To what extent do our accents determine the way we are perceived by others? Is a foreign accent inevitably associated with social stigma? Accent is a matter of great public interest given the impact ...of migration on national and global affairs, but until now, applied linguistics research has treated accent largely as a theoretical puzzle. In this fascinating account, Alene Moyer examines the social, psychological, educational and legal ramifications of sounding 'foreign'. She explores how accent operates contextually through analysis of issues such as: the neuro-cognitive constraints on phonological acquisition, individual factors that contribute to the 'intractability' of accent, foreign accent as a criterion for workplace discrimination, and the efficacy of instruction for improving pronunciation. This holistic treatment of second language accent is an essential resource for graduate students and researchers interested in applied linguistics, bilingualism and foreign language education.
Research has seen a growing recognition of the crucial role pronunciation plays in teaching English as an International Language (EIL), in achieving effective communication and its close link to the ...mastery of other aspects of language teaching and learning. In spite of its recognised importance, pronunciation is still a marginalised skill in many EIL programmes due to EIL teachers’ lack of required phonetic and phonological knowledge, and the paucity of comprehensive coverage targeted at EIL learners. While there has been much research on phonetic and phonological features of world varieties of English, there has not been a strong research–practice nexus in the field. There is therefore a need to comprehensively review EIL pronunciation teaching, to document what previous research tells us, and to discuss how research can be translated into practice. This article aims to cover a range of current issues concerning EIL pronunciation modelling and theorising, and provides a brief articulation of the current issues surrounding the global spread of English and its theoretical development. Specifically, it considers current EIL research issues, challenges, and their implications for pronunciation practice. It also considers the implications of Gardner’s (2008) Five Minds for the Future for EIL pronunciation teaching and postulates the necessity of a sixth mind to navigate the field in the post-pandemic era.
We propose a new framework for conceptualizing measures of instructed second language (L2) pronunciation performance according to three sets of parameters: (a) the constructs (focused on global vs. ...specific aspects of pronunciation), (b) the scoring method (human raters vs. acoustic analyses), and (c) the type of knowledge elicited (controlled vs. spontaneous). Adopting this model (Framework for L2 Pronunciation Measurement) as a synthetic tool, we coded the instruments found in 77 studies of L2 pronunciation teaching published between 1982 and 2017. We calculated the frequency of each measurement type and reexamined the interaction of instructional effectiveness and measurement within the sample. According to the results, instruction is most effective when it targets learners’ monitored production of specific segmental or suprasegmental features. The efficacy of instruction remains relatively unclear when gains are measured globally via subjective, human judgments, especially at a spontaneous level.
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Research on the efficacy of second language (L2) pronunciation instruction has produced mixed results, despite reports of significant improvement in many studies. Possible explanations for divergent ...outcomes include learner individual differences, goals and foci of instruction, type and duration of instructional input, and assessment procedures. After identifying key concepts, we survey 75 L2 pronunciation studies, particularly their methods and results. Despite a move towards emphasizing speech intelligibility and comprehensibility, most research surveyed promoted native-like pronunciation as the target. Although most studies entailed classroom instruction, many featured Computer Assisted Pronunciation Teaching (CAPT). Segmentals were studied more often than suprasegmentals. The amount of instruction required to effect change was related to researchers' goals; interventions focusing on a single feature were generally shorter than those addressing more issues. Reading-aloud tasks were the most common form of assessment; very few studies measured spontaneous speech. The attribution of improvement as a result of instruction was compromised in some instances by lack of a control group. We summarize our findings, highlight limitations of current research, and offer suggestions for future directions.
The development of oral language norms prior to the publication of Theodor Siebs' set of rules "Deutsche Bühnenausprache" (1898) has hardly been systematically studied to date. Ulrich Thilo Hoffmann ...offers the first comprehensive overview of recognized and controversial pronunciation norms in the 19th century. His analysis of the stage-adequate pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs in the historical specialist literature includes Konrad Duden, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Julius Hey and Wilhelm Viëtor as well as numerous lesser-known authors. Hoffmann thus makes a linguistic contribution to the debate on the development of the German standard language. At the same time, his book is a research impulse for musicology, specifically for the examination of vocal pronunciation in historically informed performance practice. The results of the study are already being used in the projects Wagner-Lesarten and The Wagner Cycles, which are pursuing the historically informed performance of Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen under the direction of Kent Nagano.
Building up on Munro and Derwing, the current study set out to re-examine and generalize the Functional Load (FL) principle (Brown, 1988) as a tool to identify a set of relatively crucial segmental ...features for successful understanding in L2 communication. In Experiment 1, 40 Japanese learners of English in English-as-Foreign-Language settings engaged in a semi-structured task (i.e. timed picture description). Their speech was assessed by native speaking raters for overall comprehensibility (ease of understanding); and then coded for the number of high vs. low FL segmental substitution errors according to the FL principle. The results showed that it was only high FL consonant substitutions (e.g. mispronunciation of /l/ as /r/ or /v/ as /b/) that negatively impacted on native listeners’ comprehensibility judgments. In Experiment 2, 40 Japanese learners of English with a wide range of immersion experience in English-speaking countries participated. The results replicated the significant impact of high FL consonant substitutions as observed in Experiment 1. Taken together, this study suggests that the FL principle may greatly help teachers and students prioritize communicatively important segmental features, a crucial step towards improving L2 oral proficiency in an effective and efficient way.
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