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The development of Czech pupils' L2 phonology assessed with a reading task
Skočilová, Tina ; Cilibrasi, Luca (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
This study focuses on the impact of age of onset on pronunciation in Czech children learning English. Two groups of children were subjected to the testing - children exposed to English from nursery, and children exposed from primary school - since those two ages of onset are the most common in the Czech Republic. In each group, twenty participants aged 8 - 12 years were tested (so, in total, forty children participated). The standardised York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension methodology (YARC) was used, with a few changes to match Czech- English bilinguals. Participants were presented with a reading task. This task constituted of a single word reading test and then seven texts sorted by complexity, from which every participant read two. The whole session was recorded, and those recordings were later used for the analysis. From this reading task, accuracy and rate of participants was measured, according to the standard methodology of the YARC. Then, a thorough analysis of pronunciations was completed, in order to ascertain the mistakes the two groups made. The results revealed that it is common for Czech children to try and read an unknown English word as they would read a Czech one - with a system known as grapheme-phoneme conversion. They also revealed that there are minimal differences in...
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