Abstract
The author argues that current research on phonetic priorities in ELT, with its focus on segments and prosody, is misguided and that emphasis should be shifted towards learners’ training in the production of words whose idiosyncratic erroneous rendition does not result from their inability to articulate foreign sounds correctly, but which is caused by various interference factors (e.g. Disney pronounced by many Polish learners as [ˈdjisnej]). It is argued that the use of such severely distorted items (local errors) has grave consequences for linguistic communication, more serious than segmental and suprasegmental inaccuracies (global errors) and should, therefore, be pedagogically prioritized. In order to verify this claim, two experiments have been carried out in which 40 native-speakers of English were asked to assess two phonetic versions of the same passage: one produced by a Polish learner of English with poor segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation, but no major phonological distortions of words, and another recording made by a speaker with the correct rendition of segments and prosodies, but with several seriously mispronounced words, common in Polish English. The assessment concerned the samples’ degree of comprehensibility, foreign-accentedness and annoyance for the listeners. The experimental data show that on all three counts the participants’ judgements were more severe in the case of the version with local errors than with global errors. The same results were obtained in the second experiment in which the samples’ intelligibility was examined in a dictation test.
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- 1.
The distinction between global and local errors is not always sharp. It is not clear, for instance, how to classify the overgeneralization that the <ate> sequence is often interpreted as [eit] in nouns, such as certificate, climate or palate. Such errors are local in the sense that they concern a particular sequence of letters, but are not restricted to a single item.
- 2.
Interestingly, other languages might also be a source of pronunciation errors. A case in point is the word lieutenant, frequently rendered by Polish learners as [lojtnant], undoubtedly due to its German version, made popular in Poland by war movies. German influences are also responsible for the mispronunciations of initial consonant clusters in names such as Spielberg > PE [špilberk] or Steinbeck > PE [štajnbek].
- 3.
The forms provided in the table are only rough approximations of the recorded items. This means that one symbol often stands for variety of sounds, e.g. [a] represents an open unrounded vowel whose backness varies, however, from language to language.
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Acknowledgments
This paper could be completed due to the help received from Graz Kalenik and Dariusz Bukowski, to whom I am deeply grateful.
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Szpyra-Kozłowska, J. (2013). On the Irrelevance of Sounds and Prosody in Foreign-Accented English. In: Waniek-Klimczak, E., Shockey, L. (eds) Teaching and Researching English Accents in Native and Non-native Speakers. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24019-5_2
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