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3 Research Methods 8
3.1 Experiment 8
3.1.1 Material 9
3.1.2 Participants 9
3.1.3 Procedure 9
3.1.4 Data 9
3.1.5 Result 9
3.1.6. Data Analysis 11
3.2 Observation 13
4 Conclusion 15
4.1 Major Findings 15
4.2 Implications for English Teaching 15
4.3 Limitations 16
4.4 Further Research 17
References 18
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
The speech intelligibility is the precondition for successful communication, and plays a very significant role in our daily communication no matter in inter-linguistic communication or intra-linguistic communication. In verbal communication, intelligibility is a measure of how comprehensible speech is in given conditions. Intelligibility is affected by the quality of the speech signal, the type and level of background noise, reverberation, the properties of the communication system, and so on. The concept of speech intelligibility is relevant to several fields, including phonetics, human factors, acoustical engineering and audiometry. Here limits are placed on the English speech at issue: English speech in this thesis refers to teachers’ English speech in class, like instructions, background introduction, extra-curricular extension and so on. And the English speech intelligibility as well refers to students’ understanding of teachers’ English speech.
A variety of factors that may contribute to speech intelligibility have been studied by scholars who pay attention to the importance of speech intelligibility. These factors include Chinese students’ mentality in English listening activities (e.g., Zhu & Jin, 2005), discoursal thinking patterns of Chinese students (e.g., Wang & Li, 2005), rate of speech (e.g., Derwing & Munro, 2001), whether the speech is native-accented or foreign-accented (e.g., Bent & Bradlow 2003 ; Bent et al., 2000), word frequency (e.g., Bradlow & Pisoni, 1999), neighborhood density (e.g., Bradlow & Pisoni, 1999; Imai, Walley, & Flege, 2005), visual stimulus effect ( Koppen and Spence 2007 ; Sinnett et al., 2007 ; Sinnett et al., 2008), and the availability of contextual constraints (e.g., Mayo et al., 1997).The language backgrounds of speakers and listeners have also been shown to be important factors in determining the intelligibility of speech (e.g., Bent & Bradlow, 2003; Munro, 1998; van Wijngaarden, 2001).
The research can be specified into the factors that influence the English speech intelligibility in English class for junior middle school students in China. As for classroom teaching, whether for teachers or students, the good English speech intelligibility is particularly essential, which will definitely determines smooth implementation of class activities and students’ understanding of language knowledge and improves the teaching efficiency. In addition, it helps teachers to make a targeted adjustment of their classroom language. The author pides all factors into two main parts: linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. For the former one, China English, one kind of English that conforms to Chinese thinking mode and is grammatically-correct but not so native, is one of the considered factors as students’ thinking pattern will influence their preference for some words or sentence organization. Teacher talk, some teachers’ language expressions, classroom behaviors and so on, is another factor that enjoys great significance as well. For the latter, physical environment and multi-media aids are also included. Not all related factors comprehensively discussed and analyzed, the author will focus on linguistic factors especially on TT and CE in this thesis because it is the English language that students learn in class. All these motivate the author to make a further study of the topic.