THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ‘ENGLISH LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE’ AND THAI STUDENTS VOWEL REDUCED ENGLISH WORD IDENTIFICATION ABILITY

Abstract

The objectives of this research are to: analyze and compare the ability in identifying English words with reduced vowel sounds using dictation tasks, and to analyze the relation between the English language experience and identification ability. The sample consisted of 3 groups of speakers: 1) 10 native speakers of English; 2) 30 Thai students with ‘high’ language competence; 3) 30 Thai students with ‘low’ English language competence. The test words in this study contained 3 reduced vowel sounds: . It was found that the native speaker group could identify 98.33% of the words correctly, 1.00% incorrectly, and were unable to identify 0.67%. The high competence group identified 62.56% of the words correctly, 31.11% incorrectly, and were unable to identify 6.33%. The low competence group had the lowest identification ability, identifying only 26.00% of the words correctly, 47.22% incorrectly, and were unable to identify 26.78%. Five major categories of errors were established: 1) Identifying the word correctly, but incorrectly spelling the word; 2) Identifying the word incorrectly as another word; 3) Identifying the word as another word and incorrectly spelling it; 4) Identifying a ‘non – word’ which is incorrect and meaningless; 5) Not identifying the word. The native speakers showed instances of the first and second categories. The high competence group demonstrated problems identifying words in the first four categories, but predominantly within category two. The low competence group also displayed errors identifying words in the first four categories as well as markedly higher instances in the fifth category. It can be deduced that vowel sound reduction of English words has a great effect on both listening skills and word identification.