Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 36, 24 June 2024
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An Analysis of the Effect of Functional Load on ESL Learners' Perception of Vowel Contrasts
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Abstract
Functional load (FL), which ranks segmental contrasts based on their communicative value in pronunciation, is essential to the development of pronunciation instruction in that it indicates the priority of certain segmental contrasts that may seriously affect the intelligibility and comprehensibility of spoken language for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Despite the widespread use of FL in pronunciation pedagogy for ESL learners, there is little evidence on whether FL affects ESL learners’ perception of vowel contrasts. In this paper, 20 ESL learners from two Chinese universities are selected to participate in two tasks to observe their performance in discriminating vowel contrasts with different FLs in listening and word pronunciation. The effects of functional load on ESL learners’ perception of vowel contrasts are investigated in terms of both input and output dimensions. The overall findings indicate that high FL vowel contrasts are more likely to be captured in listening and more consciously distinguished in pronunciation, a piece of evidence proving the necessity of applying FL principle to English pronunciation teaching.
Keywords
Functional Load, pronunciation teaching, vowel contrasts, second language learning, segmental features
References
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Art, Design and Social Sciences
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-451-4
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-452-1
- Published Date
- 24 June 2024
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/36/20240019
- Copyright
- 24 June 2024
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited