In what ways does phonological transfer affects Spanish learners in the learning of English - Research Paper Example

? In what ways does phonological transfer affects Spanish learners in the learning of English. This paper focuses on the ways that phonological transfer affects Spanish learners in the learning of English as the second language, ESL. The paper will involve the theoretical synthesis of all the provided materials in terms of how vowel transfer will affect the Spanish speakers who are trying to learn English as the second language. The critical analysis of the articles will explain phonological transfer in the sense of vowel transfers. The other part of the work will make an analysis and recommendations on phonological transfer and their impacts with the two extremes of language. The mistakes of Spanish students in terms of phonology and morphology of language will be analyzed real context. The analysis will integrate the analysis of influencing factors and how they affect the learning of the new language with reiteration being made on English learners as the second language. A conclusion will furnish the readers with my final stand on the issue of phonological transfer with respect to vowel transfer. The study further shows the interaction between bilingualism, vowel contrasts, and novel words. Bilingual participants had greater difficulty with the certainty of vowel contrasts that were contained in learners words, whereas native English participants had no significant difficulty with vowel contrasts in either real or novel words. The main variables that affected the bilingual participants’ in the process of phonological transfer were the age of acquisition of English, the report of problems in communication in English, and the overall percentage of time that was devoted to communication and learning in English. INTRODUCTION A number of previous studies have shown that phonological transfers have a vast impact when it comes to the learning of a language as the second language. The impacts have been observed when it comes to the experience of both the adults in production and perception of L2 sounds. Non-native speakers of language accuracy of pronouncing the vowels are inversely related to their age as opposed to their accuracy in pronouncing the consonants. Flege (1991b) found out in one of his studies that the non-native Spanish speakers who went to the US produced English vowels in an intended manner more often than those who went to the US as adults who produced the vowels in a more or less non-intended manner. There was a less spectral overlap between adjacent between the adjacent vowels as spoken by the early bilinguals as compared to those from the late bilinguals (Garcia Perez, 2003). Furthermore, there is the other impact of phonological transfer in terms of the vowel production accuracy as they vary among the individuals who began speaking the language when they are adults. Flege (199a) found out that English spoken by students with mild accents were more intelligible than that spoken by students with strong foreign accents. This is despite the fact that the basis of the strong accent with respect to vowel production differences still remaining unknown. There are questions raised though of whether the improvement in vowel production in adults occur naturally when one is exposed to L2 or it needs some special talents. The methodology for the findings above was conducted on ten Spanish speakers and having no other language acquired in the period of the research at level 400 or at far the university level. The students were recruited at their respective English classes across the universities of the US states. The students were generally from the same state and were between 20-23 years of age. The average number of years that the students had studied English was 7.8 with the greatest having studied for 12 years and the least 4 years (Kuhl & Iverson, 1995). A greater percentage of about 60% and above had done the studies of the language for more than 7 years including how vowels move concerning the experience of the speaker with English language. This research excluded one student who spent most of his time in Spain with the average time they spent in the English speaking country being one week. Four of the students spent two weeks in Spain with other having spent no time in Spain. The studies were performed and analyzed under various variables (Garcia Perez, 2005). A general conclusion on the impacts of phonological transfer on the Spanish students studying English vowels was presented. Furthermore, the influence that the Spanish phonological inventory has on both reading and communication in English by Spanish speakers as their first language was noted. It was found out that, actually, the first language and if the speakers spend most parts of their time in the country of their native language will affect the learning of another language exclusively. From another study designed by Flege (1991) on the effects of English language vowel production accuracy involving an examination of Germans living in the US for a varied period with some living for less than a year it was further reiterated the fact that the experienced Germans produced the English vowels more accurately than the inexperienced. Through the present studies, the accuracy with which relatively experienced and inexperienced subjects produced English vowels was accessed through acoustic measurements and through the intelligibility test. According to Flege (1991) vowel perception study to three new groups of subjects, permitted an assessment of the relation between vowel production and their perception accuracy. After producing English /i > 2?/, our subjects identified the members of two synthetic continua and actively interrogated them. The vowels in one continuum ranged from beat (/i/) to bit (/>/); those in the other ranged from bat (/?/) to bet (/2/). In both the continua, vowel quality was varied in 11 steps. This was by changing the frequencies of the ?rst ?2 vowel production and perception 4391. This was done by reducing their use of temporal cues to vowel identity, which appear to be more important in English than in Spanish (Kuhl & Iverson, 1995). The second format and vowel duration was varied into three distinct steps, yielding 33 stimuli per continuum. The NE subjects examined by Flege (1991) based their identification of vowels (/i/ vs. />/, /2/ vs. /?/) primarily on spectral quality but, as expected, they also showed a small but significant effects of vowel duration. Two vowel studies indirectly the inference that when a consonant results mentioned in the studies previously by Flege (1991) apply to the vowels, then there is an expectation that the identification responses of the experienced non-native subjects go hand in hand with NE subjects more closely than those of the inexperienced non-native speakers are. It is important to note that any two languages in our case Spanish and English when compared might differ in terms of the number of contrastive vowels they have. The other aspect of difference is the manner in which the vowels they are said to posses or share can be realized phonetically and in a contextually induced variability. The adults who are beginners of a language typically interpret L2 vowels as instances closest to L1 vowel and they pronounce them accordingly. However, in the cases where the speech perception remains malleable or when the L2 learners establish new phonetic categories for a given range of L2 vowels, then the perceived relationship between L1 and L2 vowels may change in the vowel production (Kuhl, 1991). Extensive research has been conducted to find out the perceptual relationship of the vowels between the two languages that is Spanish and English are related perceptually using varied techniques. The English vowels that are represented by phonetic symbols are not used to transcribe any of the Spanish vowels and hence classified as new. The Spanish finds it hard to produce the vowel sound in the English language they are learning, this is because the vowels in English are much complex than the same vowels in Spanish (Flege, Bohn & Jang, 1997). This may therefore overwhelm the learner of English as a second language. On the contrary, there are areas of commonality of the vowels of the two languages despite the differences. This differences work quite hard to make learning of the second language difficult for Spanish speakers while the commonalities work towards bridging the gap. The two languages have common vowel sounds despite the fact that at times they are spelt in different letters as the vowels do not exists orally in both languages hence should not create any problem being distinguished. Spanish students have at times messed up while trying to write some Spanish codes in English (Kuhl & Iverson, 1995). An immediate example of this is a case where a Spanish-speaking student attempting to encode the long /a/ sounds who confuses and reverts to the Spanish /e/, which represents a similar sound. Phonological awareness or the fact that any form of speech normally is composed of smaller units of sound is behind the understanding of the relationship that exists between sounds and symbols in language. From research, it is evident that Spanish phonological awareness and word recognition is significantly in support of the performance in the learning of English word recognition and reading skills. Hence, Spanish phonological awareness predicts English word reading. Therefore, it is prudent to conclude that native language phonological awareness or training supports the ability of the children to write and read a foreign language of which in our case there is Spanish as the native language supporting the learning of English (Kuhl, 1991). Learners of English with a Spanish origin would face very little challenges in their efforts to acclimatize hence the need for the teachers to reiterate on the best foundation of the original language to ease their work when it come to learning of the new language. Schools through the administration and teachers ought to encourage and facilitate exchange programs for the language students to open up the world for them hence acquire more languages through constant interaction with the language speakers. This was realized after the same students were made to travel back to their home country Spain of which after they came back English became a bit of a challenge in terms of the phonology, vowels development and sounds origin. It is therefore proper to assume that most teachers already believed in this analogy and only had one advice to give. That the students ought to be ones who travel to the countries where the language they have an interest in learning is administered and taught. (Kuhl, 1991). The students are also advised to be in direct contact with the English speakers most of the time. However, it is worth noting that target like speech is only one aspect of learning English hence the students need to further ways of facilitating learning of English for their improvement in both reading and writing which normally experiences most of the phonological impacts (Flege, Bohn & Jang, 1997). RECOMMENDATIONS Spanish speakers learning English have had trouble in some areas as they strive to learn the language. Some of these areas entail the fact that Spanish always posses’ only one sound per vowel and therefore the addition of the distinct vowel sound as required sounds of English must be quite complicated to the English language learner of a Spanish origin. The schwa sound which is a common vowel sound in English do not occur in Spanish and this creates a scenario where a student may try to use the closest sound to substitute the sound that they are not able to conceptualize given it does not exist in their original language (Levey & Cruz, 2007). All the variables discussed above influence the Spanish speakers who are trying to learn English in terms of their pronunciations and development of their spellings in English. If second language learners do not establish phonetic categories for the new sounds due to the technicalities of understanding of the new language, the learning of the language itself will be affected. This will be in terms of the difficulty in acquiring the sound system of an L2 as it may be derived from the variability in terms of the number and identity of the vowels in the new language with those in the speakers or learner’s native language (Kuhl, 1991). The findings from research clearly show that a perceptual training procedure is effective in training Spanish speaking students to perceive novel vowel sounds in English form. From an application point of view, the procedure can encourage second language teachers to conduct similar analysis in a classroom or school setting, and from a theoretical point of view, it demonstrates that training can positively contribute in the phonetic perception of novel sounds hence facilitating positive phonological transfer. As explained by the investigation on the effects of training native Spanish speakers in the perception and production of the English pairs of vowels /i/-/I/,/u/-/U/, and /a/-/v/ in a regular ESL classroom and on 32 participants of the Spanish origin proved effective as an improved percentage of responses between pretest and post test was recorded. Concisely, acoustic analyses indicate that realizations of Spanish /i/ may occupy a portion of vowel space that is occupied by English /i/, and to a lesser extent English />/ (Flege, Bohn & Jang, 1997). Unsurprisingly, auditory evaluation suggests that Spanish /i/ is closer to English /i/ than />/. Acoustic analyses further reveal that Spanish /e/ realizations occupy a portion of vowel space occupied by English />/ and, to a lesser extent English /2/. The studies reviewed indicate that students are able to transfer many component skills for their first to their second language, which varies, from the phonological awareness, word reading, and knowledge of word and comprehension techniques (Kuhl, 1991). It is wise for the teachers therefore to be aware that the transfer of these skills comes along with errors being made in English at times. An area, which has been noted to contain such errors, is when it comes to children giving spellings of words of the acquired language with that of the native language. It is therefore advisable to the tutors to strengths of the students when they are learning the new languages as well as their weaknesses and errors that they are likely to make which are unavoidable when reading. This will facilitate the development of a design of delivering instructions to learners of the new language (Levey & Cruz, 2007). CONCLUSION The phonological transfer and the impacts that they have on the learners of new languages is real and should be analyzed well to minimize their impacts hence facilitating the efficiency and effectiveness in learning of the new language. The research has largely been directed on the information on vowels while comparing the sound system of English and Spanish. The general principles extended herein are capable of working with many other students from many other language backgrounds since only the commonalities and differences will vary. English learners carry with them a variety of tools to the classroom, which range from their original language and the knowledge about sounds concerning vowels and consonants. The more a learner is able to grasp and relate sounds in their first language and sounds in the English language, the easier it is to support our students build on the similarities identified as they strive to understand the differences, as they become proficient speakers and writers in the new language (Flege, Bohn & Jang, 1997). References Flege, J. E. (1991). The Interlingual Identification of Spanish and English Vowels: Orthographic Evidence. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 43A (3), 701-731. Flege, J. E., Bohn, O., & Jang, S. (1997). Effects of experience on non-native speakers’ production and perception of English vowels. Journal of Phonetics, 25(2), 437-470. Garcia Perez, G. M. (2003). TRAINING SPANISH SPEAKERS IN THE PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH VOWELS. Thesis, 4(1), 1-176. Garcia Perez, G. M. (2005). PERCEPTION OF ENGLISH VOWELS BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF SPANISH IN A REGULAR CLASSROOM SETTING. PEREZ, V. 3, n. 5,(1), 1-9. Kuhl, P. K. (1991). Human adults and human infants show a “perceptual magnet effect” for the prototypes of speech categories, monkeys do not. Perception & Psychophysics, 50(2), 93–107. Kuhl, P. K., & Iverson, P. (1995). Linguistic experience and the “perceptual magnet effect.” In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Theoretical and methodological issues in cross-language speech research (pp. 121–154). Timonium, MD: York Press. Levey, S., & Cruz, D. (2007). The Discrimination of English Vowels by Bilingual Spanish/English and Monolingual English Speakers. CICSD, 3(1),NY. Read More