You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Thread starter Flaminius Start date Jun 21, Flaminius hedomodo capita Iaponiae. The letter is quoted as Note 31 to Memoirs of My Life by Edward Gibbon in this electronic version , the note is incorporated in the text body.
I am wondering if this is not an idiosyncracy of the write, and, if it isn't, what it is. If this is due to and old spelling or conjugation pattern, I'd appreciate input as to when it was reformed.
Thank you very much. This form was used in France well into the 18th century, both in spoken and written French. The entries in the Encyclopedie compiled by Diderot and d'Alembert use this and many other spellings that have changed. The case of the spoken "oi" is interesting because it reflected the pronunciation of the court. The "ai" was a variation spoken by the people of Paris. After the Revolution, people wanted to blend in with the people and not be indentified with the nobility for obvious reasons.
There are many books youmight enjoy written about the history of the French language; some even in English.
Thanks, both of you. Let me summarise what I understood. Another question. For some, an accent lets you know which vowel sound is required. As we mentioned before, the core sound associated with these accented letters can also occur with other combinations of letters. Be Nosy with Nasal Sounds In English, we mainly have oral vowels, which means the sound comes from our mouth.
Nasal vowels are so named because the sound and air escape from the nasal passage instead of the mouth. In many cases the mouth is still open, but speakers control the flow of air by blocking it from escaping the mouth. Three of the six vowel sounds not present in English are nasal sounds.
Although it may seem random, there are a few tricks to recognize the method to the madness. This helps give French its melodic flow by avoiding some awkward stops and starts. Often, this means pronouncing consonant sounds that would otherwise be kept silent when the next word begins with a vowel. While there are many exceptions and fine-grained rules to liaison, with lots of listening practice certain combinations will just start to sound right. Try listening to podcasts or a French radio station while you cook or do chores around the house to help train your ear!
When will we get there? On a tout compris. We understood everything. I would like two posters. The X corresponds to the odd ratios less than 1. Again, it can be inferred that it was the tense dimension of the vowel what caused the errors. However, the fact that it was not the most problematic one suggests that if instructors are aware of the difficulty of a sound, they are more likely to tackle the sound in class and to give students the necessary training, which can help to reduce the number of errors.
A limitation researchers faced was that even though it was intended to determine the effect throughout the three years, this was not possible because the list of words used in was different from the list used in and Table 7 shows the levels of difficulty obtained in , and Table 7 Level of difficulty of the vowel sounds in , y Furthermore, as Table 5 displayed, even students in advanced levels of the major can have specific pronunciation problems regarding vowel sounds that have to be addressed in the language classroom.
For this reason, it is imperative for instructors to determine the vowel sounds that are particularly difficult for Spanish speakers and pay careful attention to those sounds; in this way, they can guarantee that students receive enough training on the problematic areas.
Finally, another probable explanation can be the type and the amount of correction students receive. Sometimes more explicit error correction techniques are needed for a student to be aware of his or her pronunciation problems. It is necessary for instructors to make sure that learners not only understand the correction, but also that they produce a correct version of the error.
In the same way, promoting self-correction is also vital for the students to be aware of the areas in which they have to improve; allowing students to monitor their own pronunciation will promote independence and help students to be more accurate. As part of the last year of the study, a validation of the grading instrument was carried out. From words examined, there was agreement in of them between the researchers and the expert, which means that the researchers graded the recordings appropriately.
The results are displayed in Table 8. Table 8 Number and percentage of grades according to agreement between the researchers and an expert. As the table shows, more disagreement was found in the incorrect-correct relation than in the correct-incorrect relation.
That is, there is more disagreement in the words that were graded as incorrect by the researchers and correct by the expert. This is positive because it reveals that there were just few instances in which the researchers perceived a sound as correct when it actually was incorrect.
Thus, this information evidences that the results obtained from the recordings are accurate. Table 9 presents the results obtained from their perception. Possibly, they were considered difficult because they are tense vowels, a characteristic that does not exist in Spanish.
On the other hand, the maximum rate used by students was 3, and it was assigned only to two sounds; the rest of the vowels obtained ratings of 1 and 2 very easy and easy. These results show that instructors are more aware of the difficulty vowels can represent for learners; nevertheless, pupils do not seem to recognize that vowels can be troublesome and that they might be having problems pronouncing some of them.
When participants were asked for the reasons why they considered it was difficult to pronounce the vowel sounds, both teachers and students agreed on the absence of a sound in the native language as the main reason.
Professors also provided other reasons such as lack of spelling-sound correspondence, the influence of the first language, and the last reason was the tense-lax feature. This evidences that even though the tense-lax characteristic was proven to be problematic for Spanish speakers, instructors are not aware of this relevant finding. The same occurred with students; they perceived the tense-lax dimension as the least possible reason only followed by the lack of spelling-sound correspondence.
This is a significant finding because the discrepancy between perception and pronunciation affects directly the teaching decisions instructors make in relation to which sounds should or should not be emphasized or practiced in the classroom. Moreover, it is imperative for learners to be aware of their pronunciation problems so that they can focus on those areas that need to be improved; however, as Table 10 revealed, participants perceived some sounds as difficult when they were, in fact, easy for them.
This can be related to the type of correction students receive; for instance, if the correction only comes from the instructor, students are not developing the ability of self-monitoring and self-correcting. Thus, promoting activities in which pupils analyze their own pronunciation can be highly beneficial to enhance their performance in the language.
Also, it is crucial to vary the type of feedback provided and to offer correction in a more meaningful way, so that learners can actually benefit from it. The analysis of the three generations in the year group A showed that the level of difficulty for each vowel sound was almost the same for each of the three groups of students.
In the cases where the level of difficulty varied among the generations, the difference was only one level, which demonstrates that there was very little discrepancy. Moreover, this data aligned with the results obtained from group B. This input leads to the conclusion that it would be useful for instructors of the major to pay close attention to the most difficult vowel sounds found in this study when planning their lessons and during instruction.
Also, as it was expected, first year students were the ones that made more mistakes pronouncing the vowels. It is evident that beginner learners experience more pronunciation difficulty. It is relevant to mention though that in the case of the second year group, they proved to pronounce three sounds better than third year students did.
This fact may be justified by specific characteristics of the students that led to this performance, which demonstrates that specific groups of students may have specific weaknesses that need to be known and addressed by professors. As it was mentioned previously in the analysis section 4.
For this reason, professors should dedicate more class time to the vowel sounds and to monitor and provide feedback related to this aspect. Furthermore, in the study, the sounds that proved to be the most difficult were mentioned in the literature as the ones that may represent more trouble for Spanish speakers, so in this case the theory and the results found match.
It is evident that it is mostly the difference in lengthening of the English vowel sounds what represents a challenge for Spanish speakers. The differences in length should be highlighted when teaching the different vowel sounds in English.
Moreover, it was confirmed that the researchers graded the recordings correctly and the few errors made did not affect the results of the study. This fact should motivate non-native English teachers to do more research on this topic and be confident about the knowledge they have. Indeed, the previous research consulted did not acknowledge any data about Spanish speakers learning English. This means that there is lack of information on the topic but also a big opportunity to explore more. More studies are needed in order to support or disapprove what has been stated in the theory.
Similarly, the results obtained from the analysis of the recordings showed that the real difficulty of sounds did not match entirely what instructors and learners perceived. Together with the fact that the professors were stricter when grading the difficulty that the sounds represented for the students, it is shown that both should be aware of the real difficulty that vowel sounds represent for learners.
Another crucial aspect is to promote more autonomy in the error correction area to empower students to improve their own pronunciation problems. Another situation that was not expected was the reduction of the group of participants who were followed up during years , and It would have been ideal to have the same amount of students; however, this group was reduced from 23 to 11 students for various reasons.
This allowed researchers to compare only the results obtained in and We want to thank Mag. The insight and expertise that she provided greatly assisted this research. Alzahrani, Dhayfullah Saeed M. Available from ProQuest Central. Boomershine, Amanda. The perception of English vowels by monolingual, bilingual, and heritage speakers of Spanish and English. Selected Proceedings of the 15th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium pp.
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