Jason Pipe
About
Jason Pipe is from England. An experienced university lecturer from the UK and qualified high school teacher, Jason currently a Special Professor at Tokyo Keizai University where he teaches EAP, business, marketing and preparatory studies for students studying and working abroad. His research interests include sociolinguistics, task-based learning, metacognitive learning, motivation and phonology. As a PhD. candidate at UNICAF University, Jason’s present research focuses on development of teaching pronunciation and the measurement and development of speech fluency in language learning, and its relationship with other aspects of linguistic performance including pausing, repair and phonological language production at the suprasegmental level.Sessions
Encouraging Innate Speech Production to Improve Fluency and Pronunciation more
Sun, May 1, 10:00-Tue, May 31, 23:55 Asia/Seoul
As part of on an ongoing project to attain greater proficiency in English as a second language, this paper provides quantitative analyses to show that first-year students at a Japanese university (n=11) can improve their fluency and, to a certain extent, pronunciation over the academic year. Through the practice and testing stages of Timed-Pair-Practice (TPP), students were able to progress in speech production in terms of speed, pausing and repair. However, despite the inclusion of prosodic training, pronunciation proved more elusive due to the wide range of prosodic features. Concentrating on pitch, duration, intensity and rhythm, a modest acoustic alteration was observed with a reduction in duration of function words and that of the unstressed syllable of content word, and a greater range in the pitch. It can be concluded that TPP was an effective tool but more focused prosodic training is required to alter Japanese mora-timing.