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Czech High School Students' Attitudes and Beliefs about Native and Non-Native English Accents
Jandová, Daniela ; Červinková Poesová, Kristýna (advisor) ; Lancová, Klára (referee)
This bachelor thesis explores Czech high school students' attitudes and beliefs about native and non-native English accents. The theoretical part offers a comparison of the most significant research surveys both in Czech and foreign context. Furthermore, it also deals with the issues of accent discrimination towards native and non-native accents of English. The empirical part is based on a questionnaire survey. Its aim is to discover what knowledge of native and non-native accents Czech high school students have. It focuses primarily on the importance of accent among students and their personal pronunciation goals, for example if they would like to achieve native-like pronunciation. In addition, it explores what factors most influence students' choice of accent and how important they view the pronunciation of their teachers. Two groups of students were examined, students of the first and fourth year of grammar school. KEYWORDS accent attitudes, native accents, non-native accents, accent discrimination
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Production of weak forms of prepositions by non-native speakers of English
Kozáková, Tereza ; Červinková Poesová, Kristýna (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
This bachelor thesis aims to reveal and describe to which extent non-native speakers of English from different L1 backgrounds employ weak forms when producing prepositions. The theoretical part focuses on vowel reduction and its importance for the natural rhythm of English. This concept is further explored from the Lingua Franca Core perspective and its approach to teaching vowel reduction. In the practical part, the analysis of a series of recordings is carried out. The recordings were taken from the L2-ARCTIC speech corpus of non-native English (Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Vietnamese). The purpose of the analysis is to explore whether and how speakers with different L1s reduce vowels in canonically weak forms of prepositions. The focus is placed on the quality and quantity of vowels in said prepositions and their duration with regard to their occurrence in either initial or medial positions. The average vowel duration is then compared to the referential vowel duration in General British. KEY WORDS ELF, prepositions, vowel duration, schwa, vowel reduction, weak forms
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Attitudes of Czechs towards Individual English Accents
Iatsun, Valeriia ; Lancová, Klára (advisor) ; Červinková Poesová, Kristýna (referee)
The dissertation is focused on the description of the distinctive phonetic and phonological aspects of the Manchester, New Zealand and Irish accents. The theoretical part contains a comprehensive description of the segmental and suprasegmental features of the above mentioned accents in contrast with British Standard/Received Pronunciation. The practical part contains the recordings of native speakers from Manchester, Dunedin, Glasgow and Newsbury. It is followed by a research conducted in the form of a questionnaire, whose answers should help to discover the Czech students' attitude towards individual accents. Key Words Manchester, New Zealand, Irish and British accents
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Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence through Reading Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider
Míková, Barbora ; Topolovská, Tereza (advisor) ; Červinková Poesová, Kristýna (referee)
This thesis concerns the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) through reading a work of postcolonial literature (The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, 2005) in an English class. The theoretical part explains notions such as intercultural communicative competence and culture. It also describes the benefits of reading in ELT. The practical part presents a project consisting of altogether twelve lessons dedicated to reading The Whale Rider. The aim of the project is to support the pupils' development of ICC, make them aware of other English-speaking cultures than just the traditionally presented ones and, last but not least, to develop their language skills. The outcome of the project is, besides the expected raised level of ICC, which is, however, hard to measure, a poster about Maori culture realized by the pupils. KEY WORDS intercultural communicative competence, postcolonial literature, reading, English language teaching, The Whale Rider
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