2016 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
What aspects of prosody and non-verbal language can be learned autonomously?
| Project/Area Number |
26580103
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| Research Institution | Hokkaido University |
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Principal Investigator |
河合 剛 北海道大学, メディア・コミュニケーション研究院, 教授 (70312981)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
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| Keywords | prosody / non-verbal language / CALL |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Research Question: When learning to speak non-native languages face to face, what aspects of prosody (e.g., pitch, speech rate) and non-verbal language (e.g, hand movements, eye contact, facial expressions) can be learned autonomously, especially for flip learning?
Method: Computer-aided language learning system (CALL) for learning prosody and non-verbal language skills discovers which skills can be acquired with minimal instruction from instructors.
The problem: Clear, expressive prosody and non-verbal language (NVL) is critical in spoken language. Yet Japanese high schools and colleges have marginalized learning of prosody and NVL (partly due to their unimportance in career advancement, and partly due to lack of teaching time). We desire our students to learn at least some aspects of pronunciation and NVL via self-study in order to compensate for the lack of instruction, and to allow instructors who do teach pronunciation and NVL to focus on pronunciation skills that need to be taught in person.
The hypothesis: We hypothesize that some types of prosody and NVL can be learned autonomously. Pitch (the height of the voice), sound duration (the length of speech sounds and pauses), eye contact, body posture, and the gestures of fingers, hands, and arms are used in face-to-face communication in all human languages. If students can manipulate these variables in their native language (L1), presumably they may also in their target language (L2) as long as students are explicitly aware of what variables need to be adjusted how.
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