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Pink Floyd and Czech cultural context
JIRÁNKOVÁ, Lucie
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to analyse the reception of Pink Floyd in the Czech cultural environment of the second half of the twentieth century and their impact with an emphasis on the period of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. First, a description of the musical and cultural discourse of the foreign and Czech music scene is provided. The following section introduces the Pink Floyd group itself. The thesis focuses on the reception of the group in the Czech press of the 1970s and 1980s. This is followed by an analysis of Pink Floyd's influence on Czech music. The focus is also on the band's lyrics and their comparison with Czech translations, paraphrases, and cover versions.
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Production and perception aspects of weak form words in Czech-accented English
Kalvodová, Lenka ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
The present BA thesis is concerned with perception and production aspects of weak forms of grammatical words in advanced Czech-accented speakers of English. The theoretical part first compares speech rhythm in Czech and English. Discussing the components of rhythm in English, it focusses on sentence stress, including the role of changes on grammatical words. Production and perception are described as observed in native versus non-native speakers. A systematic overview of weak forms of grammatical words is provided. Finally, the need for perception and production training in non-native speakers is emphasised. The first half of the analytical part, focussing on production, examines recordings of proficient Czech-accented speakers. It uses the data to present an overview of areas in which their production of weak forms and other connected speech processes differs from native-like. The hypothesis claiming that the more accented the speaker, the fewer weak forms and associated connected speech processes can be found in their production is confirmed. The second half of the analytical part is based on two perception tests, one asking the listeners to assess the level of comprehensibility and one the level of accentedness. The results showcase the presence of patterns in the way Czech listeners perceive...
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The development of L2 inflectional morphology and cross-language interference effects
Jiránková, Lucie ; Cilibrasi, Luca (advisor) ; Guasti, Maria Teresa (referee) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
The present dissertation investigates the development in the production and perception of inflectional morphology in second-language learners of English and the role of their mother tongue during this development. The data analysed in this thesis stem from three psycholinguistic experiments that examine the production and comprehension of English novel words (thus investigating the sublexicon without the activation of word meaning). The first experiment focuses on the perception of inflectional morphemes in English novel words in L2 students at the A0 to C1 proficiency levels. Reaction-times analysis has shown that L2 learners seem to be (similarly to native speakers (e.g., Post et al., 2008)) sensitive to the presence of morphosyntactic information at the sublexical level, and they appear to decompose inflected forms into stems and affixes during perception and conduct an implicit phonetic analysis of the stem. The presence of these patterns across all levels suggests that L2 performance might be influenced by L1: Czech is morphologically much richer than English, and Czech speakers might thus be in general sensitive to morphological analysis of words. The second experiment investigates the production of inflected forms, more specifically those of past tense, in L2 learners of English at the A1 to...
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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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English gerund with temporal prepositions
Afanaseva, Margarita ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
The purpose of the present paper is to examine one of the realization forms of adverbials - adjuncts of time that are introduced with simple prepositions on, in, at, between, during and throughout complemented by gerund. The realization forms of adverbials are primarily approached from the point of view of their subordinators. In this sense, the adjuncts that are in the focus of the present paper are distinguished from comparable nonfinite adverbial clauses in that they are introduced by simple prepositions, which usually require nominal complementation. Since the focus of this paper is a corpus-based survey allowing a functional comparison with other forms of realization, the theoretical part is devoted to an introductory description of other related forms of realization of (non)finite adverbials of time, namely augmented free adjuncts, free adjuncts, and finite adverbial clauses of time. Their central features such as the status in the grammars, their functions and grammatical types, position in the sentence, form and relatedness of the subject, semantic explicitness, types of augmentors, semantic relationships between the clauses, and the differences between these forms of realization are discussed. The mentioned forms of realization are chosen on the basis of their ability to deliver the same...
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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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Mentoring in the EFL Practicum
Jedličková, Kamila ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
Keywords: Teaching practicum, mentors, mentoring, qualitative research, multiple case study Abstract The teaching practicum is an integral part of teacher education and a key role is played by teacher trainers - mentors. The aim of this thesis is to determine their perception of the practicum, evaluation of their own degree of preparedness, and attitude to the tasks which the role of the mentor involves. The theoretical part describes the roles of the mentor, models of mentoring, concrete mentoring tasks, and also mentors' motivation as well as important skills. It further discusses selected issues in the EFL practicum, namely feedback and self-reflection, observations, preparedness of mentors, and the length of the practicum. The empirical part is comprised of the results of qualitative research in the form of a multiple case study. Five case studies have been carried out in total and data have been processed through the process of coding. The paper then goes on to analyse the findings with regard to the theoretical concepts discussed earlier in the study, and outlines potential research and pedagogical implications. The main findings of the study include mentors' high motivation for their roles and friendly attitude to teacher trainees, as well as their lack of specialised education for teacher trainee...
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Materials Development for Language Teaching using CLIL
Vozabulová, Diana ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
Although the term CLIL standing for Content and Language Integrated Learning appeared as early as in 1994, and the European Union recognized it very quickly as a prospective and effective way of learning and teaching languages, it seems neither to have been used extensively within the Czech education system, nor there appears to be a general awareness of the method. However, this approach represents a great opportunity for creating more authentic atmosphere within language classrooms and simultaneously teaching and learning a content subject. When speaking of CLIL, several factors must be considered, such as its objectives, principles, methodology, discourse and materials, furthermore we have to take into account the criteria for designing and analysing material for language teaching (of course also in the view of the chosen content subject principles and objectives). In order to raise the awareness of CLIL as an effective approach to language and subject content teaching and to partly supply the lack of CLIL-focused materials, this thesis aims to take into account all the factors and present and analyse them in logical sequences, so finally an effective piece of material usable in CLIL classes could be created and subsequently analysed and evaluated. The present thesis is divided into three parts...
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Pronunciation instruction in the context of TEFL
Nelson, Sabina ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
Pronunciation instruction in the TEFL classroom has long been a neglected area regardless of its importance for the students. The data in the literature shows that teachers are generally not ready to provide pronunciation instruction for a variety of reasons: lack of qualification and training, theoretical and practical knowledge, time and motivation. The present thesis explores the current situation of pronunciation instruction at a private language school in the Czech Republic using of classroom observations and teacher and student surveys. The results confirm the initial hypothesis that pronunciation instruction including pronunciation error correction is nearly non-existent or occurs sporadically in the classroom. Only one out of four teachers (T1) included explicit pronunciation information into his teaching. The only pronunciation error correction technique observed with the four teachers was a recast which proved to be ineffective in most cases. Even though the teachers and students are generally aware of the importance of pronunciation in foreign language acquisition, their individual beliefs and attitudes towards pronunciation learning and teaching greatly differ. Key words: pronunciation, TEFL, explicit instruction, segmental features, suprasegmental features, teacher and student cognition
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Filled pauses in learner and native English
Pylypiuk, Anna ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Jiránková, Lucie (referee)
Filled pauses in learner and native English Abstract Current BA thesis targets to study filled pauses as a hesitation phenomenon in the speech of native and advanced non-native speakers of English. The aim of the thesis is to investigate the phenomenon of filled pauses, specifically the relation between the positions of the filled pauses in the sentences and clauses, and the roles they carry. One of the objectives of the work is to analyse filled pauses as a speech management strategy. Comparative interlanguage analysis is going to be one of the main methods employed in the paper. The research is based on the corpus LOCNEC, which is based on the transcriptions of interviews with native speakers of English and on the parallel corpus LINDSEI_CZ, which contains transcriptions of speech of Czech learners of English. For the purpose of the research, from each corpus were randomly selected 5 speakers. Their transcribed speech was examined for the instances of filled pauses, the ones that are analysed in the work are the following: er, erm, eh, em and mm. The size of the transcribed interviews in LOCNEC is 9,261 tokens, and in LINDSEI_CZ it comprises 10,048 tokens. In the study were identified 1,324 instances of filled pauses' use in the native and learner English: 656 occurrences of FPs in the analysed LOCNEC...
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