Transfer, similarity or lack of awareness? inconsistencies of German learners in the pronunciation of lot, thought, strut, palm and bath

The current study presents acoustic analyses of non-high back vowels and low central vowels in the lexical sets LOT, THOUGHT, STRUT, PALM and BATH as pronounced by German learners of English. The main objective is to show that learners of English at university level are highly inconsistent in approximating the vowels of their self-chosen target accents British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). To that end, the acoustic qualities of the English vowels of learners are compared to their native German vowels and to the vowels of native speakers of BrE and AmE. In order to facilitate statements about the effect of increased experience, the study differentiates between students in their first year at university and in their third year or later. The results obtained are highly variable: In some cases the learners transfer their L1 vowels to English, other cases show clear approximations to the target vowels, while other cases again document the production of new vowels neither found in German nor in English. However, close approximation to the target vowels only sometimes correlates with higher proficiency. This might be an indicator of a low level of awareness of systematic differences between the BrE and AmE vowel systems. But the data also indicate that the more advanced learners produce more distinct AmE BATH vowels and BrE THOUGHT vowels than the less advanced learners, which points to a partial increase of awareness resulting from increased experience. All in all it seems that raising the awareness of differences between target accents in L2 instruction is necessary if the envisage goal is for learners to reach near-native pronunciation

Challenging Myths

The article offers insights into teaching-related challenges posed by Advanced English methods as applied to adult Spanish learners. The analyisis highlights the importance of cognitive approaches adapted to classroom milieus and stresses the inevitability of searching for help from the philosophy of the English language as the ultimate resort for attainment of understanding

Language transfer as a learning strategy: a case study in interlanguage

This study is an attempt to show that language transfer is a notion which is still relevant in a theory of language learning, at least in a formal multilingual educational setting. The first chapter, which is the background -against which the problem of language transfer is perceived, deals mainly with the different views of errors from contrastive analysis to error analysis. The second chapter deals with the methodology used for the collection of data, the data themselves, the subjects and the setting. And finally, in the last chapter, the problems linked with a theory of language learning seen from the learner's standpoint are studied. The advantages the teacher can show from a knowledge of interlanguage theory are briefly examined too in the last part

Sociolinguistic Conditioning of Phonetic Category Realisation in Non-Native Speech

The realisation of phonetic categories reflects a complex relationship between individual phonetic parameters and both linguistic and extra-linguistic conditioning of language usage. The present paper investigates the effect of selected socio-linguistic variables, such as the age, the amount of language use and cultural/social distance in English used by Polish immigrants to the U.S. Individual parameters used in the realisation of the category ‘voice’ have been found to vary in their sensitivity to extra-linguistic factors: while the production of target-like values of all parameters is related to the age, it is the closure duration that is most stable in the correspondence to the age and level of language proficiency. The VOT and vowel duration, on the other hand, prove to be more sensitive to the amount of language use and attitudinal factors

The use of colloquial words in advanced French interlanguage

This article addresses the issue of underrepresentation or avoidance of colloquial words in a cross-sectional corpus of advanced French interlanguage (IL) of 29 Dutch L1 speakers and in a longitudinal corpus of 6 Hiberno-Irish English L1 speakers compared with a control of 6 native speakers of French. The main independent variable analysed in the latter corpus is the effect of spending a year in a francophone environment. This analysis is supplemented by a separate study of sociobiographical and psychological factors that affect the use of colloquial vocabulary in the cross-sectional corpus. Colloquial words are not exceptionally complex morphologically and present no specific grammatical difficulties, yet they are very rare in our data. Multivariate regression analyses suggest that only active authentic communication in the target language (TL) predicts the use of colloquial lexemes in the cross-sectional corpus. This result was confirmed in the longitudinal corpus where a t-test showed that the proportion of colloquial lexemes increased significantly after a year abroad

Error Analysis: a case study with intermediate learners of English

Error Analysis emerged following the traces of Contrastive linguistics, which has been a recurrent approach for research on Second Language Learning in the last century. Errors had been considered a negative response to language acquisition until the development of Error Analysis in the 60s. This perspective would state that there is a contrastive side in second language learning, and innovatively suggest that committing errors does not mean a failure in the learning process, but that it is a positive indicator of the natural steps of language learning. By using Error Analysis approach, the present study aimed at examining a collected corpus of 25 intermediate level essays written in English by students at the University of the Basque Country. The analysis centred on identifying and labelling all lexical and grammatical error occurrences, and determining whether the errors found had an L1 influence or not. The results showed, first, that in the majority of the cases the source of the error was the L2 itself, although, apparently, L1 played a significant role in many cases too, as other studies have previously stated on research with Spanish as L1. Secondly, grammatical errors seemed to occur more frequently than lexical ones, being especially recurrent those related to syntax and verb morphology. Among lexical errors, distortions were the most common errors found in the essays. The analysis of the findings resulted in the suggestion of several didactic implications, which are designed for the improvement of second language learning and teaching. These implications include giving importance to teaching specifically lexis, grammar and chunks; highlighting error feedback, self-edition and needs analysis; and finally taking into consideration gravity of errors and the impact that word processors may have in the process of writing. To conclude, some limitations of the study have been outlined, in order to give guidance on how future research could improve the current research area

Native Language (L1) Transfer in Second Language Learning: From Form to Concept, the Implications

The influence that a student’s first language (L1) can have on their acquisition of a second language (L2) has been frequently noted by language teachers (Swan, 1997; Jarvis, 2007) and documented in the literature for decades. However, thinking has gradually evolved in terms of the form that influence could take. Early research work focussed on transfer of syntax or form, but recently the role that L1 conceptual information plays in transfer has come to the fore. The 1960s saw a plethora of contrastive studies inspired by the work of Robert Lado (1957), where languages were analysed using the prevailing structuralist approaches to language description. These contrastive studies were conceived with the view to predicting the types of errors speakers of one language would make while learning another, and this became known as the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) (Lado, 1957). This view was based in the behaviourist paradigm of the time which saw language learning as habit formation. This implied that learning a new language meant the transfer of elements and features from the first language to the target language, and that old ‘habits’ may interfere with second language acquisition (Aarts, 1982). Pairs of languages were compared in terms of their similarities and differences looking at linguistic units in relation to the overarching system to which they belonged (see Vinay & Darbelnet, 1960; Agard & Di Pietro, 1965, for examples). However, the CAH was severely criticised in the late 1960s, as it did not seem to be able to predict any classroom errors that language teachers had not already noticed, and was not able to offer any solutions with regard to how to deal with these errors (Corder, 1967).peer-reviewe