Factores del internos que intervienen en el Departamento de Asuntos Regulatorios

The 20 L2 Chinese participants took part in the speaking tasks individually during March 2016 as part of a normal lesson activity. All the speaking tasks were recorded on a TX650 Sony digital voice recorder. All learners, regardless of whether they were taking part in the research, were given approximately ten minutes to practise the read- aloud tasks with other classmates. The monosyllabic words (Task 1) and sentences (Task 2) were presented in both Chinese characters and pīnyīn, alongside an English translation. In order to lessen any unhelpful influence from pīnyīn, learners were allowed to write their own pronunciation glosses on the task sheet. In actual fact, none of the participants availed themselves of this opportunity. It was difficult to know if they relied more on the characters or the pīnyīn although I suspect that it was the latter option for the majority of the learners. Some of my own pupils would certainly have struggled with the read-aloud tasks had I only presented the text in characters. Given that the focus of the exercise was on their pronunciation, as opposed to their reading ability, I felt that it was more sensible to use both forms. Unlike the Jìnbù 1 textbook the students had been following (Zhu & Yu, 2010), less obvious examples of tone

45 sandhi were taken into account when preparing the pīnyīn transcriptions. For example, the diacritical tone markers on words such as ‘bù’ (no/not) and ‘dă’ (to play) were changed depending on the tone of the following word in the sentence.

Some participants were recorded at the front of the class while their classmates worked silently on a separate writing task although others were recorded in an adjacent room when another teacher was able to supervise the rest of the class. I recognise that some participants consequently had an unfair advantage since they would have had the opportunity to listen to the role play activity with their classmates and silently rehearse potential answers if they had so desired. However, those learners who performed in a separate room may have felt less self-conscious as they were not performing in front of their classmates.

Using Version 2.0.3 of Audacity, an open-source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds, I broke down each learner’s spoken data into separate MP3 sound files with each sound file featuring a separate utterance from the three speaking tasks. All false starts and slips of the tongue were removed, as were any unnaturally long pauses in the middle of sentences when a learner was searching for a suitable word or phrase. I recognise that such actions lower any claims that can be made about the influence of sentence level prosody upon students’ intelligibility levels although this was not the main focus of the analysis. Moreover, I felt that long pauses would have been particularly confusing for a rater when presented with a randomised sentence out of context. In a similar vein, any utterances from Task 3 which featured grammatical errors and/or unusual lexical choices were also removed, along with sentences longer than ten characters. My overarching aim was to increase the likelihood that inaccurate transcriptions by the raters were a direct result of learners’ pronunciation problems as opposed to other factors such as memory difficulties or unexpected word use (Zielinski, 2006, p. 26). Since the use of dictation exercises to measure intelligibility levels required certainty about a speaker’s intended utterance (Munro, 2008, p. 202), I also removed any utterances from the role play activity when I was unsure of what a learner was trying to say.

Individual semi-structured interviews with the 40 L1 Chinese raters took place between April and July 2016 at a variety of locations in the UK, typically in an empty university classroom. The interviews incorporated the transcription tasks and rating exercises

46 and were recorded on a TX650 Sony digital voice recorder. Raters were asked to transcribe the randomised utterances of a single participant into Chinese characters

and pīnyīn. The utterances had been randomised to control for practice effects so that

the intelligibility levels of utterances from Task 3 were not artificially high. Raters were allowed to listen to each utterance a maximum of three times. The sound files had been copied on to a laptop and I also provided the raters with a pair of headphones. For any sentence level utterances from Tasks 2 and 3, they were also asked to provide accentedness and comprehensibility ratings and to verbally justify their ratings if possible. At the end of the interviews, I informed the raters of the learners’ intended utterances.

I then prepared the audio extracts for the stimulated recall interviews with the learners using Version 2.0.3 of Audacity. The interviews with each of the learners took place at Schools A and B in July 2016, four months after the initial speaking tasks. The delay was due to the length of time it took to carry out the interviews with the raters and subsequently analyse the data. However, subsequent doubts about the validity of the interviews can be played down given that the focus was not on bringing to light the learners’ original thought processes at the time of data production. At School A, the interviews took place individually in empty classrooms outside normal lesson times. At School B, the interviews took place individually in a separate office space during a Chinese lesson. In order to increase the strength of the stimulus, learners were presented with a written transcript of each extract in Chinese characters, pīnyīn and English. The audio extracts and written transcripts were embedded into individual PowerPoint presentations on a laptop with learners asked to use a pair of headphones which I provided. Most of the extracts came from Task 1 and were consequently at the monosyllabic word level. This was primarily to increase the salience of any pronunciation error, and also because intelligibility breakdowns frequently lacked a straightforward phonetic explanation at the sentence level. At the start of the interview, all learners were informed that five of the audio extracts contained at least one intelligibility breakdown while the other five extracts had been accurately transcribed. Towards the end of each interview, I highlighted any discrepancies between participants’ perceptions of their production data and their actual performance.

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