| Summary: | 碩士 === 南台科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 100 === This study investigates the vowel qualities of Taiwanese EFL young learners in English, Mandarin, and Southern Min. The participants in this study tend to apply their known and learned knowledge of pronunciation to the new or unlearned vowels both in Mandarin or English.
The study under took a direct data collecting by recording three sets of vowels. The word lists adopted by the previous research and revised by the supervisor contain 18 phrases. The target English recording and analyzing vowels are placed in the closed syllabus while Mandarin and Southern Min are in closed syllabus and second place of a phrase. The vowel data of twenty Taiwanese EFL young learners from two classes was acoustically analyzed through Praat to explore, first, discover the vowel qualities of six vowels in three languages most commonly used in Taiwan by obtaining the first formant (F1) and the second formant (F2). Second, find out the role of first language (L1) and second language (L2) in learning a foreign language (L3) by the previous data analysis. An language learning questionnaire assists to discover the language background and experiences.
The findings show that the English vowels produced by Taiwanese EFL young learners had a similar vowel space as Mandarin vowels. Boys have bigger vowel space than girls, and boys’ tongue were in a lower and more front than girls comparing their vowel qualities through 3 sets of vowels. English vowels such as /o/, /u/, and /a/ are influenced by L2. This proves the sound transfer in CAH.
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