbas Pourhosein Gilakjani ◽  
Narjes Banou Sabouri
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Educational Facilities ◽  
Pronunciation Instruction ◽  
Successful Communication ◽  
English Pronunciation ◽  
Teaching Programs ◽  
Teaching Pronunciation ◽  
Better Than

<p>Understandable pronunciation is an important part of communicative competence. Individuals who have acceptable pronunciation can easily improve their language skills better than those who have weak pronunciation. Thus, English pronunciation is very significant for successful communication. Despite the fact that English pronunciation is very important for oral communication and communicative competence, it is sometimes neglected in many language teaching programs. This study examined Iranian teachers’ views toward English pronunciation instruction. A quantitative method was used to gather data by an instrument. The researchers used a questionnaire as the instrument of this study. 100 teachers voluntarily participated in this study. Data were collected and analyzed. The findings of this paper indicated that lack of time, motivation, resources, materials, and educational facilities like computer technologies prevented teachers from teaching pronunciation and if teachers want to include pronunciation into their classes, they should be equipped with these factors that can increase their success in teaching English pronunciation.</p>

CONSTRAINTS ON “NOTICING THE GAP”

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenefer Philp
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Dyadic Interaction ◽  
Attentional Resources ◽  
Immediate Recall ◽  
Adult Esl ◽  
Esl Learners

Interaction has been argued to promote noticing of L2 form in a context crucial to learning—when there is a mismatch between the input and the learner's interlanguage (IL) grammar (Gass & Varonis, 1994; Long, 1996; Pica, 1994). This paper investigates the extent to which learners may notice native speakers' reformulations of their IL grammar in the context of dyadic interaction. Thirty-three adult ESL learners worked on oral communication tasks in NS-NNS pairs. During each of the five sessions of dyadic task-based interaction, learners received recasts of their nontargetlike question forms. Accurate immediate recall of recasts was taken as evidence of noticing of recasts by learners. Results indicate that learners noticed over 60–70% of recasts. However, accurate recall was constrained by the level of the learner and by the length and number of changes in the recast. The effect of these variables on noticing is discussed in terms of processing biases. It is suggested that attentional resources and processing biases of the learner may modulate the extent to which learners “notice the gap” between their nontargetlike utterances and recasts.

scholarly journals Phonological Processes in ESL Five-Year-Olds

1984 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Piper
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
First Language ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Sound System ◽  
Phonological Processes ◽  
Structure Changes ◽  
Speech Data ◽  
Esl Learners

This paper reports the results of a study investigating the acquisition of the sound system by fifteen ESL five-year-olds. Segmental consonant errors drawn from speech data collected over ten months were categorized according to eight phonological processes in three categories, assimilation. substitution, and syllable structure changes. Eighty-six percent of the errors corresponded to those identified by Ingram (1979) and others as universal in first language acquisition. The author advises caution in the interpretation of this result, however, since there were certain differences in the particular errors made by the ESL learners within each category as well as processes considered universal among first language learners which were not found among the ESL learners.

scholarly journals The overgeneration of be + verb constructions in the writing of L1-Malay ESL learners in Malaysia

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Abdul Aziz Roslina ◽  
Zuraidah Mohd Don
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
Developmental Aspect ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Transitive Verbs ◽  
The University ◽  
Esl Learners ◽  
Strong Verbs

This study investigates a syntactic problem in the writing of ESL learners whose first language is Bahasa Melayu or Malay. It focuses specifically on is, are, was, and were overgenerated with inflected and uninflected lexical verbs to form two primary constructions, namely be + V and be + Ved (or Ven in the case of strong verbs). This study aims to examine the patterns of be overgeneration constructions produced by the learners and determine if these are the outcome of tense and agreement marking, as postulated by Ionin and Wexler (2001, 2002). The data for the study were obtained from the Malaysian Corpus of Learner English (MACLE), a learner corpus developed by the University of Malaya. The findings reveal that uninflected verbs occur more frequently than inflected verbs in the position after be, which translates into higher occurrences of the be + bare V construction in comparison to the be + Ved construction. Both constructions are also found to occur more frequently with transitive verbs. The findings suggest that (i) the overgeneration of be + bare V is the result of agreement marking, while (ii) be + Ved is the outcome of assigning the tense feature. These findings suggest that the overgeneration of be constructions produced by L1-Malay ESL learners could be the product of a developmental aspect of language acquisition. This traces back to the system underlying the patterns of overgeneration, which is clearly made up of non-random constructions governed by very specific interlanguage grammar.

scholarly journals Developing intercultural competence in an academic foreign language classroom

2018 ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Monika Kusiak-Pisowacka
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Intercultural Competence ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Intercultural Communicative Competence ◽  
Communication Course ◽  
Language Classroom ◽  
Students First ◽  
Interesting Area

This paper focuses on the issue of developing intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in a higher education context, with a special focus put on teaching advanced foreign language (FL) students. First, the concept of ICC is discussed on the basis of Byram’s (1997) theory, which is still considered the most comprehensive model for describing the principles of developing and assessing intercultural competence in foreign language teaching. Next, a short overview of studies related to teaching ICC conducted by Polish researchers is presented. This is followed by a description of an Intercultural Communication course designed for university students and conducted by the author of the paper. In this report, the theoretical principles, the main aims of the course along with the techniques applied in teaching and evaluating students are discussed. It is hoped that the paper will be a useful contribution to discussions concerning developing ICC and will stimulate further research in this interesting area of education.

scholarly journals The use of discourse markers but and so by native English speakers and Chinese speakers of English

Pragmatics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Binmei Liu
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Oral Proficiency ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Oral Discourse ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Native Speakers Of English

Abstract Previous studies have found that but and so occur frequently in native and non-native English speakers’ speech and that they are easy to acquire by non-native English speakers. The current study compared ideational and pragmatic functions of but and so by native and non-native speakers of English. Data for the study were gathered using individual sociolinguistic interviews with five native English speakers and ten L1 Chinese speakers. The results suggest that even though the Chinese speakers of English acquired the ideational functions of but and so as well as the native English speakers, they underused the pragmatic functions of them. The findings indicate that there is still a gap between native and non-native English speakers in communicative competence in the use of but and so. The present study also suggests that speakers’ L1 (Mandarin Chinese) and overall oral proficiency in oral discourse affect their use of but and so.

The Role of Translation in Language Teaching

2015 ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
Anna Maria D'Amore
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Student Performance ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
First Language ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
English Reading

With the development of approaches and methods in Modern Language teaching that favoured oral communication skills and advocated more “natural” methods of second/foreign language acquisition, methodology calling for translation in the classroom was shunned. Nonetheless, translation used as a resource designed to assist the student in improving his or her knowledge of the foreign language through reading comprehension exercises, contrastive analysis, and reflection on written texts continues to be practiced. By examining student performance in problem-solving tasks at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, this chapter aims to demonstrate the validity of “pedagogical translation” in ELT in Mexico, particularly at undergraduate level where it is an integral part of English reading courses in Humanities study programmes, not as an end in itself, but as a means to perfecting reading skills in a foreign language and furthermore as an aid for consolidating writing and communication skills in the student's first language.

scholarly journals Variability of ESL Learners' Acquisition of Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency: What Can We Learn From Achievement Measures?

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hetty Roessingh ◽  
Pat Kover
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Academic Language Proficiency ◽  
Achievement Measures ◽  
First Language Proficiency ◽  
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency ◽  
Esl Learners

With the revamping of the Canada Immigration Act in 1985, the demographic profile of new arrivals to Canada took a marked shift to place a priority on better educated, business-class immigrants. Most of these immigrants are from the Pacific Rim, and they have high expectations for the academic achievement of their children in the Canadian school system. The purpose of this study was to look at age on arrival and first-language proficiency of these children, as these factors interact with instructed ESL support on achievement measures in grade 12. Analysis of the data reveals that although all learners benefit from structured ESL support, it is the younger-arriving ESL learners who have the most to gain, even after many years of little or no support. We note that all ESL learners, regardless of age on arrival, struggle to acquire the cultural and metaphoric competence that is beyond the linguistic threshold required for success, but nevertheless central to successful engagement in a literature-based program of studies.

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