Synchronous-Voice Computer-Mediated Communication: Effects on Pronunciation

Maria Camino Bueno Alastuey
Public University of Navarre
Abstract:
Communicative competence is the ultimate goal of most learners of a second language and intelligible pronunciation a fundamental part of it. Unfortunately, learners often lack the opportunity to explore how intelligible their speech is for different audiences. Our research investigates whether synchronous-voice computer-mediated communication could be an adequate tool both to promote more authentic interactions and to test the intelligibility of students´ pronunciation with different audiences. We also study whether the kind of dyad (NNS sharing L1, NNS different L1, and NS) affects improvement in pronunciation and amount of phonetically modified output as a result of interactions and investigate whether teachers' considerations of the seriousness of phonetic errors are confirmed by interlocutors' incomprehension.
KEYWORDS
Oral Synchronous Computer-mediated Communication, Pronunciation, Communication Breakdowns, Intelligibility
INTRODUCTION
Communicative competence is the ultimate goal of most second language learners in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. However, lack of individualized practice, interaction, and instant feedback usually results in insufficient oral skills and poor pronunciation. Oral interaction is generally teacher-centered and, when individualized (in pairs), takes place between students sharing the same L1, and thus communication becomes inauthentic.1 Furthermore, same-L1 NNSs have been reported to notice fewer errors than different-L1 NNSs (Varonis & Gass, 1985)--especially phonetic errors (Long & Porter, 1985)--and to use their L1 to solve communication breakdowns (Smith, 2005). Therefore, they may not provide enough negotiation-of-meaning moves (Long, 1996) so as to produce modified output (Swain, 2005), a process which has been proved to contribute notably to L2 acquisition (Mackey, 1999).
Our research explores pronunciation improvement using synchronous voice computer-mediated communication (SVCMC). Our focus on pronunciation is due to four factors. First, pronunciation is an underexplored area (Derwing & Munro, 2005) and is many times neglected in EFL contexts (Breitkreutz, Derwing, & Rossiter, 2001; Neri, Cucchiarini, & Strik, 2006). Second, research on the effect of interaction using SVCMC with a focus on pronunciation improvement is nonexistent at the moment to the best of our knowledge. Third, a minimum level of intelligibility is necessary for communicative competence (Celce-Murcia, 1987). Finally, students' intelligibility should be tested with different kinds of partners only available through SVCMC in various EFL contexts.
SVCMC was used because it was considered as the best tool to provide individualized oral and pronunciation practice in open-ended two-way information-exchange tasks2 with immediate feedback on intelligibility and pronunciation errors caused by phonetic breakdowns in communication and the modified phonetic output they may prompt. It also widened the range of interlocutors available to include NNSs with different L1s and NSs. Moreover, since the interactions were recorded, students would refrain from using their L1 with NNSs with the same L1; negotiation-of-meaning moves would increase and hopefully produce more modified output. Finally, there is a lack of research on students' linguistic achievement when using SVCMC, and this study should contribute to clarifying its usefulness for SLA in EFL contexts.
This project seeks to explore the capabilities of SVCMC for the development of pronunciation depending on the kind of dyad as it regards pronunciation improvement, number of phonetic errors, number of phonetic breakdowns, and amount of phonetically modified output. To our knowledge, there is no research comparing the effect different kinds of dyad have on pronunciation developments or exploring the linguistic outcomes of students using SVCMC. With increasing numbers of L2 learners using SVCMC because of the possibilities it offers for L2 learning, an exploration of linguistic outcomes may be critical in the SLA field.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Interaction Hypothesis
Interaction is fundamental in language learning; research and practice suggest that successful language learning can only take place when four conditions are present: (a) high-quality input, (b) ample opportunities for practice, (c) high-quality feedback, and (d) individualized content (Zhao, 2005). Authentic interactions with authentic audiences are generally missing in EFL learning contexts, and the urgency in solving this problem is self-evident (Wang, 2004).
In any kind of interaction, there might be breakdowns in communication when the output is incomprehensible for a variety of reasons. Communication breakdowns are even more common when NNSs engage in interaction. The interaction hypothesis maintains that those breakdowns direct the attention of learners to the part of language responsible for the breakdown and result in repair moves related to negotiation of meaning and negative feedback, through which speakers might become aware of the inaccuracy of their speech (Long, 1996; Schmidt, 2001; Gass, 2003). As a result, if learners recognize the different types of negative feedback provided by interlocutors, they may try self-correction in the form of modified output (Swain, 2005; Long, 1996), which has been postulated to contribute notably to second language acquisition (Mackey, 1999).
Output is a necessary condition because it allows learners to compare their own production with the correct input. In pronunciation, this is the first step leading to an understanding of one's own pronunciation deviations (Neri et al., 2006).
Although the benefits of interaction have been researched for morphosyntactic and lexical improvement (Smith, 2004; Pellettieri, 2000; Foster & Ohta, 2005), only Sicola (2009) has researched "specific evidence of such phonological processing during interaction" (p. 18). However, her research has not dealt with pronunciation improvement, which remains an area to be explored. Our paper tries to fill that gap by studying the effect of interaction in pronunciation improvement to lend support "to the potential applicability of interactionist approaches to investigating L2 pronunciation developments" (Sicola, 2009, p. 17).
Pronunciation and Intelligibility
Pronunciation is essential to communicate orally as there is "a threshold level of pronunciation in English such that if a given non-native speaker's pronunciation falls below this level, he or she will not be able to communicate orally no matter how good his or her control of English grammar and vocabulary might be" (Celce-Murcia, 1987, p. 5). Research has further illustrated that phonetic errors account for an important number of communication breakdowns and repair moves in interactions between both NSs-NNSs (Jepson, 2005) and NNSs-NNSs (Fernández-García & Martínez-Arbelaiz, 2003; Jenkins, 2000).
Nevertheless, pronunciation has been a marginalized area in SLA (Derwing & Munro, 2005), and its importance has always been determined by ideology and intuitions rather than research (Levis, 2005). Although instruction has been shown as effective in improving both perceptive and productive pronunciation skills (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998; Cenoz & García Lecumberri, 1999; Bongaerts, 1999), the time devoted to meaningful pronunciation practice has remained clearly insufficient (Neri et al., 2006). As a solution, authentic tasks involving peers and groups for interaction and feedback so that learners could notice and repair their own and others´ phonetic errors have been proposed (Morley, 1991; Fraser, 1999). SVCMC can aid in the provision of authentic tasks, intensive interaction, and feedback on individual problems by engaging students in interaction with more able peers and thus may contribute to phonetic improvement.
Another problem regarding pronunciation instruction is its focus. Research on attainment reports that native-like pronunciation after early childhood is actually extremely infrequent (Flege, Munro, & Mackay, 1995; Scovel, 2000). A more realistic aim and the actual trend in pronunciation teaching in EFL contexts is intelligibility (Wells, 2005; Neri et al., 2006).
What contributes more to intelligibility has also been questioned. Some authors claim that suprasegmentals have a negative impact on listeners (Hahn as cited in Munro & Derwing, 2006). However, Levis (2005) points out that a segmental focus makes a more important contribution to intelligibility. Jenkins (2002), analyzing interactions between NNSs in the classroom, also concluded that segmentals produced most of the communication breakdowns.
Furthermore, research suggests that learners´ capacity to modify their speech to become intelligible to interlocutors from a wide range of L1 backgrounds might be enough for successful interactions (Jenkins, 2000). However, most research on intelligibility issues has focused on native speakers´ perceptions (Tajima, Port, & Dalby, 1997; Munro & Derwing, 1995; Derwing & Munro, 2005) while "research undertaken in NNS-NNS interaction ... is still in its infancy" (Pickering, 2006, p. 220).
A further problem is that since familiarity with an accent improves comprehension (Gass & Varonis, 1984), teachers and researchers may not be the best judges of their own students' comprehensibility or intelligibility (Munro & Derwing, 2006). In addition, few studies have analyzed speech from classroom interactions, and therefore the need for empirical, replicable studies about intelligibility in classroom settings with different kinds of audiences is clear.
Our study tries to fill two gaps in research. First, it will seek to clarify whether SVCMC is an effective tool for pronunciation development due to the increased interaction and its benefits in terms of noticing and modified output--through negotiation of meaning--with different kinds of partners. Second, it will explore how many phonetic breakdowns, caused by errors perceived as serious by the teacher (who was also the researcher), take place in real interactions as a means of testing whether teachers´ judgments of serious phonetic errors are representative of the judgments of different kinds of interlocutors.
Synchronous Voice Computer-Mediated Communication
Among the many benefits of CMC are the opportunities it offers for individualized instruction, for exposure to different accents, and for interactions with different L1 learners and native speakers of the language, thus the opportunity to use the language to communicate authentically. SVCMC offers the potential to develop students´ speaking skills3 and to test whether their communicative competence and intelligibility4 is sufficient to interact successfully. Even though text chat has been compared to face-to-face-interaction and seems to share some of its benefits (Beauvois, 1997; Payne & Ross, 2005), synchronous voice exchanges should resemble even more closely face-to-face communication, especially regarding repair moves, turn adjacency conventions, and discourse coherence structures (Jepson, 2005).
Research on SVCMC has generally compared text and voice chat and has concluded that voice chat technology makes tasks more demanding for learners (Sauro, 2001), produces significant gains in oral proficiency (Yang & Chang, 2008; Satar & Özdener, 2008), and offers an environment in which learners are more willing to negotiate for meaning, use a significantly higher number of repair moves (especially pronunciation-related repair moves), and repair their speech more often based on their interlocutor's hints (Jepson, 2005). Pronunciation has been reported as producing a significantly higher number of repairs (Jepson, 2005) and being the cause of anxiety when students realized their proficiency level was lower than they had thought (Satar & Özdener, 2008).
Our research continues the investigation of the effect that SVCMC has on oral proficiency concentrating on pronunciation gains, a promising area as Jepson (2005) reported that more than half of the self-repetition and explicit correction repair moves and a third of the clarification requests and confirmation checks in his data were directed at pronunciation repair. He concluded that "because of the inherent absence of non-verbal communication and the focus that current voice chat technology places on pronunciation, voice chat may be an optimal environment for pronunciation work"
CONCLUSION
From our data, we can conclude that SVCMC is beneficial for pronunciation because it provides enough breakdowns in communication through which students can notice the gaps in their current phonetic interlanguage and thus produce phonetically modified output.
This study has shown that the kind of dyad affects pronunciation improvement and that NNS-NNS different-L1 dyads appear as the most beneficial for pronunciation development--both in achievement and instances of modified output--followed by NNS-NS dyads and NNS-NNS same-L1 dyads. Whether NNS-NNS different-L1 dyads also contribute the most to other kinds of modified output such as lexical or morphosyntactic output in SVCMC interaction is a promising area for future research.
This study also contributes to demystifying the native speaker fallacy which posits NSs as the best interlocutors and models for language learning. At least for pronunciation improvement this does not seem to be case; in the project described here, higher improvement in pronunciation occurred in NNS-NNS different-L1 and NNS-NNS same-L1 dyads, and both may have also contributed to reducing anxiety levels and providing more opportunities for self-repair.
Further, both NNS-NNS different-L1 dyads and NNS-NS dyads led to equally high numbers of phonetically modified output, higher than that of NNS-NNS same-L1 dyads. As a result, teachers should be encouraged to promote interaction with NNS-NNS different-L1 dyads using SVCMC since they have been shown as the most beneficial in pronunciation achievement, phonetic breakdowns in communication, and phonetically modified output, much more so than the typical arrangement in EFL classrooms with NNS-NNS same-L1 communication.



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