Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 22, Issue 1, 1999

Forensic Phonetics is an important application of Linguistics that has emerged as a discipline over the last decade. This paper describes a Forensic Phonetic experiment which investigates the nature of within- and between-speaker variation in the acoustic characteristics of the word hello in demonstrably similar-sounding voices. The nature of within-segment variation is determined in repeats of the same word said under different prosodic conditions in order to exclude as much of the linguistically determined variation as is consistent with the realities of the forensic situation, thus providing a good estimate of variation associated with speakers. Intonationally varying tokens of the naturally produced single word utterance hello from six adult Australian males are compared with respect to fundamental frequency, and to centre frequencies and bandwidths of the F-pattern below 5 KHz. This comprises the first five formants and extra resonances, including a possible singer’s formant and tracheal resonance. Results show that between-speaker acoustic differences are pervasive, though not ubiquitous. Magnitudes of between-speaker differences are presented for all parameters, and their forensic significance evaluated. ANOVA and chi-square tests show that even similar-sounding voices differ significantly in their acoustics, especially centre frequencies of F2-F4, formant bandwidth, and incidence of extra resonances. Simulated forensic conditions show that some of these differences are not realistically demonstrable. Nevertheless, there remain sufficient significant differences to distinguish 13 out of 15 pairs: a value of 13% for the denominator of the associated Bayesian Likelihood Ratio for the prosecution hypothesis. Directions for future research are indicated.

Recent work in literacy has emphasised the partnership between parents and schools in furthering children’s literacy development. This paper discusses the nature of this partnership in late primary school and early secondary school learning in Australia and the ways in which information is communicated between the partners. It is argued that, while schools devote a lot of attention to communicating with parents, this communication does not typically become true dialogue. Instead, the communication is always monodirectional with the school communicating messages to parents, but rarely receiving (or attending to) messages from parents. As such, parents come to be viewed by the schools as junior partners in their children’s literacy development and the school view of partnership focuses on moving parents into the school’s framework. At the same time some parents do not see the partnership in the same way as the school and instead locate responsibility for developing basic skills with the school. Attempts to include parents may then be seen as getting parents to do the school’s work. The study concludes that in current practice there is not actual partnership between school and home in the group investigated.

This article investigates the morphosyntactic accuracy of second year examination compositions written by advanced level students of French. The study provides a detailed error analysis of 212 compositions done on the basis of an error classification system consisting of twenty-two linguistic categories. The findings derived from this data highlight areas where students’ linguistic competence is at its weakest, and the rate of progress made by students from one semester to another. More specifically, they present the problem of linguistic accuracy, or rather lack thereof, as widespread, deeply engrained, and worthy of serious attention. The outcome of this investigation leads to a discussion of practical and theoretical explanations for our students’ lack of morphosyntactic accuracy and to a consideration of ways of reducing orthographic and grammatical imprecision. The effectiveness of focus on form is examined, with particular reference to processing instruction linked to the classroom use of the French grammar checker Le Correcteur 101.

This paper reports on a project (funded by a small Australian Research Council grant) investigating levels of metalinguistic knowledge of English and other languages amongst first-year undergraduate learners of French, Chinese and Italian and the relationship between this knowledge and success in studying a language at university. The study is a partial replication of research undertaken by Alderson, Clapham and Steel (1977) in relation to learners studying French at a number of British universities.

The findings offer no support for the widely-held view that there is a strong connection between learners’ knowledge about language and their success in foreign language study. Results show that, while undergraduate language learners have serious lacunae in their knowledge about language, those who have studied a language other than English (LOTE) at school do better on some measures of metalinguistic knowledge than those who are beginning language study from scratch. However, the results also show that for all three languages there is a weak relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and second language ability. The study points to areas of further research, including a more detailed examination of the relationship between metalinguistic awareness in L1 and L2 and an investigation of those areas of grammar that may be more amenable to explicit grammar teaching.

The cross-linguistic research reported in this paper was designed to investigate language-specific and universal aspects of emotion display in teacher interactions with pre-school children. It assumes that communicative strategies are underpinned by beliefs about the appropriate and strategic use of emotion, and the different values given to emotion expression. Using data from Australian-English interactions and Australian Lebanese-Arabic interactions, the study uses semantic and conversation analysis to compare and contrast the coincidence of emotion expression and interactive intention. It explains the language-specific preferences for expres-sion of certain emotions; and how emotion display contributes to the teacher role. The study found language-specific preferences for expressing negative and positive emotion in feedback and encouragement strategies that reflect language-specific role expectations.