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HOWTO DELIVER A WINNING SPEECHAT JAPANESE SPEECH
CONTESTS IN UZBEKISTAN
PhD Chiharu Tsurutani (SamSIFL)
Abstract. This paper reports on the usefulness of prosodic training in the preparation
for speech contests in a foreign language. In language teaching, instructors tend to pay
more attention to the correction of syntactic and semantic errors than pronunciation errors.
However, the prosodic errors cost in speech production when the tone of voice or
impression of the speech delivery are crucial, such as ata speech contest. Unless taught
specifically, foreign language learners tend to assign the intonation of their native tongue
on the utterance. The example was demonstrated by the speech of an Uzbek learner of
Japanese.
Pronunciation teaching tends to be neglected in classrooms in the multilingual
society of the 21
st
century.It has been encouraged to communicate freely rather than
worrying about native-like pronunciation too much. However, pronunciation, particularly
prosody plays a crucial role to make a speech appealing and attractiveto the audience and
achieve the goalfor the participating contestants,that is, winning at the speech contest.In this
report, the importance of prosodic training isaddressed by presenting the intonation of
untrained production of Japanese sentences in a digitized form in comparison with the
native speaker’ sproduction.
1.
Linguistic and cultural background of Uzbek learners of Japanese
In Uzbekistan, the official languagehas beenpredominantly Uzbek since their
independence from the USSR.However, Russian is still widely spoken and most Uzbek
people can speak at least these two languages well, or possibly three languages if they speak
Tajik, or Turkish. This multilingual environment is a great advantage for language learning.
In addition, both Japanese and Uzbek belong to the Ural-Altaic language group and
sharemany linguistic similarities. Therefore learning Japanese should be easier for Uzbek
native speakers than for speakers of Indo-European languages.
1-1.
Love for public speaking
For Australian university students who I taught for three decades, the participation in
speech contests was an unnecessary chore which did not affect their grades. They preferred
to spend their time improving their grade or assignments. Individualism prevails over the
fame for the university they belong to. Because of this culture, it was not easy for teachers
to recruit good students for speech contests. Contrary to the Australian situation, Uzbek
students seem tohave a Russian speech culture. Making a speech in front of audienceis an
important part of their social activities. They are proud of presenting their own opinion in
front of others,which raises their profile as a model student. Even in private social functions,
people often make a speech willingly,make a toast and skull a glass of vodka.
1-2.
Linguistic background
The content of the speech is undoubtedly the most important part to be considered in
the marking criteria. However, the same weight is allocated to the pronunciation and
expressive intonation of speech in speech contests in Uzbekistan. Here, native-like, natural,
less foreign accented speech becomes in high demand.It is required to deliver a speech full
of emotions and acting particularly when you quote someone else’s utterances. Just a
flawless,textbook readingis not good enough. To this end, you need to understand the accent
and intonation pattern of the target language you deliver the speech, in this case, Japanese.
Thus, we should identify the linguistic gap between the two languages, Uzbek and Japanese.
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1-2-1.Phonetic and phonological issues for Uzbek learners of Japanese
First of all, the comparison of Uzbek and Japanese consonants and vowels are shown
below.
The inventory of Uzbek consonants entails all Japanese consonants and the Uzbek
language has contracted sounds (
Yo-oncha, chu, cha
) as well. Japanese has only five
vowels, while Uzbek has six. The tongue height of “
え
” [e] and “
お
” [o] differs, but does
not cause a major problem for communication.The Uzbek language lost vowel harmony
which was a typical characteristic oflanguages in the Turkic language family (Sjoberg 1963)
Japanese has two other phonemes,alv
eolar flap [ ſ ] and voiceless palatal fricative [ ς
].
Figure 1: Uzbek consonants =phonemes which do not exist in Japanese
(George Mason University the speech accent archive:2022)
Figure 2: Uzbek vowels (left)and Japanese vowels (right)
Pronunciation errors are not limited to incorrect consonants and vowels. All three
components of spoken language have to be considered to improve pronunciation of the
language you are learning, that is, segmental features, suprasegmental features and prosodic
organization.
segmental features (consonants, vowels)
Spoken language suprasegmental features (pitch, duration, loudness)
prosodic organization (accent, intonation)
While it is relatively easy to point out the incorrect consonants and vowels, errors
above the segmental level are not easy to identify, particularly for non-trained listeners.
Even experienced language instructors can agree only 80-90% of the time when they are
asked to transcribe non-native speakers’ utterances for the pitch pattern or length of vowels.
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(Tsurutani:2008) This is partly because the production of non-native speakers is sitting
somewhere between the target language and their native tongue on the production scale.
Another reason is that it is hard to describe the prosodic errors as there is no uniform
methods to express it to ordinary learners with no linguistic knowledge.
Pitch tracking by Praat(Boersma and Weenink:2019) and some other devices for
acoustic analysis enable us topresent the exact movement of pitch (the height of voice) in an
utterance. The following is a speech sample showing the typical Japanese intonation.
Japanese intonation
Sankaku-no yane-no mannaka-ni okimasu
The triangular roof-GEN in the middle put it
L% = Fall at the end of accentual phrase (Venditti et al:2008)
Figure 3:
Pitch contour of Japanese declarative sentence
Japanese intonation is typically described as the shape of a Japanese kana character
“
へ
”
he
. This shape appears repeatedly whenever a new phrase boundary starts.
Uzbek intonation
There is not much work done on Uzbek prosody, apart from the work on final stress
(Athanasopoulou and Vogel:2017) and prominence in Uzbek (Athanasopoulou, Vogel and
Dolatian:2020). Another research studywas on stress in Saudi Diaspora Uzbek (Bokhari and
Washington:2014).So far, their findings are limited to the usage of stress in Uzbek
language; Uzbek would no longer adhere to the final stress pattern and considered to be
possibly a stressless language (Athanasopoulou and Vogel:2017)Thus, this report takes the
form of a case study using the recording of Uzbek and Japanese phrases produced by an
Uzbek speaker.
2.
Intonation used by an Uzbek speaker on Japanese sentences
A speaker is 21-years old, anUzbek femalenative speaker who has been studying
Japanese for three years at university in Samarkand (henceforth Learner U). In order to help
improve her Japanese speech production, I recorded her speech and pointed out the
difference between hers and my production (Japanese female native speaker). I used Praatto
digitize speech samples.Three statement sentences were extracted from her speech. They are
presented in the order of Japanese, (Romanized version of Japanese), the English translation
and Uzbek translation of Japanese sentence below.
Sentence 1:
老化には二つのカテゴリーがあるそうです。（
Rooka niwa
futatuno kategori-ga arusoodes)I heard there were two categories in ageing.
Qarishning ikki
kategoriyasi mavjud.
Native speaker’s production
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Time (s)
0
3.7
0
500
Rookaniwafutatsu no kategorii ga arusoodes
Learner U’s Japanese production
Time (s)
0
3.9673
0
500
Learner U’s intonation of the Uzbek translation of the Japanese sentence
Time (s)
0
3.03263
0
500
Qarishning ikki kategoriyasi mavjud.
As can be seen, the native speaker’s pitch contour displays a small peak in each
phrase and that height decreases towards the end of the phrase boundary. On the other hand,
the Uzbek speaker’s production of Japanese presents a very similar intonation pattern to the
Uzbek sentence of the same meaning.It sounds very monotonous and does not have a pitch
decline at the end of the sentence.Due to the limited space in this report,only productions of
Learner U are presented for Sentences 2 and 3.
Sentence 2:
私の祖母は今年６０才です。
(Watashino sobowa kotoshi rokujussai
des)
My grandmother is 60 years old.
Mening buvim oltmishyoshda
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Time (s)
0
3.75937
0
500
Watashino sobowakotoshi rokuju
ssai
des
Time (s)
0
3.09372
0
500
Mening buvim oltmishyoshda.
Sentence 3:
外見はとっても若く見えます。
(Gaiken wa tottemo wakaku miemas)
Her appearance looks very young.
ko‘rinishidan juda ham yosh ko‘rinadi.
Time (s)
0
3.02678
0
500
Gaiken wa tottemo wakaku miemas
Time (s)
0
2.83372
0
500
ko‘rinishidan juda ham yosh ko‘rinadi.
The decline of pitch towards the end of sentence is not observed in all of her
utterances regardless of the languages she speaks.
3
Pedagogical suggestions
The acquisition of prosody sometimes has more impact on a learners’ intelligibility,
as judged by native speakers, than does the acquisition of segmental features. Language
instructors should pay more attention to the right intonation pattern and prosodic differences
between the target language and the learners’ first language. Otherwise, learners would refer
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back to the intonation of their first language without any guidance. The appropriate
instruction regarding intonation should be given at an early stage of learning rather than just
before thepreparation of the final product, i.e., speech presentation in front of a big
audience.
REFERENCES:
1.
Athanasopoulou, A. and Vogel, I. (2017).Final stress in Turkic languages? The
case of Uzbek, laboratory phonology
2.
Athanasopoulou, A., Vogel, I. and Dolatian,H. (2020). Acoustic properties of word
and phrasal prominence in Uzbek
Proceedings of the workshop on Turkic and languages in
contact with Turkic
5. 1-15.
3.
Boersma, P.and Weenink, D.(2019). Praat:Version 6.0.47 for Windows.
4.
Bokhari, H. and Washington, J. (2014).Stress in Saudi Diaspora Uzbek and its
relation to stress in Turkish Indiana University.
Proceedings of the first conference on
Central Asian Languages and Linguistics
. 51-61. Bloomington, Indiana.
5.
George Mason University the speech accent archive (2022).Accessed on 3 March
2022.
6.
Sjoberg, A (1963). Uzbek Structural Grammar. Uralic and Altaic Series 18.
Indiana University Press.
7.
Tsurutani, C. (2008).Pronunciation and rhythm of Japanese as a second language:
Keisuisha Japan.
8.
Venditti, J., Maekawa, K. and Beckman, M. (2008)
Prominence marking in the
Japanese intonation system – handbook of Japanese linguistics
