A Large Collection of Sentences Read Aloud by Vietnamese Learners of Japanese and Native Speaker's Reverse Shadowings

Abstract

The main objective of language learning is to acquire good communication skills in the target language. From this viewpoint, the primary goal of pronunciation training is to become able to speak in an intelligible-enough or comprehensible-enough pronunciation, not a native-sounding one. However, achieving such pronunciation is still not easy for many learners mainly because of their lack of opportunity to use the language they learn and to receive some feedbacks on intelligibility or comprehensibility from native listeners. In order to solve this problem, the authors previously proposed a novel method of native speakers' reverse shadowing and showed that the degree of inarticulation observed in native speakers' shadowings of learners' utterances can be used to estimate the comprehensibility of learners' speech. One major problem in our previous research however, was that the experiment was done on a relatively small scale; the number of learners was only six. For this reason, in this study, we carried out a larger collection of Japanese utterances read aloud by 60 Vietnamese learners and Japanese native speakers' shadowings of those utterances. An analysis of the subjective ratings done by the native speakers implies that some modifications we made from our previous experiment contribute to making the framework of native speakers' reverse shadowing more pedagogically effective. Further, a preliminary analysis of the recorded shadowings shows good correlations to listeners' perceived shadowability.