Learners’ perspectives and outcomes towards native and non-native instruction with respect to pronunciation

La enseñanza del componente hablado del inglés ha estado en constante debate y cambio para decidir seguir, ya sea, una pronunciación similar a la nativa o una extranjera inteligible. Consecuentemente, esta síntesis de investigación apuntó a establecer, con la ayuda de 16 estudios primarios, si los educadores nativos o no-nativo hablantes son los modelos más apropiados para la enseñanza de la pronunciación en el estado actual del idioma inglés. Los resultados demuestran una discrepancia en lo que está aclarado en investigaciones con lo que realmente es percibido en escenarios reales de educación. No obstante, existe actualmente una clara mejora del estatus de los docentes no-nativo hablantes para enseñar pronunciación inglesa que sea comprensible para cualquier hablante del idioma, en vez de generar en los estudiantes una imitación de una pronunciación nativa. Los resultados de esta investigación ayudan también a establecer una idea más clara sobre los futuros objetivos y percepciones de la enseñanza de la pronunciación y de sus modelos, como también puntos de discusión para completar brechas de conocimiento sobre el tema, especialmente en nuestro contexto.The speaking component of the English language has been in constant debate and change to decide following either a native-like or an intelligible-foreign pronunciation. Consequently, this research synthesis aimed to establish, with the aid of 16 primary studies, whether Native or Nonnative Speaking Teachers are the most appropriate models for pronunciation teaching in the current state of the English language. The results demonstrate a discrepancy of what is stated in papers to what is actually perceived in real educational scenarios. Nevertheless, there is nowadays a clear raise of status for non-native speaking teachers to teach an English pronunciation that is comprehensible for any speaker of English, rather than making students imitate a native pronunciation. The findings of this research also help to establish a clear perspective of what are the future goals and perceptions for pronunciation teaching and their models as well as several discussion points to fill certain gaps of knowledge about the topic, especially in our context.Licenciado en Pedagogía del Idioma InglésCuenc

Phonetic Convergence, Language Talent, Personality and Attention

Studies into phonetic adaptation rarely consider individual differences (IDs) on a cognitive and personality level between speakers as a direct source of adaptation variation. In order to investigate the degree to which the individual phonetic talent and further psycho-cognitive IDs of speakers affect phonetic convergence in a second language setting, 20 German native speakers were involved in two dialog tasks with two native speakers of English, a male speaker of American English and a female speaker of Standard Southern British English. The dialogs were quasi-spontaneous task-oriented interactions elicited with the Diapix picture-matching game. The English L2 learners were divided into a phonetically talented and less talented group based on their test results and evaluation in a preceding extensive language talent test battery. The acoustic analyses using amplitude envelopes revealed that talented speakers converged significantly more toward their English native speaking partners in the Diapix study. An additional analysis relates their degree of convergence to a range of personality and cognitive measures. The factors openness, neuroticism, Behavior Inhibition score and the switch costs in a Simon Test significantly impacted the degree of phonetic convergence in the dialog study

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The role of experience in processing foreign-accented speech

The present study examines the perceptual accommodation of the bilabial stop-consonant voicing contrast (i.e., /b/ vs. /p/), in several English- and Spanish-accented contexts, by native Spanish listeners with different degrees of experience with accented speech. In a series of four experiments, we confronted three potential mechanisms for the perceptual accommodation of foreign-accented sounds. According to the first mechanism (phonetic relaxation), listeners accommodate foreign-accented sounds by relaxing the phonetic boundary between native speech sound categories. According to the second mechanism (phonetic calibration), listeners accommodate foreign-accented sounds by adjusting the location of native perceptual boundaries according to the phonetic realization of native categories in the foreign-accented speech context. Finally, according to the third mechanism (phonetic switching), foreign-accented speech sounds are accommodated by switching to a non-native system of phonetic representations that was previously developed through long-term experience with the speech norm of the foreign accent. Experimental results indicate that Spanish listeners did not relax the phonetic boundary between /b/ and /p/ in an English-accented Spanish context (Experiments 1 and 3). However, they accommodated English-accented Spanish voicing differently, depending on their degree of experience with the English-accented speech norm. When Spanish listeners had little or no experience with the English norm, they calibrated the location of the perceptual boundary between /b/ and /p/ according to the Spanish or English phonetic realization of these sounds in the speech context (Experiment 4). Alternatively, when they had a high degree of experience with English-accented speech, they accommodated English-accented Spanish /b/ and /p/ by using an English-like system of phonetic representations that was not predictable from the phonetic realization of /b/ and /p/ in the speech context (Experiments 1 and 2). These experimental results contribute to a better understanding of the role played by non-native experience in the perceptual accommodation of foreign-accents. In particular, they indicate that native listeners may rely on previous long-term experience with the native language of the foreign-accented speaker to efficiently accommodate foreign-accented speech variability in a different way to which they accommodate speech variability from different native-accented speakers

Life Portraits: A Comparative Case Study of Four Veteran Spanish Teachers

In foreign language education the classification native or nonnative speaker of a language often evokes thoughts related to degrees of competence in language teaching (Braine, 2004; Davies, 2004). This comparative case study focused on Spanish teachers in a United States context. It contributes toward the literature base in research related to native and nonnative speakers of languages other than English within the local context. Using the threefold theoretical framework of role identity theory (Stryker, 1968; Stryker & Burke, 2000), teacher efficacy (Tschennen Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001) and social constructivism (Schwandt, 2007), the study aimed at developing understandings about the lived experience of foreign language teachers given the native/ nonnative speaker construct. It investigated how their personal perception of their role impacted the execution of professional duties. It also explored their conceptualization of the language teacher, given their extensive observation of teachers of various languages. The questions guiding the research were: (a) How does each participant conceptualize her role identity as Spanish teacher in a predominantly English speaking setting?, (b) How viable is the native/nonnative speaker construct when teacher efficacy is considered?, and (c) how has the experience of supervising teachers of differing linguistic backgrounds in the language they teach (native/nonnative speaker teachers) influenced the participants’ understanding of the language teacher construct in the USA? Data collection was done through interviews, focus group discussions and classroom observations. The participants were four veteran Spanish teachers who had been in the department chair position for more than ten years. Two grew up speaking the language while the others learned the language in an academic setting. Findings revealed that there was great similarity in the way teachers conceptualized their role as Spanish teacher and that they gave no credence to the native/ nonnative speaker construct as an indicator of language proficiency and competence in language teaching

The Relationship Between Phonemic Category Boundary Changes and Perceptual Adjustments to Natural Accents

published Online First October 21, 2019People often experience difficulties when they first hear a novel accent. Prior research has shown that relatively fast natural accent accommodation can occur. However, there has been little investigation of the underlying perceptual mechanism that drives the learning. The current study examines whether phonemic boundary changes play a central role in natural accent accommodation. Two well-established boundary shifting phenomena were used here—recalibration and selective adaptation—to index the flexibility of phonemic category boundaries. Natural accent accommodation was measured with a task in which listeners heard accented words and nonwords before and after listening to English sentences produced by one of two native Mandarin Chinese speakers with moderate accents. In two experiments, participants completed recalibration, selective adaptation, and natural accent accommodation tasks focusing on a consonant contrast that is difficult for native Chinese speakers to produce. We found that: (a) On the accent accommodation task, participants showed an increased endorsement of accented/ mispronounced words after exposure to a speaker’s accented speech, indicating a potential relaxation of criteria in the word recognition process; (b) There was no strong link between recalibrating phonemic boundaries and natural accent accommodation; (c) There was no significant correlation between recalibration and selective adaptation. These results suggest that recalibration of phonemic boundaries does not play a central role in natural accent accommodation. Instead, there is some evidence suggesting that natural accent accommodation involves a relaxation of phonemic categorization criteria.Support was provided by Ministerio de Ciencia E Innovacion, Grant PSI2017-82563-P, Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa, Grant SEV-2015- 0490, by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018–2021 program, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant IBSS-1519908

Does seeing an Asian face make speech sound more accented?

Published online: 17 May 2017Prior studies have reported that seeing an Asian face makes American English sound more accented. The current study investigates whether this effect is perceptual, or if it instead occurs at a later decision stage. We first replicated the finding that showing static Asian and Caucasian faces can shift people’s reports about the accentedness of speech accompanying the pictures. When we changed the static pictures to dubbed videos, reducing the demand characteristics, the shift in reported accentedness largely disappeared. By including unambiguous items along with the original ambiguous items, we introduced a contrast bias and actually reversed the shift, with the Asian-face videos yielding lower judgments of accentedness than the Caucasian-face videos. By changing to a mixed rather than blocked design, so that the ethnicity of the videos varied from trial to trial, we eliminated the difference in accentedness rating. Finally, we tested participants’ perception of accented speech using the selective adaptation paradigm. After establishing that an auditory-only accented adaptor shifted the perception of how accented test words are, we found that no such adaptation effect occurred when the adapting sounds relied on visual information (Asian vs. Caucasian videos) to influence the accentedness of an ambiguous auditory adaptor. Collectively, the results demonstrate that visual information can affect the interpretation, but not the perception, of accented speech.Support was provided by Ministerio de Ciencia E Innovacion, Grant PSI2014-53277, Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa, Grant SEV-2015- 0490, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant IBSS-1519908