How to deliver a winning speechat japanese speech contests in Uzbekistan

Аннотация

This paper reports on the usefulness of prosodic training in the preparation for speech contests in a foreign language. In language teaching, instructors tend to pay more attention to the correction of syntactic and semantic errors than pronunciation errors. However, the prosodic errors cost in speech production when the tone of voice or impression of the speech delivery are crucial, such as ata speech contest. Unless taught specifically, foreign language learners tend to assign the intonation of their native tongue on the utterance. The example was demonstrated by the speech of an Uzbek learner of Japanese. Pronunciation teaching tends to be neglected in classrooms in the multilingual society of the 21st century.It has been encouraged to communicate freely rather than worrying about native-like pronunciation too much. However, pronunciation, particularly prosody plays a crucial role to make a speech appealing and attractiveto the audience and achieve the goalfor the participating contestants,that is, winning at the speech contest.In this report, the importance of prosodic training isaddressed by presenting the intonation of untrained production of Japanese sentences in a digitized form in comparison with the native speaker’ sproduction. 1. Linguistic and cultural background of Uzbek learners of Japanese In Uzbekistan, the official languagehas beenpredominantly Uzbek since their independence from the USSR.However, Russian is still widely spoken and most Uzbek people can speak at least these two languages well, or possibly three languages if they speak Tajik, or Turkish. This multilingual environment is a great advantage for language learning. In addition, both Japanese and Uzbek belong to the Ural-Altaic language group and sharemany linguistic similarities. Therefore learning Japanese should be easier for Uzbek native speakers than for speakers of Indo-European languages. 1-1. Love for public speaking For Australian university students who I taught for three decades, the participation in speech contests was an unnecessary chore which did not affect their grades. They preferred to spend their time improving their grade or assignments. Individualism prevails over the fame for the university they belong to. Because of this culture, it was not easy for teachers to recruit good students for speech contests. Contrary to the Australian situation, Uzbek students seem tohave a Russian speech culture. Making a speech in front of audienceis an important part of their social activities. They are proud of presenting their own opinion in front of others,which raises their profile as a model student. Even in private social functions, people often make a speech willingly,make a toast and skull a glass of vodka. 1-2. Linguistic background The content of the speech is undoubtedly the most important part to be considered in the marking criteria. However, the same weight is allocated to the pronunciation and expressive intonation of speech in speech contests in Uzbekistan. Here, native-like, natural, less foreign accented speech becomes in high demand.It is required to deliver a speech full of emotions and acting particularly when you quote someone else’s utterances. Just a flawless,textbook readingis not good enough. To this end, you need to understand the accent and intonation pattern of the target language you deliver the speech, in this case, Japanese. Thus, we should identify the linguistic gap between the two languages, Uzbek and Japanese. 158 1-2-1.Phonetic and phonological issues for Uzbek learners of Japanese First of all, the comparison of Uzbek and Japanese consonants and vowels are shown below. The inventory of Uzbek consonants entails all Japanese consonants and the Uzbek language has contracted sounds (Yo-oncha, chu, cha) as well. Japanese has only five vowels, while Uzbek has six. The tongue height of “え” [e] and “お” [o] differs, but does not cause a major problem for communication.The Uzbek language lost vowel harmony which was a typical characteristic oflanguages in the Turkic language family (Sjoberg 1963) Japanese has two other phonemes,alveolar flap [ ſ ] and voiceless palatal fricative [ ς ]. Figure 1: Uzbek consonants =phonemes which do not exist in Japanese (George Mason University the speech accent archive:2022) Figure 2: Uzbek vowels (left)and Japanese vowels (right) Pronunciation errors are not limited to incorrect consonants and vowels. All three components of spoken language have to be considered to improve pronunciation of the language you are learning, that is, segmental features, suprasegmental features and prosodic organization. segmental features (consonants, vowels) Spoken language suprasegmental features (pitch, duration, loudness) prosodic organization (accent, intonation) While it is relatively easy to point out the incorrect consonants and vowels, errors above the segmental level are not easy to identify, particularly for non-trained listeners. Even experienced language instructors can agr