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2. What factors might contribute to students' preference? What is the
relationship between the participants' choices and these factors (i.e., gender, self-perceived proficiency, familiarity, and exposure to English-speaking countries)?
The structure of the two research questions is shown in Figure 1. To explore the central question with regard to the learners’ learning goal in pronunciation, the four factors in the participants’ background information would be investigated to determine which factor plays an important role in their choice of pronunciation goals. Besides, the participants’ motivation and attitudes towards accents would also be examined to confirm whether they influence how the participants set their learning goals.
Figure 1. The structure of the two research questions
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CHAPTER 3
METHODOLOGY
The methodology of the study included four parts: the participants of the current study, the instruments used, the research procedures, and the data analysis method.
Participants
Participants were 172 high school students in northern Taiwan excluding the unfinished 25 questionnaires. This study adopted stratified sampling and the
participants were categorized into three groups: general high school, elite high school, and comprehensive junior-senior high school. The definition of each high school would be stated in the following paragraphs.
General high schools are common secondary high schools consist of three years of schooling based on the definition of Minister of Education in Taiwan. Among general high schools, there are some schools that are generally more prestigious and students there have better academic performance. These schools are so-called elite high schools.
According to Department of Education in Taipei City Government, there is no universal definition of elite high schools. In one of their reports, elite high schools were defined as schools whose minimum admission is equal to or above PR 95 in The Basic Competence Test for Junior High School Students in 2009 and the definition was adopted in the present study. The PR, Percentage Rank, of a score is the
percentage of scores in its frequency distribution that are equal to or lower than it. For example, the students in the elite high school in this study would have test scores that are greater than 95 percent of the scores of students taking the test.
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three-year education in junior high schools and three-year in senior high schools according to Laws and Regulations Retrieving System of Ministry of Education in Taiwan.
In each school, two classes of students (about 70) were chosen to participate in this study. The classes selected were based on the availability of the teachers in each high school. Each of the three teachers, who helped to carry out the study, chose two of their classes to participate in the study. Besides, varying factor like gender for students were taken into consideration to make the participants representative.
Therefore, the classes were all co-educational and had both male and female students.
Among the 172 participants, there are 97 females and 75 males.
High school students were selected as the participants for two reasons. First of all, previous study focused on the attitudes of university students and high school students’
voices were little heard. According to Ministry of Education, high school students have four English credits in each semester, which means four English classes every week. As the intensive English leaners in Taiwan, high school students’ attitudes should be considered. Therefore, this study may shed lights on secondary school instruction.
Instrument
The instrument used in the present study: questionnaire (about background information of the participants, and their preference in different accents and their leaning motivation), the verbal-guise technique (VGT). Each will be explained in details.
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A questionnaire about the background information of students (Appendix A) The background information required in this study consists of four parts: gender, self-perceived proficiency, familiarity and the exposure to English speaking countries since previous studies proved that gender difference (Bernaisch & Koch, 2015; Hundt, Zipp & Huber, 2015; McKenzie, 2008), self-perceived proficiency (McKenzie, 2008), familiarity (Dalton-Puffer et al., 1997) and exposure (McKenzie, 2008) play a crucial role in the participants’ attitudes. According to McKenzie (2008), exposure means experience of traveling to English-speaking countries and in the research of
Dalton-Puffer et al.(1997), the definition of familiarity is composed of the respondents’
familiarity with certain accents at school and /or during stays in English speaking countries. These two facets were separated to discuss in this study. Therefore, in this study, the participants’ familiarity would be surveyed in how much time they immerse themselves in English during their daily life while exposure would be discussed in how much time they have ever spent in English-speaking countries.
A questionnaire about accents and learning motivations (Appendix B)
The questionnaire was adapted from Timmis (2002) and translated into Chinese.
The participants would state their learning goal in pronunciation and they would be asked to make a choice first from the two statements.
Student A: ‘I can pronounce English just like a native speaker now. Sometimes, people think I am a native speaker.’
Student B: ‘I can pronounce English clearly now. Native speakers and non-native
speakers understand me wherever I go, but I still have the accent of my country’
(Timmis, 2002)
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After making a choice, they had to provide their reasons and the following eight reasons were developed in this study. The participants have to rate by the eight provided reasons for their choices with a 4-point Likert-scale (1 = very disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = agree; and 4 = very agree). The reasons were designed to investigate the participants’ motivation of learning English. The motivation of participants was proved to influence the attitude in the studies of Lennartsson(2008) and Jain & Sidhu (2013); thus, it would be considered in this study.
The eight reasons to learn English (motivation) were generally based on the concept of instrumental and integrative motivations (Gardener and Lambert, 1959).
According to Norris-Holt (2001), learners with the instrumental motivation consider their purposes of language learning more utilitarian way. On the other hand, learners with integrative motivation wish to integrate themselves into the culture of the target language group. According to Gardener and Lambert (1959), students with integrative motivations would be expected to work harder to polish their communication skills in the second language. Therefore, to investigate whether the participants in this survey had this kind of tendency, the eight motivations were categorized based on the types of motivation.
Three statements in the questionnaire (1. “I want to take English proficiency tests to get certificates.” 2. “I may go abroad to study in the future.” 7. “It will make me competitive in job market.”) are categorized to instrumental motivation while the other three (4. “I want to live abroad in the future.” 6. “I want to make friends with people from different countries.” 8. “I want to go abroad to work and travel in the future.”) are integrative motivation, which can be referred from Crookes & Schmidt’s (1991) definition “Integrative motivation is identified with positive attitudes toward
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the target language group and the potential for integrating into that group, or at least an interest in meeting and interacting with members of the target language group.”
In addition, the rest of the two statements are common belief of the participants (3. “Other people may think I am good at English.” 5. “Native accent is the perfect accent”) from previous studies (Lee & Wang 2015; Timmis, 2002; Tokumoto &
Shibata, 2011). To generate more of the participants’ viewpoints, there is also an open-ended question that they can provide their own reasons in the following blank to elicit more viewpoints from the participants.
The verbal-guise technique (VGT) (Appendix C)
This section examined the participants’ language attitudes towards native accent and Taiwanese accent. The participants would listen to two recordings from the International Dialects of English Archive and then rate them respectively. The first recording is from a 32-year-old female from New York, which represents the native accent. The reason to choose the New York accent is that this dialect is the most recognizable accent in the United States due to its popularity in the media (Labov, 2006). The second recording was read by a 30-year-old Taiwanese female, who was a graduate student in the United Sates. Since the subject’s first language is Mandarin Chinese and born in Taiwan, she was selected to stand for Taiwanese accent. To minimalize other factors that might affect the results of the study, both clips share the same script and the two females who participated in recording were in similar ages.
After listening to the recordings of the two speakers, the participants evaluated them based on 16 personality traits adopted in He and Zhang’s (2010) study. The rating was based on the 4-point Likert scale: 1 = the voice does not match with the given trait at all; 2 = the voice does not match with the given voice so well; 3 = the
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voice matches with the given trait well; and 4 = the voice matches with the given trait very well. Instead of using the 5-Likert scale used by He and Zhang (2010), the choice of the even number scale would “force respondents to evaluate each accent either positively or negatively and prevent form adopting a neutral position” (Jenkins, 2007 p.152).
The verbal guise technique used in this study is widely applied in attitude studies to elicit the participants’ implicit attitudes towards different accents (Bernaisch and Koch, 2015; Cheng, 2009; Dalton-Puffer, Kaltenboeck and Simit, 1997; Lee & Wang, 2015; McKenzie, 2008). The reason to choose the verbal-guise technique instead of the matched-guise technique (Lambert et al., 1960) is that the matched-guise
technique requires only one speaker with different accents to speak and then the participants will be told that there are more than one speaker before they rate the different accents. It was criticized most on the artificiality of the speakers because it is
“practically impossible to find speakers who are equally convincing in several disguises”(Dalton-Puffer et al., 1997 p.177). On the other hand, the verbal-guise technique, which was adopted in this study, involves participants listening to recording from different speakers. The speakers can speak without the need to disguise, which is considered more natural than the matched-guise technique.
With these two instruments employed, the interpretations would be stronger to investigate the preference in pronunciation of Taiwanese learners and to discuss their motivation and factors contributing to their choices. After that, pedagogical
implications would be provided to shed lights on pronunciation teaching in Taiwan.
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Procedure
The data collection was undertaken in three high schools of Taiwan in September 2018, when the semester just began and the subjects had more free time to help
complete the study. The participants included six classes of the students (172 students).
Since they came from three high schools, I assigned a teacher in each school and made sure he/she understood how to conduct the survey. Then I handed my questionnaire and recordings to them. These three teachers in each high school were responsible for carrying out the survey, collecting the questionnaires and sending them back to me for further analysis. When conducting the survey, the people in charge had to answer the questions about the study from the participants to make sure they finished the
questionnaires without misunderstanding.
Besides, to ensure consistency of the measurement, the procedures involved in this survey were the same. They students were all required to finish in the same order: the questionnaire about the background information, preference, and learning motivation, and the VGT test during similar time span. First of all, this survey required the
background information of the participants. Then, it investigated their output goals in pronunciation by explicitly asking whether they want to sound like native speakers or to communicate fluently but with the Taiwanese accent. After that, the verbal-guise technique (VGT) was applied to elicit their attitudes towards accents implicitly. They spent about 30 minutes on the survey.
Data analysis
The study aims to explore Taiwanese learners’ attitudes towards accents by examining their learning goal and preference. To answer the following two research questions, this study used statistics to analyze the questionnaires.
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1. Do Taiwanese students prefer the native accents or their own variant as their learning goals? Why do they have this kind of preference (motivation)?
2. What factors might contribute to students' preference? What is the
relationship between the participants' choices and these factors (i.e., gender, self-perceived proficiency, familiarity, exposure to English-speaking
countries)?
To answer question one, the issue was probed both explicitly and implicitly in the two parts of the questionnaire as indicated in Figure 2. First, this study analyzed the main question lying in the second part of the questionnaire (Appendix B), which directly asked the participants about their learning goal. The participants chose either English with native accent or with fluent Taiwanese accent and percentages were applied to analyze this data. Moreover, to implicitly explore the participants’
preference, this study also analyzed the results of VGT (Appendix C), which aimed to elicit the participants’ spontaneous reactions toward accents and compared it with their learning goal to determine their accent preference. After the participants listened to the two recordings, they were required to rate among the 16 traits-14 positive adjectives and 2 negative ones. The higher rating means the more positive/negative attitude towards certain accent. The rates of the two recordings were analyzed to acquire their means and difference and also underwent t-test to determine the significance.
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Figure 2. Taiwanese Students’ Preference towards Accents
Besides, the participants’ motivations behind their learning goal (Appendix B) and the factors (Appendix A) behind their choices were also investigated in this study, which is presented in Figure 3. Percentage, which is a ratio expressed as a fraction of 100, was applied to analyze the participants’ motivation as well as the factors. Besides, cross analysis was used to determine the relationship between them to figure out what factors and motivations significantly contribute to their choices.
Figure 3. Factors and Motivations behind the Participants’ Choices
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In order to elaborate the effect of motivations on the participants’ choices, they were asked to provide detailed reasons to learn a particular accent in the open-ended part. They could write in Chinese to help them articulate their opinions and their response would be collected and categorized based on the most frequent themes for further analysis.
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CHAPTER 4
RESULTS
This chapter reports the results on the questionnaire survey including the four factors (gender, self-perceived proficiency, familiarity and exposure) in the
background information, their attitudes toward accents, and the eight motivations, which can be further categorized into integrative, instrumental and others. Next, the results of verbal-guised technique are demonstrated and compared with the results of questionnaire to check the consistency.
Questionnaire Survey Research Question 1: Attitudes toward Accents
The results show that 58 percent of the students would prefer themselves to be like Student A (I can pronounce English just like a native speaker now. Sometimes, people think I am a native speaker), which suggests that more than half of the students set their pronunciation goals to be native-like. Some of the participants wrote:
When you learn a language, you should learn the correct pronunciation and try to become a native speaker.
These students acknowledged the historical authority of native models and argued for their inherit superiority over other varieties of English.
If you want to learn a language, you should learn from its original accent, grammar, and custom.
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But at the same time they admitted the difficulty of achieving the goal:
It's better to pronounce English in “English” pronunciation but it's not easy.
On the other hand, there were 42 percent of them chose to become Student B (I can pronounce English clearly now. Native speakers and non-native speakers understand me wherever I go, but I still have the accent of my country), which means they don't mind speaking English with the accent of their own mother tongue. They elaborated their reasons in the open-ended question:
Language is for communication.
It’s good enough if people can understand.
The purpose of communication is to understand. If people can’t understand your native accent, it’s still not a successful communication.
It’s convenient when you travel. It’s enough to understand a language.
Some of their reasons are related to the communication function of a language and indicated that the purpose of communication is to acquire the information.
When confronting many different accents, I can still get information without difficulties.
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I can generally understand the meaning that foreigners want to convey.
These participants recognized the purpose of communication is information exchange and the communication can be successful as long as they could be understood
accurately. In their points of view, accents have little to do with understanding.
Research Question 1: Verbal Guised Technique
In general, the results of the VGT displayed in Table 1 are found to be consistent with the findings of the questionnaire survey in this study reported before. From table 1, it can be seen that multivariate analysis of variance indicated that significant differences between Taiwanese accent and native accent. To be more precise, native accent was rated significantly higher than Taiwanese accent on nearly all the positive traits except three items- sincere (p=0.713), approachable (p=0.550) and patient (p=0.470). Although the means of native accents for these three were still higher than Taiwanese accents, there was no significant difference (p<0.05) in statistics level.
These three personalities all describe positive behaviors of a person; that is, people with these personality traits are easy to talk to and become friends. The results show that for the participants, accents did not affect their opinions towards people in terms of getting along with them.
Despite the fact that the participants obtained more positive attitudes toward native accents, the ratings of the native accent on the two negative traits were slightly higher than the Taiwanese accent though these two ratings of the item arrogant (p=0.253) and aggressive (p=0.080) did not reveal significant difference (p<0.05). It is still worthy to note that when the participants were in favor of the native accent, the native accent
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was still reported to be more arrogant and aggressive. This may arise from the
classroom culture in Taiwan, which is still more conservative than western countries.
Students are supposed to play passive roles in classroom and they have few opportunities to demonstrates their abilities. If they have some talents, presenting them in a humble way would be encouraged. When it comes to language learning, almost every student speaks with accents in Taiwan. If someone is different from others and speaks with perfect native accents, they may be seen as too arrogant or aggressive in others’ opinions.
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Table 1. Means and Differences of Taiwanese Accent and Native Accent on the 16 Traits
Traits
Means Taiwanese Native Accent Accent
Difference Sig.
Positive 1. Friendly 2.38 2.69 -0.31 0.000**
2. Intelligent 2.35 2.90 -0.55 0.000**
3. Educated 2.57 3.21 -0.64 0.000**
4. Competent 2.42 3.02 -0.60 0.000**
5. Industrious 2.40 2.56 -0.16 0.040*
6. Sincere 2.56 2.60 -0.04 0.713
7. Approachable 2.31 2.37 -0.06 0.550 8. Considerate 2.16 2.35 -0.19 0.017*
9. Trustworthy 2.21 2.67 -0.46 0.000**
10. Wealthy 2.13 2.35 -0.22 0.005**
11. Trendy 1.97 2.41 -0.44 0.000**
12. Powerful 1.95 2.47 -0.52 0.000**
13. Confident 2.26 3.09 -0.83 0.000**
14. Patient 2.17 2.30 -0.13 0.470
Negative 15. Arrogant 1.84 2.01 -0.17 0.253 16. Aggressive 2.45 2.53 -0.08 0.080 Note **p < 0.01, *p<0.05
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Research Question 2: Motivations
To probe the participants’ English learning motivations behind their choices, eight motivations were provided for them to rate from a 4-point Likert scale: strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. Based on the participants’ ratings, their
To probe the participants’ English learning motivations behind their choices, eight motivations were provided for them to rate from a 4-point Likert scale: strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. Based on the participants’ ratings, their