The parallels that are present between language and music, together with popular beliefs that musicality may be a factor enhancing language learning, especially with regard to pronunciation, prompted the idea of designing an academic course whose main aim was to demonstrate the relation between the two domains from the linguistic perspective. There were eighteen students participating in the course which was an elective for 1st year MA students of English at the University of Łódź. The course content included presentation of direct links between language and music, and of selected studies indicating the influence of music on developing various aspects of linguistic performance, e.g. second language learning (e.g. Pastuszek-Lipińska, 2008; Kolinsky et al., 2009), early reading abilities (Fonseca-Mora et al., 2018) or pitch processing (Besson et al., 2007). The practical part of the course involved testing the students' musical abilities with the use of various tools: tests available online and a sample of a music school entrance exam (based on Rybińska et al., 2016). The participants completed tasks related to their English speech performance, i.e. recording the passage The North Wind and the Sun and analysing their English speech production with the use of acoustic speech analysis software (Praat) in order to learn about the ways in which they could explore the possible links between their musicality and performance in L2 English. The majority of students claimed that they had not been aware of the degree of interplay between language and music, and had overestimated their musical abilities prior to taking the tests, but they saw the potential of music training not only in language learning, but other spheres of human activity.
The aim of this pilot study is to describe, analyse and interpret the outcome of a pronunciation self-assessment task carried out by Polish learners of English at an academic level and their reflections on progress and what they believe they need in order to feel more successful as speakers of English in terms of pronunciation. It also attempts to discuss certain individual factors determining the perceptions of the learners’ performance. Seventeen Polish first-year university students of English philology were asked to assess their improvement in the production of individual English sounds based on two recording sessions that they had undergone at the beginning and at the end of the academic year, i.e. before and after a two-semester pronunciation course. The results of the students’ assessment were then compared with the teacher’s assessment. All of the participants were recorded reading a diagnostic passage which concentrates on examining individual segments of Standard British English (SBE). They were also asked a number of questions in the form of an open-ended questionnaire related to their attitudes and feelings towards certain mispronunciations and general performance in the two recording sessions, how they perceive the way they speak English, their opinions as to the most effective techniques and activities in pronunciation training. Keywords: self-assessment, English pronunciation teaching and learning, improvement
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