JALT PRONSIG
NEWSLETTER
N 2 October, 2002
Contents:
I.
Call for
participation in JALT conference and for participation in PRONSIG elections
II.Programme of JALT Pronsig event
III.CALL for nominees to Pronsig
positions for next year
IV.Call for proposals to Pronsig
exhibits and Pronsig Table Caretaker on Nov. 23.
V.Membership report
VI.Forthcoming pronunciation and
speech-related conferences.
VII.Reminders of feedback on Pronsig
conference and other forms to activate the Pronsig.
VIII. Discussion of Internet
resources for pronunciation
teaching.
I. Call for participation in JALT
conference and in PRONSIG elections II.
Dear
PRONSIG interest group members:
We are
going to have a major Pronsig Event at JALT 2002 in Shizuoka (November
22-24). The event will start at
12.15 and finish at 17.45. It will include 8 excellent presentations on various
topics ranging from testing and material design to CALL, songs, radio and
poetry in pronunciation teaching. We shall start with a general SIG meeting to
discuss the further work of the SIG, as well as hold an election for new
officers. Please consider participating in the JALT conference and plan to join
us on the afternoon of November 24 (and don't forget to reserve a Shinkansen
seat very soon!).
II. Programme of the FORMING PRONSIG EVENT at JALT 2002
Forming PRONSIG EVENT
Pronunciation teaching,
testing, material design.
12.15 – 13.00 MEETING AND ELECTIONS OF PRONSIG
We request everyone interested in pronunciation teaching to take part in the meeting.
Many important points (such as publications, conferences, etc.) will be discussed.
Your attendance, ideas and vote will be greatly appreciated!
13.00 - 13.30 Hiroko Yoshida. “College students’ Views on L2 Pronunciation Learning”
13.30 – 14.00 Cecilia Ikeguchi. “Practical Considerations in Testing English Pronunciation of Japanese Students”
14.00 – 14.30. Stephen Lambacher. “Improving Pronunciation of Segmentals Using Electronic Visual Feedback.”
14.30 – 15.00. Kenneth J. Cranker. “Pronunciation Materials Design for Real Communication”
15.00 – 15.15. Break
15.15 – 15.45. Terri Long. “English Pronunciation Learning System”
15.45 – 16.15. Steven Cutting. “Teaching Pronunciation Through Radio”
16.15 – 16.45. Scott Noble. “Pronunciation Practice Through Popular Songs”
16.45 – 17.15. Jesse Glass. “Veronika Makarova. Poetry in Pronunciation Teaching”
17.15 – 17.45. GENERAL DISCUSSION, Questions/Answers session.
Pronunciation
teaching, testing, material design
Abstracts
Summary
This workshop organized by the Forming JALT Pronunciation Special Interest Group covers a broad range of aspects in English pronunciation teaching. Four integrated presentations provide participants with a number of practical tips related to computer-assisted tools for pronunciation training (electronic visual feedback), approaches to testing pronunciation performance of FL learners, ways of designing pronunciation materials best suited for genuine interaction, and the use of poetry for pronunciation teaching.
Hiroko Yoshida College students’ Views on L2 Pronunciation Learning.
Current studies of second language phonology recognize that the degree of pronunciation proficiency learning is influenced by various factors such as learners’ ages and their native languages, learners’ exposure to the target language, amount and type of prior pronunciation learning, learners’ aptitude, attitude, and motivation. Given the complexity and variability in these factors that may either impede or promote acquisition of L2 pronunciation, attaining an intelligible rather than a native-like pronunciation in L2 is currently considered more realistic and pedagogical for post pubescent and adult learners in the EFL/ESL classroom (Avery & Ehrlich, 1992; Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 1996). However, this predominant view on pronunciation learning has not been fully examined from L2 learners’ perspectives. This pilot study examines how Japanese college learners actually perceive L2 pronunciation in the EFL context and explores their holistic views on L2 pronunciation learning. The data analyzed for this study are based on questionnaires, observation, and interviews. The
analysis revealed that: (a) Many college learners feel anxiety about their pronunciation while they speak the target language; (b) They believe that acquiring good pronunciation helps build confidence in L2 learning; and (c) L2 learners need varying degrees of pronunciation proficiency, depending on interlocutors and contexts.
References
Avery, P. & Ehrlich, S. (1992). Teaching American English Pronunciation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (1996). Teaching
pronunciation: a reference for teachers of English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cecilia Ikeguchi: Practical Considerations in Testing English
Pronunciation of Japanese Students.
The paper will discuss general questions that a designer of (a) pronunciation test (s)
should consider. These include, amongst others: the questions of necessity of the test, level of competence, focus of attention. Then, the speaker will suggest relevant design features for such a test. This include practical issues like: should the tester highlight accuracy of intelligibility? Should the test be purely formal (Tench, 1996) or communicative? Furthermore, the presenter will share some ideas as to the scope of a pronunciation test and the different tasks involved therein. Finally, an example of an English pronunciation proficiency test used for Japanese students will be shown. The recommendations drawn are: the scope of a pronunciation test must reflect the tester's intention. The testing of pronunciation by professionals : language teachers, phoneticians and linguists can only be a means to an end. The ultimate test of the students' performance is outside the classroom, in real live situations, where their interlocutors are not testing them, but are interacting with them. (Japanese teachers of English are most welcome)
Stephen Lambacher: Improving
Pronunciation of Segmentals Using Electronic Visual Feedback.
One type of computer instruction for pronunciation training that has received a great deal of attention in recent years is the use of electronic visual feedback (EVF). With EVF, users can record their voice and perform an acoustic analysis of their speech with functions for showing and measuring intonation, duration and frequency range. EVF enables L2 learners to improve their pronunciation of both segmentals (vowels and consonants) and suprasegmentals (rhythm, pitch, stress, intonation) by showing the exact sound features of their production that need to be changed. EVF is effective because it provides students with a deeper sense of their own pronunciation by enabling them to graphically compare their own pronunciation with their teacher or with sound data samples that have been copied and stored into a database. One of the main objectives is for students to be able to associate the frequency pattern of the segmental with the sound they are producing. In most second language classrooms, there is insufficient time to address all the sounds of the English language. Therefore, prioritizing training objectives is essential. Thus, this presentation will focus on the use of EVF to help Japanese adult learners improve their pronunciation of difficult English consonant and vowel sounds. The talk will include practical suggestions for using EVF with large or small classes, as well as an overview of some of the more popular EVF software programs currently on the market.
Kenneth J. Cranker: Pronunciation Materials Design for Real Communication
Generally speaking, communicating meaning is the main function of language. Yet pronunciation classes often focus on production of sounds of individual vowels or consonants (segmentals) with minimal meaningful input or exchange of meaning. Thus, they may become tedious or seem "meaningless" to students who instinctively understand that language is for communication. How can pronunciation teachers keep interest and meaning in their classes? In this presentation, I will discuss material that has been developed within a computer-assisted pronunciation course at the University of Aizu. The course itself primarily uses visual feedback software to help students improve their production of segmentals, but this material was designed to give balance to the course by providing meaningful dialogs with a university setting, conversation questions to elicit genuine student-student interaction, and pair-work exercises. All of this material richly incorporates the segmentals being studied, but it focuses more on meaning and the communicative aspect of language. This material could therefore be used in non-computer-oriented pronunciation courses as well as conversation courses. Topics for dialogs and conversation questions include computer viruses, graduation theses, exams, weekend activities, experiences, and preferences. Attention is also focused on how altered word stress leads to varied meanings, and how similar sounding words have very different meanings. This material has been used successfully for three years in the University of Aizu pronunciation course.
website: http://www.u-aizu.ac.jp/~kenc/pronun.html
Terri Long: English Pronunciation Learning System
The speaker will present and demonstrate a CALL pronunciation learning program that provides intensive phonemic training for self-access learning. The teaching algorithm supplies a systematic and explicit instruction in sound/spelling relationships, procedures; i.e. steps for learning and practicing phonic skills of English word pronunciation. Besides, the system unpacks the merging process of blending the individual sound elements/phonemes, i.e. the vowels and consonants to form a data-pool of syllabic sounds of English words.
Steven Cutting: Teaching Pronunciation Through Radio
This presentation will explore methods of teaching sentence level pronunciation such as stress, intonation, connected speech, rhythm, and emotion through the genre of radio. The presenter will first demonstrate how activities can easily be developed from the radio for classroom use. Then he will take you step by step through a highly motivating, student centered pronunciation activity in which students write and record their own radio show.
Scott Noble. Pronunciation Practice Through Popular Songs.
This workshop introduces a way to address some major pronunciation challenges faced by Japanese learners, namely rhythm, stress, and connected speech difficulties. Activities using popular songs and subsequent tasks tailored to meet these pronunciation needs will be demonstrated. Rationale for these tasks, and the results of these activities on the pronunciation of a sample of Japanese college students will also be presented.
Veronika Makarova & Jesse Glass: Poetry in Pronunciation Teaching.
The presenters survey earlier reported uses of poetry in pronunciation teaching and report results of an experimental study of effects of poetry listening/reading practice on the pronunciation performance of Japanese learners of English.
III.
CALL for nominees to Pronsig positions for next year
Please,
propose candidates (nominees) for the following Pronsig posts:
1. Co-ordinator
2. Director
of Membership
3. Director
of Programmes
4.
Treasurer
5. Editor
Please,
feel free to propose yourself or any other person who is/would be willing to
become soon JALT MEMBER and PRONSIG member. In particular, a TREASURER is needed who would handle our
5,000 yen odd account!!!
Please,
submit proposals by e-mail (by November 20) to Veronika Makarova (makarova.veronika@aist.go.jp) Or writing to her
at Namiki 3-663, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044.
IV. Call for proposals to Pronsig exhibits and Pronsig Table Caretaker on Nov. 22-24.
Dear
Pronsig members:
We shall
have a table and a chair at the conference. Please, feel free to bring over and
leave there any PRON-related materials, booklets, etc. If there is any paper
you want to share or software you would like to promote – please bring it
over to our table.
We need
SOMEONE who plans to attend all 3 days of the conference to be a caretaker of
the table (i.e., arrange the stuff on the table and put up advertisements and
newsletters, etc.). PLEASE VOLUNTEER IF YOU CAN BE THERE FOR 3 DAYS!!! You would not have to need to sit at
the table at all times – just place everything ON the table and
occasionally check if everything is in good order.
We have 6
JALT members who have paid their PRONSIG membership. THANK YOU!!! We only need 44
more members to become a full SIG! If you want to help, please be sure to
circle ‘Pronsig’ while renewing your JALT membership. Our current
members include the following (as well as about 25 more associates and
unregistered members):
Hill Kent,
Kawashima
Hirokatsu,
Kikuchi
Takeshi,
Melchior
Elin,
Overly
Eric,
Veronika
Makarova
VI.
Forthcoming
conferences on pronunciation and speech-related topics.
1.
November
22-24, JALT 2002, Shizuoka;
Pronunciation
Special Interest Group Event at JALT – November 24, 12.15- 17.45.
2.
December
2-5, 2002: 9th Australian International Conference on Speech Science
and Technology 2002 , Melbourne, Australia.
http://www.conferences.unimelb.edu.au/SST
3.
August
3-9, 2003. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (15th ICPhS), Barcelona,
Spain.
http://shylock.uab.es/icphs/
4.
18 -
20 March, Tokyo, Japan. Spring Meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan.
Acoustical
Society of Japan, Nakaura 5th-Bldg., 2-18-20 Sotokanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
101-0021, Japan;
Fax: +81 3
5256 1022; Web: http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/asj/index-e.html
5. ISCA
& IEEE Workshop on Spontanious Speech Processing and Recognition,
Tokyo,
Japan, April 14-16, 2003. The deadline is December 20, 2002.
6.
22-26
April, 2003. 37th IATEFL Conference, Brighton, UK
www.iatefl.org
7. 05-09
April, 18th International Congress on Acoustics, Kyoto
http://www.ica2004.or.jp/home.htm
8. ICASSP
2004 Montreal, Canada, May 17-21 2004
9. ICSLP
2004 Jeju, Korea, October 5-9, 2004
10. ICASSP
2005 Philadelphia, USA, May, 2005
VII. Reminders on feedback
We still need your feedback on the
possibility of organizing a special Pronsig Conference next year. If you can
help out in organising it, please let us know. Maybe you university can even
host it? If you have any other
ways of activating Pronsig, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Please, read
the paper below, and contribute to the general discussion by writing to the
author (=Pronsig co-ordinator).
Internet resources for
English pronunciation teaching
Veronika Makarova,
Meikai university, Japan
Pronunciation teaching in Japan has a number of specific problems, such as large classes, lack of specialized teacher training courses, curricula flaws, etc. The proposed presentation demonstrates how Internet resources could help to tackle these problems and improve pronunciation of Japanese learners of English. In particular, the presentation addresses the following issues:
1. Speech analysis and pronunciation teaching software on the web;
2. Language corpora ;
3. Teacher support resources.
The presenter concludes by reporting students’ attitudes to pronunciation training with Internet resources.
I. Introduction. The challenges of pronunciation teaching.
Pronunciation performance of Japanese learners of English has been a subject not only of severe criticism from ELT specialists (e.g., Acton, 1997), but also of many anecdotes (Ref. Appendix for examples). Objective studies, on the other hand, indicate that speakers of Japanese English can be estimated as having more intelligible pronunciation than speakers of many other Englishes, including native American (Kwon, 2001; McMurray, 2001). The surveys of English learning attitudes of Japanese students show that while most students are interested in improving their pronunciation (Makarova & Ryan, 2000), too native-like pronunciation may be undesirable since it may provoke bullying (Tobin, 1995), and that students may prefer the local Japanese standard to the native one (Honna et al., 2001).
However diverse the attitudes to pronunciation teaching, performance and standards may be, it is generally acknowledged that pronunciation is an indispensable part of language skills, and that at least a certain limit of intelligibility needs to be achieved for successful communication (Brown, 1994; Jenkins, 2000). The advanced command of the sound system, especially its suprasegmental part, allows the speaker to render subtleties of attitudinal, emotional, pragmatic, discoursal and other meanings (Brazil, 1997; Cruttenden, 1997).
Pronunciation teaching poses a number of difficulties, some of which are related to the specific nature of pronunciation skills and are common across cultural and educational environments, whereas some others may only be found in a particular location.
Among the ‘universal’ challenges of pronunciation teaching it is possible to name the following:
1. The war of
standards
With the ‘ownership’ of English shifting from a few ‘native’ nations to a wider range of users, the idea of what variety of English and which level of proficiency/parameters of performance should be taken as the model is becoming more and more blurred. While some kinds of ‘native’ and especially American English still enjoy high prestige (ref. Bayard, et. al. 2001), and are being pushed by commercial structures (e.g., an advertisement of one language school in Japan offers ‘More than English, American English’), linguists are becoming more and more lenient to alternative and ‘local’ Englishes (Jenkins, 2000).
2. L1/L2 interference
Although cross-linguistic interference affects all levels of language, in case of pronunciation teaching to adults, it is not impossible, but difficult to change pronunciation habits established in early childhood (Nikolov, 2000). The sound system of English presents difficulties to EFL learners with all L1s due to inevitable discrepancies between the native language and the English sound systems, and due to a large number of vowels and occurrence of some rare consonants (like -th- sounds) in English. In case of mixed (regarding L1) groups, the teacher may find it hard to address all the specific problems experienced by students under the influence of their native languages.
3. The specific nature of pronunciation skills
As opposed to other language skills, pronunciation requires not only the ability to understand and memorize the inventory and functions of a certain number of distinctive linguistic units, it is a complex skill involving articulation (muscle) control, hearing, imitation (mimicking) abilities. Developing these muscular skills and establishing their automated neuro-control takes time and effort.
Some specific problems of teaching English pronunciation in the Japanese context include
1. the practice of katakana transcription of loan
words,
2. large classes,
3. lack of specialists and specialized teacher
training courses,
4. curricula flaws,
5. administrative conservatism.
Since these issues are surveyed in Makarova, 2001, they are not addressed here.
The universal and specific challenges of pronunciation training outlined above (in section I) can be addressed with the help of a large variety of different tools available in Internet. These tools can be grouped into a few categories.
1.
English
pronunciation teaching software
For those considering computer-assisted pronunciation training, Internet has advertisements of and information about the major pronunciation training kits, such as
Connected Speech (Protea, Australia) and Pronunciation Power (English Computerized Learning, USA). The commercial packages are easy to install, self-explanatory, entertaining and require no expert knowledge from either the teacher or the learner. The learner can have repeated access to the drilled items and take his/her own pace, which allows to establish the articulatory habit and to focus on the elements presenting particular difficulty to the individual learner or to speakers of a specific L1 (particularly helpful in case of large mixed nationality groups).
Some firms are becoming more aware of the diversity of the market regarding pronunciation standards, and are offering a few sets (e.g., British English, North American and Australian variants of Connected Speech).
Disadvantages of ‘ready pronunciation training packs’ are that the number of drilled items is fixed and relatively small, and that there is no flexibility in tasks. Some other disadvantages vary from product to product, but the packs generally tend to be messy with transcription (e.g., Pronunciation Power has a weird notification system with the sound /oi/ represented as ‘oy’, etc.).
2. Speech processing software
Speech (signal) processing software is generally used for the acoustic and phonetic analysis of speech signals, but with some effort, it can be used for pronunciation teaching since it provides electronic visual feedback (EVF) of the acoustic parameters of the input signal (Chun, 1998). Pronunciation features which can be effectively taught with EVF include both segmentals and suprasegmentals (Anderson-Hsieh, 1992; Lambacher, 1996). A number of commercial packages are available, but high quality products are also downloadable from the web. Probably the best known examples are:
WaveSurfer, Centre for Speech Technology (CTT) KTH, Stockholm, Sweden. http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/
CSLU Speech Toolkit, the Centre for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/tools.htm
Praat, Paul Boersma and David Weenink, the Institute of Phonetic Sciences, the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Operating speech processing software does require minimal phonetic knowledge, but there is a considerable amount of flexibility, and by preparing and downloading sound files, the teacher can offer an infinite (in principle) number of models and practice items. The software also enhances students’ understanding of the speech mechanism. Free software may be a good resource in case of administrative conservatism, budget cuts, etc.
Both speech processing and pronunciation training software allow to fight curricula limitations providing students with opportunities to study not only in, but after classes as well.
3. Assessment
of pronunciation teaching and signal processing software
Before selecting a package, it may be helpful to get expert assessment and users’ impressions, which are also available on the web (e.g., Healey, 2002).
4. Computer corpora and electronic dictionaries
One of the most useful ways of resolving the conflict of different interests that the learners may have regarding different varieties of English is to let them explore on-line speech corpora, some of which (like The International Corpus of English http:/www.lds.upenn.edu/ldc/online/ speech) have speech samples from various parts of the world. Although access to most corpora has to be purchased, some corpora are free (e.g., TIMIT http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ ldc/online/speech/).
Web sites of some university departments and organizations have accessible interesting speech samples, e.g. Canadian Accents records by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (http://www.cbc.ca )
5. Phonetic fonts
The aftereffects of katakana can be fought with the help of transcription exercises. Special phonetic fonts can be downloaded (e.g., IPA (International Phonetic Association) phonetic fonts: http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipafonts.html), or alternatively the teacher may prefer SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/ home/sampa/home.htm), a kind of sound and prosodic notation utilizing normal keyboard:
6. Web sites of
professional organizations
Teachers can find various information related to pronunciation teaching (conferences and articles, links, discussion groups, etc.) on the webpages of professional organizations, e.g.,
IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group http://members.aol.com/pronunciationsig/
JALT Pronunciation Special Interest Group http://www2.gol.com/users/elin/jps/index.html
III. Student attitudes
to Internet and computer resources.
Over two years, I have taught English phonetics and phonology course which I designed to incorporate pronunciation training (roughly half of the 90-minute class time) with traditional media (audio tapes, pronunciation learning games, video) and Pronunciation Power software package. The available version of Pronunciation Power offered the teaching of American English vowel and consonant phonemes. I also encouraged the students to use other web resources, especially TIMIT. In the end of the course, I distributed a questionnaire asking 89 students about:
a) their self-estimation of the achieved progress
b) their ranking (5 points on a Lickert scale, where 1 meant ‘of no use’, and 5 – ‘most useful’) of the effect of the following activities for pronunciation improvement:
‘listen to/(and repeat after) the audio tape; pronunciation learning games, watching pronunciation video; working with the pronunciation teaching software; working with the speech processing software; using TIMIT; error correction by the teacher’.
The students were also requested to put down any comments they could think of in a free way.
The results of the poll show that although most students reported achieved progress (87%) and considered all the activities useful, the highest ranking was assigned to ‘pronunciation teaching software’ (4.8), followed by ‘audio-tape’ and TIMIT (4.2 each), error correction by the teacher (4.1), and videotape (3.9). Somewhat lower ranking was given to speech processing software (3.5) and pronunciation learning games (3.2.).
The students remarked that they enjoyed the games, but other activities were of higher practical use. Speech processing software was too difficult for them to understand, although they remarked that it was especially helpful for showing whether their voice goes up or down (in intonation training exercises). The relatively low ranking of speech processing software is also partly explained by the specific limitations of the software package which was at the author’s disposal.
Internet offers a variety of resources which can help to tackle many problems of pronunciation teaching and to improve the pronunciation performance of learners. Japanese learners of English reported positive attitudes to pronunciation-related Internet resources.
Acton, W. (1997). Seven suggestions of highly successful pronunciation teaching.
TheLanguage Teacher, V. 21(1), pp. 21-25.
Anderson-Hsieh, J. (1992). Using electronic visual feedback to teach suprasegmentals.
System, 20, 51-62.
Bayard, D., Gallois, C., Weatherall, A., Pittam, J. (2001). Pax Americana? Accent
attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand,
Australia and America. Journal
of Sociolinguistics 5/1, 22-49.
Brazil, D. (1997). The communicative value of intonation in English. Cambridge: CUP.
Brown, H. D. (1994). Teaching by principles: An
interactive approach to language
pedagogy. New Jersey: Prentice Hall Regents.
Chun, D. M. (1998). Signal analysis software for teaching discourse intonation.
Language Learning and Technology, 2(1), 61-77.
Cruttenden, A. (1997). Intonation (2nd ed). Cambridge: CUP.
Healey, D. (2002). An overview of Pronunciation Software: Using technology to
teach pronunciation colloquia. TESOL 2002. www.onid.orst.edu/~heyleyd
Honna, N., Kirkpatrick, A., Gilbert, S. (2001). English Across Cultures. Tokyo: Sansusha.
Jenkins, J. (2000). Phonology of English as an International language.Oxford: OUP.
Kwon, O. (2001) KATE International Conference Proceedings. Korea Association of
Teachers of English, 1, 7 - 17.
Lambacher, S. (1996).
Teaching English segmentals using electronic visual feedback. The
Language Teacher, 22-27.
Nikolov, M. (2000). The critical period hypothesis
reconsidered: successful adult learners of
Hungarian and English. IRAL 38, 109-124.
Makarova, V. (2001).
English pronunciation teaching in Japan. Studies in Foreign Language
Teaching. Tsukuba University Foreign Language Center, 23, 159-177.
Makarova, V. & Ryan, S.M. (2000). Language teaching attitudes from learners’ perspectives:
a cross-cultural approach. Speech Communication Education, 23, 123-165.
McMurray, D. (2001) New Englishes of Asia. The Language Teacher Online, 25:
http://langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/01/nov/mcmurray.html
Tobin, R. I. (1995). Teaching returnees in university
English classes. The Language Teacher,
19 (11), 23-27.
1. A Japanese lady was reported to get to Torquey instead of Turkey because of the way she pronounced the country’s name (The Japan Times, 21 June, 1997).
2. A Japanese delegate at IATEFL conference in a queue for food: “This is a wrong queue, isn't it!” (for ‘long’) Reported by Paul Tench, Centre for Language & Communication Research, Cardiff University (from personal correspondence).
2. A shop assistant: “This should fit you. It’s FLEA size” (for ‘free’). (from the author’s experience).
The issue was compiled by Veronika
Makarova, Pronsig co-ordinator, and edited by Stephen Lambacher, Pronsig
Editor.
See JALT PRONSIG webpage at http://www2.gol.com/users/elin/jps/index.html.