Exploring EFL College Students' User Behaviors and Perceptions of YouGligh

10.29716/TKSFLL.202306_(39).0001

Cheng, Hsiu-pin(鄭秀彬)

YouGlish ； informal language learning ； accent ； YouGlish ； 非正式語言學習 ； 口音

淡江外語論叢

39期（2023 / 06 / 01）

1 - 29

英文;繁體中文

YouGlish is one of the emerging pronunciation-oriented learning websites. Based on Youtube, YouGlish provides a pool of videos containing the target vocabulary item through a simple keyword search function and offers a searching output similar to text-corpus concordance, but in an audio-video form. Like regular text corpora, existing literature tends to approach YouGlish as a research tool. This study came into further exploration of the potential of YouGlish as a learning tool. 142 EFL college students were recruited from a private comprehensive university in northern Taiwan and participated in an 8-week experiment. Weekly recordings and a questionnaire provided both quantitative and qualitative data on students' autonomous informal language learning with YouGlish, their attitudes towards accents, and their overall perception of YouGlish as a learning tool. The results showed that in general YouGlish was positively accepted by these EFL college students as an effective learning tool, benefiting them in mainly word pronunciation, increased accent awareness, and sensitivity. Limitations of autonomous informal language learning also emerged. Discussions were made on the learning opportunities YouGlish can offer with a proposal on incorporating YouGlish into classes to enhance pronunciation teaching and learning.

YouGlish是一個以發音為導向的學習網站。它基於Youtube，通過簡單的關鍵字搜索功能，它匯集並提供給使用者大量的含有搜索關鍵字的影片。它提供的搜索結果類似於文本語料庫的索引，但是以影音的形式呈現。與常規文本語料庫一樣，現有文獻傾向於將YouGlish作為研究工具。本研究側重探索YouGlish作為學習工具的潛力。在台灣北部一所私立綜合大學，142名以英語為外語學習的大學生參與了為期8週的實驗。每週的錄音作業和問卷提供了關於這些大學生藉由YouGlish進行自主、非正式語言學習時的使用方式、他們對英語口音的態度以及他們對YouGlish作為學習工具的總體看法的定量和定性數據。結果表明，總體而言，這些學生對YouGlish的態度積極，認為YouGlish是有效的學習工具：尤其是能受益於學生的單詞發音以及提高口音意識和敏感度。同時，自主的非正式語言學習的局限性也在本實驗中有所呈現。基於本實驗數據，本文討論了YouGish可以帶來的學習機會，並針對將YouGlish融入課堂以加強發音教學提出了具體的學習建議。

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