A Study on the Influence of “Peer Tutoring Program” in Improving English Pronunciation of the Freshmen in English Major

1、 “同伴辅导同伴辅导”对提高英语专业新生英语发音的对提高英语专业新生英语发音的 作用研究作用研究 以河师大外国语学院英语教育专业 08、09 级学生的实验为例 a study on the influence of “peer tutoring program” in improving english pronunciation of the freshmen in english major a trial in grade 08 peer tutoring program; incorrect pronunciation; pronunciation training; table of

2、 contents acknowledgements. 摘要 . abstract. table of contents . introduction.5 chapter 1 general principles .2 the background and emotions of our research.2 the general frame of the study .2 chapter 2 the history and background of the “peer tutoring program”.2 chapter 3 the process of the “peer tutor

3、ing program” which took in henan normal university in 2009 .5 1 preparing stage.6 2 tutoring stage.10 3 assessing stage.10 chapter 4 the discussion and achievements of the “peer tutoring program” .11 chapter 5 conclusion.17 bibliography .20 introduction the abroad expert had started the autonomous l

4、earning towards foreign language and got a lot of research and discussion since the 1970s. while the local scholar expects after beginning from the 80s in 20th century to the discussion of english independence study and gets a value and expands in the end of 90s. most of them confirm the positive ef

5、fect of cultivating the ability of autonomous learning in the education of university english, and discuss about the training methods in different perspective, almost 71% them are theory introduction, while 29% of them are based on their empirical studies. the research target is confined within the

6、middle and primary school students, open universities and night college students, at the same time, their research scope is focused on the features of the autonomous learning class, lacking of the empirical studies which aim at a certain abilities about the developing of autonomous learning in engli

7、sh majors. so, some researchers who have studied the foreign language education in universities for many years believe that its especially important to learn the autonomous learning methods for the foreign language students. a study on the influence of “peer tutoring program” in improving english pr

8、onunciation of the english major freshmen a trial in grade 08 2. the process of the “peer tutoring program” which was taken in henan normal university in 2009; 3. the discussion and achievements of the “peer tutoring program”. 4. conclusion chapter 2 the history and background of the “peer tutoring

9、program” the first recorded use of an organized, systematic peer tutorial learning project in the western world didnt come about until the late 1700s. arising from school budget woes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, peer tutoring became an effective way of giving underprivileged (at this t

10、ime, sadly, only male) children a reasonable shot at an education. the first systematic approach to peer tutoring is credited to andrew bell, who was the superintendent of the military male asylum at egmore, in england (goodlad et. al. 23). when bell took the reins at this institution, the asylum wa

11、s run as a school for boys whose fathers had been killed during wartime. bell transformed the asylum into more of an official school. many teachers feel that they do not have enough time in the school day to work one-on-one with every student. peer tutoring is a way for all students to get one-on-on

12、e help and enough time to practice and learn. for peer tutoring, every student in the class is paired with another. the teacher writes lessons that one student uses to teach or tutor another. during the tutoring, one student explains the work to another student, asks the student to answer questions,

13、 and tells the student whether his or her answers are correct. peer tutoring is usually considered less threatening and intimidating. there are many benefits for both the peer tutor and tutee in this relationship, one aspect of this is that the tutor can establish a rapport with the tutee in a way t

14、hat a teacher cannot. a peer tutor may have taken the same class recently, or have taken similar classes. because the peer tutor is seen by the tutee as being more at their own levels, advice given by the tutor may be accepted more readily than advice from a teacher. another key reason for this is t

15、hat a peer tutor does not give any grade on the paper, whereas a teacher serving in a tutor role may still be perceived as someone who grades papers. peer tutors can be trained through on-the-job training, as well as through formal workshops. new tutors can be paired with more experienced tutors for

16、 their first few tutorials, and after the tutors are satisfied that the new tutors can operate alone they can give one-on-one tutoring. a key aspect of tutor training is the reflection on tutorials with other tutors. this reflection looks at what could have gone better as well as the tutors progress

17、 in giving tutorials. there is a realistic example of the “peer tutoring program” in the river east collegiate in canada and they said, “the peer tutoring program is a service runnel by the students, for the students. students with an average of 80% or higher in a course offer their talents by signi

18、ng up for this program in hopes of helping other students meet their goals. this service is available to all grades for both tutoring and being tutored. once a tutor and a tutee are matched up they simply choose a specific time to meet and then they are all ready to go. the program is monitored by t

19、he river east collegiate resource teacher. students who volunteer to be a tutor are awarded by the school at the end of the year.” but there is no english learning example for the chinese students. in higher education tutorial settings, the benefits of peer tutoring programs also extend to class tut

20、ors (a website about peer tutoring at rmit university). using grounded theory techniques, it was found that the following five themes underlie their experiences: role exploration, sharing responsibility, regulation of the peer tutored groups, harnessing the peer tutors role and community (see articl

21、e for further detail). esl training can be separated from regular tutor training as a subject that contains special difficulties that must be dealt with on their own. tutoring in an online writing lab can also be separated from normal training. the critical importance of youth having the opportunity

22、 to participate in meaningful roles such as youth-helping-youth is a salient factor in preventing social problems, including substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and delinquency. the need exists to expand the opportunity to have all students experience the helping role. the new model: * calls for in-dep

23、th preparation and training of peer tutors and their ongoing reflection on the tutoring process; * removes the negativity usually associated with receiving help, since all students participate in giving and receiving help; * sees being a tutee as preparation for becoming a tutor; * leads to the crea

24、tion of student-centered, peer-focused schools (gartner, 1992). (an ancillary aim is the spread of other peer opportunities: peer mentoring, peer mediation, peer education, peer helping.) above all, a peer tutor is anyone who is of a similar status as the person being tutored. in an undergraduate in

25、stitution this would usually be other undergraduates, as distinct from the graduate students who may be teaching the writing classes; in a k-12 school this is usually a student from the same grade or higher. there are some basic rules to establishing your peer tutoring program, the key to success is

26、 a clear objective. thorough planning and evidence gathering activities will contribute to substantiation of the decisions you will make. zimmerman believes that the emotion of the autonomous learning should be inherent and self- motivated essentially, the study process should be planned, the studen

27、ts could realized the results of the autonomous learning, and control themselves in the course. some local researchers took a conclusion about the common features of autonomous learning (as follows) based on zimmermans viewpoint. we can find that “peer tutoring program” suits these common features.

28、at the same time, the “peer tutoring program” could teach students the methods of autonomous learning and give them more free learning time according to sinclair goodlad and beverley hirsts studies, besides, it takes great advantage of ameliorating the relationship between the peer tutor and tutee.

29、with all the above viewpoints and comparison, it could not only cultivate the dependence and autonomy of the students, but also come up with a new way to solve the incorrect pronunciation problem which puzzled the english major students for a long time by taking the peer tutoring program into phonic

30、 work. chapter 3 the process of the “peer tutoring program” which took in henan normal university in 2009 as we all know, we cant have a convenient or correct conversation unless we learn the pronunciation well. however, in the research, we found that most freshmen dont have the ability to pronuncia

31、tion correctly because of the influence of the exam-oriented education, much of the worse scores students in the research admit that they missed the practice of voice to get more higher mark, while it need not consider the score, so they can have more chance to improve their ability of pronunciation

32、. there are three main stages of the peer tutoring program in henan normal university in 2009-2010, which are “preparing stage”, “tutoring stage”, and “assessing stage”. the total time of this item is set into one semester (from april to june in 2010) by considering the lack of longitudinal empirica

33、l study to the english major students autonomous learning by now. 1. preparing stage (april in 2010) the preparing stage is just like a rpg game, some people play the role of the tutor while some others play the role of the testee. the former contains 191 students from grade 2008, 12 freshmen from g

34、rade 2009 and 9 postgraduates (212 people of all), the latter contains 271 freshmen from grade 2009 and five students from grade 2008 (276 people of all). the tutor and the testee are both come into being by two approaches which are voluntary application and recommended by the english course teacher

35、, then the members of our “the detection and counter plan to the incorrect pronunciation of english major freshmen” scientific research item take a random sampling to the students who take part in this program as the testee by considering the english course teachers advices, then we take a voice pro

36、nunciation collecting work as long as a week to 78 students whose pronunciation problem is obviously serious before the beginning of this program. testee: the testee is divided into two classes, the experimental group and the control group completely random (). the former group is to get the trainin

37、g while the latter group will not. each group has 138 persons and the 78 students whose pronunciation problem is obviously serious are also divided into the two groups completely random (each group has 39 persons). in the total item project, the experimental group people are asked not to tell anothe

38、r group that they are getting training and told that another group people are getting the same training while the control group people will be asked to learn the book english pronunciation exercises by themselves in a certain place at a certain time to avoid the pygmalion effect (the pygmalion effec

39、t, or rosenthal effect, refers to the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, often children or students and employees, the better they perform. the effect is named after pygmalion, a cypriot sculptor in a narrative by ovid in greek mythology, who fell in love with a fema

40、le statue he had carved out of ivory. the pygmalion effect is a form of self- fulfilling prophecy, and, in this respect, people with poor expectations internalize their negative label, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly. within sociology, the effect is often cited with regards to edu

41、cation and social class. which is said in the wikipedia ). the content of the voice pronunciation collecting work is based on the book english pronunciation exercises which is edited by zhang guanlin who is a vice professor of the english major in beijing normal university. the test is divided into

42、three parts named vowel, consonant, and rule of reading and the skill of pronunciation. the location of this test is in a quiet classroom. we will give the students questionnaire before the test to build a basic information file. the students have five minutes to know well the content without knowin

43、g it before which not only make sure the authenticity of this test but also make the students show their true ability. the people who are in charge of the test are ordered not to show their feelings and emotions while being in test to avoid the experimenter effect (is a term used to describe any of

44、a number of subtle cues or signals from an experimenter that affect the performance or response of subjects in the experiment. the cues may be unconscious nonverbal cues, such as muscular tension or gestures. they may be vocal cues, such as tone of voice. research has demonstrated that the expectati

45、ons and biases of an experimenter can be communicated to experimental subjects in subtle, unintentional ways and that these cues can significantly affect the outcome of the experiment -rosenthal 1998. robert rosenthal has found that even slight differences in instructions given to control and experi

46、mental groups can affect the outcome of an experiment. different vocal intonations, subtle gestures, even slight changes in posture, might influence the subjects.) all the voice data is saved in the matching file. then we members of the scientific research item will take the work of transferring the

47、 voice data into text data after getting a training of the theoretical course of the voice. the following is the standard of the transferring. a. vowel it contains the jaw height, the tongue position, and the lip configuration; they could be described to the words: lower/higher, front/ central/back,

48、 round/unrounded. among the former three standards, the tongue position is the most difficult and important, for the front, center, and back of the tongue are distinguished, as are four levels of tongue height: the highest position the tongue can achieve without producing audible friction (high or c

49、lose); the lowest position the tongue can achieve (low or open); and two intermediate levels, dividing the intervening space into auditorily equivalent areas (mid-high or open-mid, and mid-low or close-mid). (crystal, 1997;155-156) the ipa system defines eight “primary” cardinal vowels, in relation

50、to which a further set of “secondary” cardinal vowels can be defined. by convention, the eight primary cardinal vowels are numbered from one to eight as follows: cv1 i, cv2 e, cv3 , cv4 a, cv5 , cv6 , cv7 o, cv8 u. the first five of these are unrounded vowels while cv6, cv7, and cv8 are rounded ones

51、. b. constant the categories of constant are established on the basis of several factors and the most important of these factors are: (a) the actual relationship between the articulators thus the way in which the air passes through certain parts of the vocal tract, and (b) where in the vocal tract t

52、here is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of air. the former is known as the manner of articulation and the latter as the place of articulation. besides, there is another part called the work of vocal cords which can be described as voiceless/voiced. the manner of articulation refers to w

53、ays in which articulation can be accomplished: (a) the articulation may close off the oral tract for an instant or a relatively long period; (b) they may narrow the space considerably; or (c) they may simply modify the shape of the tract by approaching each other. it contains stop/nasal/fricative/ap

54、proximant/lateral/trill/tap and flap/affricate. and it can be described to plosive/fricative/affricative/nasal/glide. the place of articulation refers to the point where a constant is made. practically constants may be produced at any place between the lips and the vocal folds. eleven places of arti

55、culation are distinguished on the ipa chart as following: bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, glottal. and it can be described to bilabial/labiodental/dental/alveolar/ alv-palatal/velar/glottal/bi-velar/ lingua-palata/retroflex-alveol

56、ar/glottal-labiovelar. now the constants of english can be described in the following way: p voiceless bilabial stop b voiced bilabial stop s voiceless alveolar fricative z voiced alveolar fricative c. the skills of pronunciation while in our research item, we usually label the testees sound with th

57、e xml as follows: head information make-up *it refers to “the beginning of the transferring”, “the id number”, “the disk number”, “the end of the transferring”. * it refers to “the information of the participant”, “the number of the examiner”, “the number of the examinee”, “the end sign”. * the gend

58、er value stands for female and 2 stands for male discourse information tagging 1 turn: it refers to the amount of words one speaker say in one talk, it expressed by ; 2 repeat: it doesnt need to label designedly, just to write the words that are repeated; 3 pause: in the system of labeling, a short

59、pause (about 2-3 seconds) is expressed by “” while a longer pause is expressed by “” 4 cramped voice: the words that are difficult to understand are expressed by “?”, and one “?” stands for one syllable. mispronunciation tagging at first, we should confirm the tagging scheme, the treatment to four b

60、asic errors are as follows, 1 wrong pronunciation: which is expressed with “w”, and then labeling the words that are mispronounced after “w”; 2 plus pronunciation: it is expressed with “p” before the syllables that are added with a “-” between them. 3 sound absorbing, its called slurring words, too,