Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

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aaleks
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby aaleks » Fri Sep 08, 2017 12:51 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:
reineke wrote:I have previously shared the story of a Chinese-Vietnamese family that moved to the US in the 1980s. Only the two youngest children (who moved to the US aged 5 and 7) achieved native pronunciation. No one else in the family achieved native or native-like pronunciation even though several family members moved to the US as young children. Their written and spoken language production is heavily fossilized. Almost everyone attended college.

Which is why, I argue that one can indeed achieve native like pronunciation outside the country/countries where the language is predominant. Immigrants often don't sound like those around them as they imitate those around them just through observation (i.e. listening to natives), which for me, perhaps not everyone, but me, is going to be flawed. Their own language system is heavily ingrained in them already. But if you sit down with language courses or other such tools for learning pronunciation and analyse the phonetics and strive to avoid the influence of your own native language while constantly mimicking and adjusting to the audio content to sound as close as possible to the recordings, chances are you can sound very much like a native indeed.

Not everyone wants to get rid of an accent or acquire a native-like accent. Some people maybe want to but it could be just not their main priority at the moment (especially if there's no problem in communication with natives).
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby Elenia » Fri Sep 08, 2017 10:27 pm

reineke wrote:I'd trade my foreign language skills with those of a rural native any time.


Today, I noticed an increasing Skånsk inflection to my Swedish. It led to an interesting feedback loop where my interlocutor began speaking with an even stronger Skånsk accent than before. (Thankfully no actual Skånska was spoken, I would have been lost).
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby PeterMollenburg » Fri Sep 08, 2017 11:14 pm

aaleks wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:
reineke wrote:I have previously shared the story of a Chinese-Vietnamese family that moved to the US in the 1980s. Only the two youngest children (who moved to the US aged 5 and 7) achieved native pronunciation. No one else in the family achieved native or native-like pronunciation even though several family members moved to the US as young children. Their written and spoken language production is heavily fossilized. Almost everyone attended college.

Which is why, I argue that one can indeed achieve native like pronunciation outside the country/countries where the language is predominant. Immigrants often don't sound like those around them as they imitate those around them just through observation (i.e. listening to natives), which for me, perhaps not everyone, but me, is going to be flawed. Their own language system is heavily ingrained in them already. But if you sit down with language courses or other such tools for learning pronunciation and analyse the phonetics and strive to avoid the influence of your own native language while constantly mimicking and adjusting to the audio content to sound as close as possible to the recordings, chances are you can sound very much like a native indeed.

Not everyone wants to get rid of an accent or acquire a native-like accent. Some people maybe want to but it could be just not their main priority at the moment (especially if there's no problem in communication with natives).


I am aware of this. Edit: It may not have come across this way as I was talking strictly about improving pronunciation (and thus was not discussing those that don't have this objective), nevertheless I do understand and kindly respect others and what they wish to achieve in learning a language. I don't believe having a native like accent makes such a person better than anyone else either, as sometimes I do believe perfectionism is potentially a sign of vanity since it alters the way one may appear to outsiders with such things as native-like accent or sporting achievements etc, and I would not be surprised in the slightest were I to win a vanity contest if there was some kind of an imaginary vanity reading machine.
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aaleks
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby aaleks » Sat Sep 09, 2017 10:05 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:I am aware of this. Edit: It may not have come across this way as I was talking strictly about improving pronunciation (and thus was not discussing those that don't have this objective), nevertheless I do understand and kindly respect others and what they wish to achieve in learning a language. I don't believe having a native like accent makes such a person better than anyone else either, as sometimes I do believe perfectionism is potentially a sign of vanity since it alters the way one may appear to outsiders with such things as native-like accent or sporting achievements etc, and I would not be surprised in the slightest were I to win a vanity contest if there was some kind of an imaginary vanity reading machine.

I don't see vanity in one's working on his accent, and I look up to people who are able to get rid of or signifyingly reduce it. Unfortunately very often I can't formulate my thoughts into English words. When that happens, usually I delete the most Tarzan-like part of such a text. And I'm afraid, that sometimes, as a result, my posts might sound unintentionally harsh. They might be half-baked as well. (Of course I try to edit them to make look more coherent, but...) In fact I just wanted to say that sometimes one's accent, bad or good, isn't a result of a right or wrong approach. It could be more about one's willingness to work on it, or how strong the willingness is.
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby leosmith » Sat Sep 09, 2017 4:52 pm

I don’t mind additional discussion, but let me restate the first post a bit. Do you guys agree that:
1) Adult learners achieve native-like pronunciation less often than native-like other skills?
2) Pronunciation errors fossilize more quickly and are more resistant to reversal than errors in other skills?
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby Uncle Roger » Sat Sep 09, 2017 6:06 pm

1) a lot less often of course, because it's partly a musical skiill (which is not exactly taught sufficiently in most school systems) and partly sheer performance. Speaking is like singing or playing a musical instrument or executing a 3 point shot in basketball or a serve in tennis. There is an intrinsic uncertainty about it, which makes 100% consistency unattainable.

2) again yes, because school caters for grammar and spelling mostly. Plus your voice is a natural trait (like your height and your eye colour or rather the way you run or jump), whereas an alphabet, words and a grammar are completely artificial constructs and as such must be learned from scratch (in fact, must be taught to you), which already puts much stronger basis for systematicity in their use.
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sat Sep 09, 2017 8:44 pm

leosmith wrote:I don’t mind additional discussion, but let me restate the first post a bit. Do you guys agree that:
1) Adult learners achieve native-like pronunciation less often than native-like other skills?
2) Pronunciation errors fossilize more quickly and are more resistant to reversal than errors in other skills?


1. Yes.
2. Yes, I think. Not 100% sure, but am hesitantly saying yes.
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby reineke » Tue Sep 12, 2017 5:49 pm

Joey Barton, who is currently on loan at French Ligue 1 side Olympic Marseille, speaks at a press conference - in English, but with a distinct French accent.



A is for Accomodation

"What Barton of course was doing (although neither he nor the Daily Mail named it as such) was accommodating his accent to that of his audience. Accommodation, as Robin Walker (2010: 97) reminds us, is ‘the ability to adjust your speech and aspects of spoken communication so that they become more (or less) like that of your interlocutors’. David Crystal (2003: 6) adds that, ‘among the reasons why people converge towards the speech pattern of their listener are the desires to identify more closely with the listener, to win social approval, or simply to increase the communicative efficiency of the interaction’.

Winning social approval may well have motivated Barton, a newcomer to the region, to assume a French accent. But more important still was the need to be intelligible: in his defence he had said that ‘it is very difficult to do a press conference in Scouse for a room full of French journalists. The alternative is to speak like a ‘Allo Allo!’ character’.

Whatever the reason, Barton’s much-publicized accommodation is a good, if extreme, example of what most of us tend to do naturally and instinctively, and not just at the level of accent. Jenny Jenkins (2000: 169) identifies a wide range of linguistic and prosodic features that are subject to convergence between speakers, ‘such as speech rate, pauses, utterance length, pronunciation and… non-vocal features such as smiling and gaze’."

https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/20 ... mmodation/

Also see: S is for Stupid.
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby Jbean » Tue Sep 12, 2017 6:53 pm

I have a sometimes Italian teacher who is married to an American. Her children were born in Italy and grew up speaking both Italian and English, the family moved to the U.S. when the children were seven. She says that her daughter speaks Italian with an Italian accent and English with an American accent, but her son speaks Italian with an American accent and English with an Italian accent. Her son invented a single accent somewhere in the middle.
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reineke
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Re: Pronunciation – it’s a delicate skill.

Postby reineke » Sun Oct 01, 2017 4:45 pm

A is for Accent

"Significantly, the adjectives that most commonly co-occur with accent (according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English [Davies 2008-], and excluding for the moment names of languages – like French, Russian etc) are: thick, heavy, foreign, slight, strong, soft, faint, fake, lilting, native, clipped, funny, strange, different, good, charming and sexy. Notice how value-laden many of these adjectives are. This fact serves to remind us that – for the ‘person in the street’ at least – there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ accent, in the sense of an accent that is value-free.

This was driven home this week by the appearance of a video on the BBC Website in which a young Polish woman living in the UK is reduced, literally, to tears by the negative reaction her accent supposedly evokes among Britons – an accent that is hardly thick, heavy or funny, incidentally. Accordingly, she enlists the services of an elocution teacher, who promises to rid her of her accent once and for all. (The teacher’s exaggerated RP vowels and her manner of drilling them is reminiscent of Professor Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, and the way he successfully erases the Cockney accent of Eliza Doolittle, and, in so doing, effectively erases her identity).

What the Polish woman is seeking is what is marketed as ‘accent reduction’, which, as Jennifer Jenkins (2000, p. 208) points out, is predicated on a misunderstanding of what second language acquisition means, i.e. not subtraction, but addition: ‘An L2 accent is not an accent reduced but an accent gained: a facility which increases learners’ choices by expanding their phonological repertoires.’ And she adds, ‘Interestingly, we never hear references to “grammar reduction” or “vocabulary reduction”. No writer of L2 pedagogic grammars or vocabulary courses would entertain the notion that learners need to reduce their L1 grammar or vocabulary in order to acquire the L2.’

Of course, such arguments will probably not appease the Polish woman who desperately wants to achieve a kind of social invisibility. Nevertheless, they serve to remind us that our choices – as teachers, curriculum designers and materials writers – have a strong ethical component."

https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/20 ... or-accent/
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