Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

The Impact of Applied Linguistics: Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of BAAL
University of the West of England
Findings
The rhythm metrics scores of L2 English utterances produced by the L1
Spanish learners are shown in Figure 12.2.
The graph shows that the scores of V% decrease and the scores of Varco-C
and nPVI-C increase, which reflect an overall progression across levels. In
other words, as learners progress up the levels, they are better able to
produce the various types of consonant clusters typical of English speech
without vowel insertion or consonant deletion; therefore, the relative
vocalic percentage in their speech decreases and the variability in the
durations of consonantal intervals increases.
Figure 12.2: Rhythm metrics scores of Spanish L1 learners
However, Varco-V doesn’t follow the expected rising trend and drops
down at higher levels. The initial findings about how the Spanish learners
mark the accented syllables might explain why the scores of vocalic
variability (Varco-V) do not show progression at higher levels.
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