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Sociophonetic study of dysfluent behaviour in native English speakers
Longauerová, Renáta ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Gráf, Tomáš (referee)
The present thesis focuses on the study of the influence of two social factors, age and gender, on the frequency and variation of seven different types of dysfluencies (filled pauses, silent pauses, repairs, repetitions, false starts, vowel and consonant lengthening) in the spontaneous speech of native English speakers from England. The speakers were divided into four different social groups according to their age and gender. The first part of the present thesis provides a general characterization of the relevant types of dysfluencies, together with the main issues concerning the production of speech dysfluencies. The empirical part presents the analyses of the recordings of 32 native English speakers from England. The overall results considering general influence of age and gender show that the only significant difference is between age groups, with older speakers producing more dysfluencies than younger speakers. Gender, on the other hand, does not make the difference significant, except for vowel lengthenings that were produced significantly more by female speakers than male speakers, and repetitions, which is the only type of dysfluency where the difference is significant and influenced by both age and gender, with older male speakers producing significantly more dysfluencies than any other...
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Examining lexical complexity in the written production of L2 proficient learners of English
Sotona, Martin ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
The thesis analyses lexical complexity in the written production of L2 proficient learners of English (the highest C2 level). Additionally, it compares L2 lexical complexity with L1 lexical complexity of English native speakers. This lexical complexity is investigated in two key parameters: lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. A quantitative analysis is made by the means of single indicators and is followed by an analysis where composite indicators VOCD-D and MTLD are employed to measure lexical diversity. Lexical sophistication is explored through the English Vocabulary Profile tool (EVP), which categorises words in a text according to predefined frequency word lists (A1-C2 types). The main hypothesis presumed that the lexical complexity of L2 English speakers is inferior to L1 English speakers, despite the fact that their L2 English language competence is at the highest level possible (C2 level), often compared to "native-speaker competence". It was expected that the results in respective groups (L2 and L1 speakers) would be similar. Another working hypothesis is that low- frequency words at the C2 level will be smaller for L2 English speakers than that for L1 English speakers. The data comprises 20 comparable texts of L2 proficient English speakers in the dimension of their length (the...
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The Washback Effect of the Czech 'Maturita' Exam: the Students' Perspective
Rösslerová, Eva ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to ascertain whether and to what extent English language lessons at Czech secondary schools are affected by the so-called washback effect related to the final leaving examination ("maturita"), and to attempt to define how this potential negative impact may be minimized. The washback effect phenomenon occurs when a (language) course is concluded by a final examination, and describes how such an examination influences the actual curriculum, the instruction as such, and all the participants. Applied linguistics offers a number of both theoretical and empirical studies conducted worldwide which focus on the particular aspects of the washback effect occurring during language examinations. This thesis strives to follow up on the findings of these empirical studies and apply them to the current centralised Czech form of the English "maturita" examination. The thesis was initially inspired by students' observations during English lessons at a Czech grammar school, which were a part of pedagogical education at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University. After establishing the focus of the paper, preliminary research in the form of semi- structured interviews with four students in the final grades at Prague grammar schools was conducted. While this pre-research study allowed only...
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Linguistic Differences, Differences in Mindstyle: Corpus Analysis of William Faulkner's Novel As I Lay Dying
Kubánek, Cyril ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Gráf, Tomáš (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to show that the processing of the language of individual characters in William Faulkner's novel "As I Lay Dying" using the methods of corpus linguistics can lead to valuable findings applicable in literary research. The first result is the confirmation based on exact methods, of the conviction that each of the characters in the work maintains his or her typical language, which can be characterized by a set of key words and key expressions. The second, related, result is the presentation of the acquired set of keywords in terms of the concept of "mind style". This notion was introduced by Roger Fowler in 1977 and is based on the study of typical, regular and consistent lexical choices, which can be observed as a certain pattern or manner of language conveying the speaker's view of the world and of his or her mental self. In the chapter dealing with the theoretical background of the thesis, the connecting line between modernist literature, stream-of-consciousness method, corpus linguistics, and mind style was clarified. Furthermore, the method of the work was defined and its limitations and possible difficulties were also indicated. For the section focused on linguistic and literary research, a list of all the direct speeches of the novel was compiled in a spreadsheet and...
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Grading in English lessons at secondary schools
Dodecká, Ivana ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to find out how English teachers at secondary schools grade students' performance, to what extent teachers grade systematically and what the possible weaknesses in these systems are. A questionnaire sent to various types of secondary schools ('gymnázium', SOŠ, SOU) was used for data collection. Respondents were evaluated based on their grading approach, with questions covering, among others, the following areas: use of grading criteria and type of activities graded, grading principles followed, availability of grading guidelines within schools and the extent to which these were binding, teacher instruction on grading at university, and so on. The results of the research pointed to a non-systematic grading approach in English lessons which may result in inconsistency in student performance assessment across the secondary school system. In its conclusion, the thesis identified critical areas of the non-systematic grading approach and sought possible improvements. Keywords: grading, assessment, quantitative assessment, English languages skills, secondary schools, English teachers
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Use of discourse markers in the speech of advanced learners of English before and after a study stay in an English-speaking country
Millerová, Barbora ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Hubáčková, Iva (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to determine whether study abroad has an effect on the frequency of discourse markers in speech of advanced learners of English. The data used for the analysis are interviews with ten advanced learners of English conducted before and after studying abroad in an English-speaking country for one or two semesters. 1,228 discourse markers were identified and tagged. The research revealed that nine out of ten speakers increased their use of discourse markers post-SA, although this increase was only significant for four of them. The most frequently used discourse markers both before and after the SA were like and so. Apart from these two markers, you know has experienced the highest increase in frequency post-SA. The thesis also examined locational distribution of markers well and so within an utterance, but did not find any significant changes post-SA. The analysis of individual speakers' recordings proved that apart from changes in frequency, variety of the DMs also changed for most of the students, which suggests their speech was influenced by the study stay abroad. Keywords: discourse markers, learner language, study abroad
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Nonword repetition in bilinguals. Does performance differ from Developmental Language Disorder?
Hasalová, Kateřina ; Cilibrasi, Luca (advisor) ; Gráf, Tomáš (referee)
This study investigates the patterns in nonword repetition performance of children with a developmental language disorder and bilingual children. It has been shown by previous research that both children with developmental language disorder and bilingual children tend to perform poorly in nonword repetition tasks. As these tasks are one of the tools often used for diagnosing markers of DLD in young children, diagnosing bilinguals with DLD proves to be difficult, since both of the groups exhibit a poor performance. An analysis of the patterns found in NWR performance of bilingual children and children with DLD might shed more light onto the issue. The study focuses on analysing the performance in a widely used assessment task - The Children's Test of Nonword Repetition. Three samples of data were analysed. The first sample of data consisted of monolingual English-speaking children diagnosed with a developmental language disorder. The second sample of data consisted of Czech-English bilingual children from international schools in Prague who started acquiring English at the time of birth, i.e. simultaneous bilinguals. The third and final sample consisted of Czech- English bilingual children from international schools in Prague who started acquiring English after one year of age, i.e. sequential bilinguals....
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Lexical Variety in Oral Production of L2 Learners of English as a Factor in Determining Language Proficiency
Škutová, Zuzana ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
Lexical variety (also referred to as lexical diversity) is a term used to describe the range of lexis used in texts. It constitutes a subcategory of language complexity, which is one of the three components of the CAF theory, that operates with complexity, accuracy and fluency These terms are used in linguistic research to describe language proficiency of native (L1) speakers, but they are also for example part of the CEFR framework, which classifies non- native (L2) speakers into categories based on their overall language competence. The majority of research within the area of lexical variety still focuses mainly on written language. As a result, the analysis of spoken production stays neglected. The analysis of spoken language can be more labour intensive as the data need to be transcribed and pruned before evaluation. A possible simplification would be to work with spoken language corpora that have already been compiled, which is the solution adopted to obtain data for the purpose of this thesis. The corpus used here is the LINDSEI_CZ, this sub-corpus contains transcriptions of Czech L2 speakers of English. The speakers were sorted into proficiency levels between B2 and C1 according to the CEFR standards. The aim of this thesis was to find if there is a significant difference in lexical variety...
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The acquisition of prepositions through gaming
Marková, Daniela ; Cilibrasi, Luca (advisor) ; Gráf, Tomáš (referee)
The present study deals with the acquisition of the six most common prepositions in the English language through the employment of a video game specifically designed for this purpose. The thesis features a theoretical overview of the literature relevant to language acquisition, acquisition of function words (more specifically prepositions), game-based acquisition and instruction and its various aspects. The practical part contains a description of the game's design which endeavours to combine the relevant (S)LA theories together with the research on learning through gaming. The game consists of five separate tasks and the mechanics of which are then combined in the final task to elicit the correct responses of the subject. The language used in the game is adjusted for the subjects' level of proficiency, the game is fully voiced and offers a degree of customization. An experiment was conducted on 24 pupils from an elementary school, aged 12-13, who were assessed before and after playing the game. The results revealed that the game did advance the subjects' performance in prepositional structures containing the six most frequent English prepositions at the A1-A2 level of proficiency. Special attention was given to the performance on the preposition to compared to its particle counterpart to. Results...
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Syntactic Complexity in the Speech of Learners of English: Issues in Operationalization
Bulantová, Barbora ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The thesis analyses syntactic complexity of monologic tasks of 10 B2 and 10 C1 speakers of English with Czech as their L1. The data derives from LINDSEI_CZ (Gráf 2017). The transcripts of the recordings were segmented into AS-units (Foster et al. 2000) and adapted for the purposes of the analysis. Syntactic complexity was calculated using following measures: mean length of AS-unit, mean length of clause, clauses / AS-unit. These were complemented by fine-grained indices of structural complexity, comprised of ratios of subordinate clause types and coordinate verb phrases per total number of clauses (Vercellotti & Packer 2016) and a weighted complexity scale designed by Vercellotti (2018). The results of the quantitative analysis showed no significant effect of proficiency on syntactic complexity of the speakers. In fact, all speakers irrespective of language proficiency level produced very similar complex structures as opposed to lower-proficiency structures. This indicates that more fine-grained indices should be incorporated into spoken complexity research. At the same time, scores of each measure varied considerably within groups, pointing at the importance of inter-speaker variability in this research. The thesis thus produced outcomes that are largely methodological, in that it has identified...
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