19 International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics ...

G E N E R A L S E S S I O N
Teaching English to Greek young learners of English:
a comparative study on form-focused instruction in Primary School
Danae Tsapikidou
Cambridge University
dt321@cam.ac.uk
This study is a quasi-experiment about the comparative benefits of teaching grammar to young Greek
EFL learners aged 10-11 in a contextualized linguistic environment using either an explicit, structural,
rule-based approach or a communicative, implicit, task-based approach to grammar instruction. More
specifically, this study investigated the proficiency gains of learners who performed different
communicative tasks with an implicit grammar focus – on the English Simple Past tense- compared
with the gains achieved by learners who were given traditional grammar tasks in the same linguistic
context – the children’s film and storybook Curious George. The combination of the two approaches
was investigated for potential additional benefits. The class year was investigated in relation to the
outcomes of an implicit versus an explicit approach to grammar teaching. Using a pre-post test design,
it was showed that through targeting specific structures in contextually and pragmatically familiar
language, there are equally favourable learning gains from the structural and task-based approach to
grammar instruction and that a combination of the two approaches produces the best results. The
class year did not correlate with learning gains of either the implicit or explicit approach to grammar
teaching, whereas grammatical scaffolding provided in communicative task work influenced accuracy
in oral production.
Can pronunciation be taught? Teaching English speech rhythm to Greek students.
Eleni Tsiartsioni
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
eltsiart@enl.auth.gr
According to Couper (2006), there has been surprisingly little exploration of the effectiveness of
pronunciation teaching by researchers and as a result teachers have had little guidance on how to
teach pronunciation or if they should teach it at all. This study attempts to address the issue of
whether foreign language pronunciation can be successfully taught, by investigating the effectiveness
of teaching features of the English speech rhythm to Greek students of 10, 13 and 16 years old.
Modern Greek has been traditionally described as a language with syllable-timed rhythm
(Mackridge <strong>19</strong>85), however, according to Dauer (<strong>19</strong>83), Greek is located somewhere between
prototypical stress- and prototypical syllable-timed languages displaying characteristics of both.
English, on the other hand, is a prototypical example of stress-timed languages, due to its syllable
structure, vowel reduction and stress placement. An interesting, therefore, question is whether and to
what extent a suprasegmental feature, such as speech rhythm, can be acquired by speakers whose
native language belongs to a different rhythmic class.
In this study 36 Greek students of English of three age groups (12 students of 10 years old/ 4 th year
of Primary School, 12 students of 13 years old/ 1 st year of Junior High School and 12 students of 16
years old/ 1 st year of Senior High School) were recorded reading an English text. Recordings were
made twice, before and after the teaching intervention which consisted of 50 pronunciation lessons
embedded in the regular English language lessons at the public school. 25 of these lessons were
devoted to teaching features of the English speech rhythm, i.e. strong and weak forms, vowel
reduction and the production of schwa. The teaching approach adopted was that proposed by Celce
Murcia, Brintοn and Goodwin (<strong>19</strong>96), who suggest five stages of pronunciation teaching moving from
controlled to free activities. A control group of 36 students (12 of each age group), who received no
particular pronunciation training and followed the regular school programme, was also recorded.
Additionally, data from native Greek and native English children were obtained on their L1. The
recordings were analysed acoustically with the use of waveforms and digital spectrograms and
subsequently a Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) was computed. Proposed by Grabe and Low (2002),
the PVI is a metric which examines a language’s speech rhythm by computing the vocalic and
intervocalic variability index in a long stretch of speech.
The study aims at answering the following questions:
1. Is pronunciation teaching effective in a foreign language environment?
<strong>19</strong> th ISTAL 57