Second Language Pronunciation. Группа авторов

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Название Second Language Pronunciation
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Жанр Языкознание
Серия
Издательство Языкознание
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119801573



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more opportunities for teachers to explicitly orient learners’ attention to mismatches and to provide them with more attention-orienting input.

      Naturalistic L2 Pronunciation Development

      Despite the fact that adult L2 learners attempt to speak before they have much experience with the perception of L2 sounds, there remains a short lag between improvement in perception and corresponding improvement in production. Summarizing the literature, Thomson (2022) reports that L2 perception scores are typically higher than L2 production scores for the same sound categories. Some counter-examples of L2 production accuracy surpassing perceptual accuracy do exist (Goto, 1971). However, most cases come from researchers whose explicit aim is to disprove the claim that perception precedes production (e.g., Borden et al., 1983; Bradlow et al., 1997; Sheldon & Strange, 1982). As Thomson (2022) notes, the reading task used to elicit speech in these studies allows learners to apply explicit knowledge of how to produce words based on spelling. Consequently, it is a strategy for bypassing natural progression, rather than proof that production can otherwise precede perception. There is also no evidence that such a strategy would extend to spontaneous communicative contexts.

      Instructed L2 Pronunciation Development

      While limits on ultimate attainment in naturalistic learning contexts are well-established, instructed L2 pronunciation can provide an opportunity to re-orient learners’ selective perception towards phonetic cues that they have learned to ignore. Despite this fact, production-oriented approaches to teaching pronunciation have long-dominated the field (e.g., Celce-Murcia et al., 2010; Lyster et al., 2013; Thomson & Derwing, 2015). In the 1970s, Audiolingualism used spoken models, but only to introduce production rehearsal activities (Brown & Lee, 2015). In the 1980s, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) largely neglected pronunciation instruction, focusing almost exclusively on communicative processes to the exclusion of form. While CLT appealed to adult L2 learners’ desire to communicate as quickly as possible, it largely recreated the naturalistic conditions under which L2 pronunciation is most resistant to change. In more recent years, while pronunciation instruction has regained a position of importance, instruction continues to be predominantly production-focused (e.g., Saito & Lyster, 2012).

      Since we know that speech perception plays such a foundational role in accurate speech production, why is this not reflected in popular L2 pronunciation teaching methods? One reason for this disconnect is that L2 speech perception research is largely inaccessible to language teachers (Thomson, 2018a). It is typically published in technical journals and largely reports on laboratory-based studies, which may appear to lack relevance to the real world. Unfortunately, by ignoring this important research, pronunciation specialists are unprepared to teach in a way that addresses the cognitive-developmental features of pronunciation associated with speech perception (Derwing & Munro, 2015).

      The cognitive mechanisms underlying the benefits of HVPT over low variability training are not fully understood. One possibility is that all cognitive categories, by their very nature, contain variation. This means that learning a new category necessitates learning about the distribution of sounds that can occur within that category. Another possibility is that the use of multiple talkers maximizes the potential for a given L2 learner to encounter at least some tokens of target sounds that do not automatically assimilate to pre-existing L1 categories. There is evidence that L2 learners are more apt to recognize English vowels as belonging to a new category if those vowels were produced by a talker whose productions are acoustically distant from any confusable L1 vowel categories (Thomson, 2007). It remains unclear whether there is an optimal amount of variability. Programs claiming to be HVPT have used between 2 and 30 talkers, for example, and vary widely in the number of phonetic contexts utilized (Thomson, 2018a). It seems unlikely that using two talkers provides optimal variability, but using increasingly larger numbers may result in diminishing returns or make learning more difficult (Thomson, 2018a).