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- Chinese voices in portuguese: call needs for the oral skills learningPublication . Castelo, AdelinaThis study aims at identifying which CALL (Computer-assisted Language Learning) materials should be made available to the Chinese learners of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL) for them to improve their oral skills in a more autonomous way. Adopting an approach of needs analysis and clients’ views inquiry, it is based on an online questionnaire completed by 418 Chinese volunteer participants who are learners of PFL. The participants’ perceptions about (a) their own difficulties in pronunciation and oral understanding and (b) the CALL materials needed to address these oral skills were analysed in three ways: as a whole; according to the participants’ proficiency level in PFL; according to their geographical region. The results allowed for a reflection on the relevance of using these inquiries and for the proposal of a prioritisation list for the creation of new CALL materials. This list gives special importance to the tasks perceived as the most difficult by the participants (distinction of voicing, liquids and vowel height, understanding of text and word) and to the CALL types of materials considered the most needed (word recognition system, recorded rhymes, poems, tongue twisters, songs or texts with written transcription).
- Produção de vogais orais tónicas do PLE por falantes nativos de chinês mandarimPublication . Castelo, Adelina; Freitas, Maria JoãoO presente estudo tem dois objetivos: descrever a produção de vogais orais tónicas por falantes nativos de chinês mandarim em processo de aprendizagem do português europeu como língua estrangeira e identificar as implicações didáticas decorrentes dos resultados descritos. Os participantes (oito falantes nativos de chinês mandarim aprendendo português durante um ano letivo) realizaram uma tarefa de nomeação de imagens correspondentes a itens lexicais fonologicamente controlados; as suas produções orais foram gravadas e foneticamente transcritas. Os resultados são descritos tendo em conta (i) o impacto das variáveis fonológicas na taxa de sucesso de produção de vogais e (ii) os tipos de estratégias de reconstrução nas produções não conformes ao alvo. Os resultados contribuem para a definição do perfil fonético dos aprendentes chineses de português. Por fim, são identificadas implicações didáticas dos dados relevantes para o ensino do português no contexto em foco.
- Preliminary results on the acquisition of Portuguese voicing assimilation in coda fricative by Chinese learnersPublication . Wang, Xinyan; Castelo, Adelina; Zhou, ChaoIn the phonological system of European Portuguese (EP), there is a process of voicing assimilation in the fricative in Coda position, which is produced as [ʒ] before a voiced consonant and as [ʃ] before a voiceless consonant ([1]). There are already studies on the segmental acquisition of fricatives among the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (MC) who learn Portuguese as a second language (L2) (e.g. [2]). However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study on the acquisition of this EP assimilation process of among MC native speakers. Consequently, evaluating the process application in the production of these learners can contribute to a better understanding of their phonological acquisition in EP and to a reflection on different models of phonology acquisition of an L2 (e.g. [3], [4]). Therefore, the present work aims to observe the voicing specification in the fricative in Coda position, in controlled speech produced by MC native speakers who are learners of EP. Ten EP native speakers and thirty Chinese learners of EP participated in a reading task. The stimuli consist of 40 pseudowords and 20 distractors. All items were disyllabic words with the format CVC.CV, including five groups of 8 pseudowords each according to the manner of articulation of the second syllable consonant: voiceless fricative, voiced fricative, voiceless oral stop, voiced oral stop, nasal stop. Participants were recorded reading each item within a carrier the sentence “Digo XX novamente.” (“I say XX again.”). The results show that, as expected, the native speakers applied voicing assimilation systematically; by contrast, the Chinese learners predominantly produced voiceless fricatives, regardless of the voicing of the following consonant. There might be an effect of the manner of the following consonant, as many learners use almost exclusively the voiceless consonant in all contexts while some tend to employ the voiced one only before a nasal consonant. These results suggest that the success in learning the fricative voicing ([2]) does not guarantee the acquisition of a phonological process implying such voicing alternation. After a detailed presentation of the results, the implications of these are analyzed in terms of phonological acquisition and didactic implementation.
- A aquisição das consoantes laterais do português europeu por aprendentes chinesesPublication . Zhou, Chao; Freitas, Maria João; Castelo, AdelinaThe present study examined the production of European Portuguese (EP) lateral consonants by 14 Chinese learners, through a picture naming task eliciting the target segments in all possible syllable and word-level positions. Our results illustrate that /l/ is stable in singletons (100% target-like) due to the positive transfer from Mandarin Chinese. However, it is very often vocalized in codas (only 16.7% target-like production, [ɫ]), which might be attributed to a phonetically based tendency (Graham, 2017; Johnson & Britain, 2007). The high accuracy (97% target-like) of /l/ in onset clusters, an absent structure in the L1, can be the result of the heterosyllabic nature of EP obstruent-liquid sequences (Veloso, 2006) or of the association of two segments to a single skeletal position, which was also argued as an intermediate stage in EP L1 acquisition (Freitas, 2003)./ʎ/ is still in acquisition (52.4% target-like), and is often produced as an L1 category [lj], due to acoustic and articulatory similarity.
- Acquisition of Portuguese mid vowels by Chinese Mandarin native speakers: some data on perceptionPublication . Castelo, Adelina; Zhou, Chao; Amorim, ClaraPrior research reveals that, when acquiring European Portuguese (EP), L1-Mandarin learners with beginning ([1]) and more advanced proficiency levels ([2]) neutralise the distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/ to the low vowel in their L2-Portuguese production. Given that major L2 speech learning models ([3], [4], [5]) assume a tight link between L2 speech perception and production, we speculate that the observed production difficulty can be ascribed to misperception: the two target vowels are perceptually assimilated to an L1 category. In this work, we explicitly tested this perception-based account by assessing how L1-Mandarin learners perceptually categorise EP /e/ and /ɛ/. 70 L1-Mandarin learners, whose Portuguese proficiency level was measured by LextPT ([6]), performed a forced-choice identification task. The test stimuli are 36 disyllabic paroxytone pseudowords with target vowels always in stressed position (12 CVCV items × 3 talkers). The perceptual results show that L1-Mandarin learners fail to discriminate between the two EP vowels, as shown in Figure 1. In stark contrast to previous production studies ([1], [2]), where the vowel distinction is somehow preserved (otherwise the confusability would have been bidirectional as well), the current results suggest that the two speech modalities may not develop in tandem in L2 speech learning. Moreover, a mixed-effects logistic regression does not find an effect of L2 proficiency on learners’ perceptual performance. No evidence thus indicates that the observed perceptual difficulty will be mitigated with an increase in L2-Portuguese proficiency.
- Cultural representations in foreign language education: a study on chinese learners of PortuguesePublication . Castelo, Adelina; Xavier, Lola Geraldes; Rouxinol, CláudiaStudying a foreign language is strongly associated with learning the target culture(s), developing representations of the foreign language realities, and acquiring interculturality. A pilot study conducted over a 4-year bachelor’s degree program in Portuguese as a Foreign Language aimed at understanding the cultural representations of Portuguese-speaking realities by Chinese students and how they evolved. Results show that: the foreign culture representations only slightly change over the 4 years; the mobility programs’ destination greatly influences representations of the host country; the students’ passivity causes superficial and school-based cultural representations of the target cultures, countries, and their inhabitants. These results have several pedagogical implications concerning the mobility programs’ preparation and the intercultural approach in the classroom.
- What does the pronunciation of plosives and fricatives by Chinese learners of Portuguese teach us?Publication . Castelo, AdelinaProducing didactic materials for teaching the Portuguese pronunciation to Chinese learners should take into account their specific difficulties. Consequently, defining the phonetic-phonological profile of these learners is one of the important tasks to be accomplished, and for this purpose a study based on the oral production data of plosives and fricatives is still in need. The aim of the present study is: (i) to identify the problems faced by the Chinese learners of Portuguese in the pronunciation of plosives and fricatives; (ii) to draw the didactic implications for the teaching of pronunciation. Eight native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were asked to name orally pictured objects. The words included in the corpus were controlled for some linguistic variables (e.g. stress position) and included one of the twelve obstruent consonants in standard European Portuguese. The results are analyzed in terms of (i) the impact of linguistic variables on the success rate and (ii) the reconstruction strategies for non-target productions. An important finding is the existence of significantly more difficulties with voiced plosives. Finally, the contributions to the definition of the phonetic-phonological profile of Chinese learners of Portuguese and to these consonants’ pronunciation teaching are systematized.
- Audiolivros literários como recurso de aprendizagem de PLE: estudo exploratório com aprendentes chinesesPublication . Castelo, Adelina; Xavier, Lola Geraldes; Yun, LiuCom o crescimento da acessibilidade aos textos literários em formato de audiolivro digital, torna-se necessário refletir sobre o papel destes na aprendizagem de uma língua estrangeira, em particular do Português. Existem já várias reflexões sobre as vantagens destes recursos e alguns estudos empíricos que comprovam os seus benefícios em situações concretas. Contudo, ainda são muito pouco conhecidas as práticas reais de uso dos audiolivros literários por parte dos aprendentes de línguas estrangeiras. Assim, este estudo, a partir de uma microrrealidade de ensinoaprendizagem de Português como Língua Estrangeira (PLE), na China, visa contribuir (i) para o conhecimento do uso dos audiolivros literários como recurso de aprendizagem de PLE por parte dos aprendentes e (ii) para a reflexão sobre a sensibilização necessária de modo a que aprendentes e professores aproveitem melhor este recurso. Para isso, foi aplicado um questionário a 52 alunos chineses de PLE. Os principais resultados mostram como os formatos de leitura preferidos correspondem ao livro digital e ao livro impresso, havendo pouca experiência de recurso aos audiolivros digitais, apesar de os aprendentes terem consciência das vantagens destes instrumentos. As conclusões obtidas permitemnos refletir sobre as necessidades de sensibilização dos aprendentes para o recurso aos audiolivros digitais como meio de aprendizagem.