How the Identity Affected Our L2 Pronunciation?

Shuhang Li

In the 1970s and 1980s, teachers focused on behavioural theory between L1 and L2 in teaching pronunciation in second language acquisition, influenced by behaviorist master theory, and engaged learners in a lot of audiolingual drills, like dictations, repetitions, etc., but little consideration was given to the actual meaning of the content.

Since the 1990s, the goals of instruction seem to have changed. Phonics teachers began to focus on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), not only focusing more on what communicative language means. At the same time, a critical assumption arose in academic field: Biological and maturational constraints affected on adults’ L2 learning. There was a growing belief that there is a critical period for learning L2 in childhood, between the ages of 6 and 7, and that once a person misses the critical period, it is difficult for them to learn as much as they did from the beginning (Critical period: the key period for learners to learn some special skills or behaviours).

So what are the goals of learning to L2 pronunciation, the nativeness principle or the intelligibility principle?

There are many influencing factors, for example: negative transfer from the native language: it is very difficult for a Chinese adult to become a native speaker of English, because the Chinese pinyin is different from IPA in that there are no diphthongs. For example, if the word “down” is not known, most people will pronounce it as “dang”. There are many other effects of negative native language migration, so I will not go into details here. There are also local dialects, emotional factors and so on.

What I am interested in is one of the social factors that influence the L2 pronunciation: identity.

Some L2 learners do not want to sound like native speakers because they are concerned about and want to preserve their L1 identity, such as English speakers with a French or Spanish accent. Others believe that the closer the native speaker is, the more successful their learning will be.

Not only the learners , but also the other people in their social network play a key role. For example, in foreign countries, if a Chinese person’s English pronunciation is too native, he or she is often first recognized by people in his or her language community as being of Chinese descent or as having immigrated many years ago, and is not considered to have received his or her second language education in China. In addition, there is a phenomenon where some of the L1 community around the learner will accuse them of being disloyal to the L1 community by their overly authentic accent, and the L1 community will put pressure on them to assert their support for their national ideology. In such cases, L1 learners are likely to maintain some superficial desire to sound like native speakers, but in most cases they are satisfied with a certain level of pronunciation proficiency to communicate effectively at an understandable global average.

Questions:

1. Have you ever experienced anything in the above situations? How do you balance the relationship between pronunciation learning objectives and identity?
2. As a teacher, if you find that your students have such contradictions, how should you help them?

References:

Loewen, S. (2020). Introduction to instructed second language acquisition (Second). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Retrieved 2022, 149-165.

Moedjito, M. (2009). Priorities in english pronunciation teaching in efl classrooms. K@Ta, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.9744/ing.v10i2.16884

Gilakjani, A. P. (2012). The significance of pronunciation in english language teaching. English Language Teaching, 5(4), 96–107. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v5n4p96