The Impact of Singing on the Development of Voicing Contrast in L2 English

A Master of Arts thesis in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) by Laila Adnan Sherif entitled, “The Impact of Singing on the Development of Voicing Contrast in L2 English”, submitted in April 2024. Thesis advisor is Dr. Ozgur Parlak. Soft copy is available (Thesis, Completion Certificate, Approval Signatures, and AUS Archives Consent Form).

Abstract

The incorporation of music training for pronunciation improvement, particularly listening and singing to songs, has become a researchable topic in L2 research (Patel, 2011; Zhang et al., 2023). Nonetheless, many of the studies on this topic have not investigated the benefits of singing and listening to songs on an online platform. Similarly, few compared the benefits of singing and listening to songs on pronunciation improvement (Baills et al., 2021). As such, the current research aims to investigate the benefits of listening and singing to songs on Zoom application. Additionally, it seeks to investigate the differences between singing and listening to songs in terms of pronunciation improvement of the voiceless bilabial stop /p/, and the voiced dental fricative /v/ that Arab learners of English struggle with. Following an experimental design with a pretest and posttest, 34 participants were recruited from an Arabic private school in UAE and were divided into listening and singing groups. Two songs were used to train the learners on the /p/ phoneme, and another two songs were used to train learners on the /v/ phoneme. The recordings of the pretest and posttest were uploaded on Gorilla program for eight evaluators who rated the productions of the participants. A Wilcoxon test for non-parametric data was used to analyze the differences between the two groups based on the ratings of the evaluators. Results showed no significant difference between the listening and singing groups on their /p/ production on the pretest and posttest. However, posttest results of the /v/ phoneme production showed that the singing group outperformed the listening group. The findings are discussed in relation to future recommendations for the use of singing and listening to music in improving L2 pronunciation.