pronunciation – Educational Sociolinguistics

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:

Have you ever experienced anything in the above situations? How do you balance the relationship between pronunciation learning objectives and identity?
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

You’re outta sight – urusai (shut up)

Victoria

The scene: a Japanese exchange student studying abroad in some unnamed country goes to a live performance of a band that plays a song called “You Gotta Stay”. However, the student mishears this song title as “Ryuugakusei”, meaning “exchange student”. The rest of the song plays out similarly, with the English lyrics being a rather unoriginal love song but the Japanese interpretation being the story of a Japanese exchange student acclimatizing to life abroad. For instance, from the chorus:

“You gotta stay” – “Ryuugakusei” (Exchange student)
“Hey, I need you here, babe” – “Heya nijuu hei bei” (The room is 20m²)
“It’s better never talkin’ ‘cause it’s no good” – “Beddo ni neru toki kutsu nugu” (Take off your shoes when you sleep in bed)
“You gotta stay” – “Ryuugakusei” (Exchange student)
“Hey, I need you here, babe” – “Heya nijuu hei bei” (The room is 20m²)
“I messed up, should’ve known last time I met ya!” – “Miso shiru nomitai wa meccha” (I really want to drink miso soup)

While mishearing lyrics has long been a fun feature listening to music in one’s own language (think Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “there’s a bad moon on the rise” infamously being mistaken for “there’s a bathroom on the right”), this song is an interesting example of how listening to music, particularly that in a language that perhaps not fluently understood by the listener, can result in some amusingly different messages. In the video linked above, the guest artist playing the exchange student is a relatively new figure on the Japanese music scene named Okazaki Taiiku. In other songs, such as one called “Natural Lips”, he slurs and manipulates his Japanese words in a way that makes them sound something like English (complete with English style ‘-r’ sounds that are notoriously difficult for Japanese speakers), but ultimately, the song becomes almost impossible to understand without reading the subtitles simultaneously, as the title card at the beginning warns. For further context, the band behind “Ryuugakusei” is a Canadian-Japanese hybrid outfit called Monkey Majik which features two brothers from Ottawa who originally came to Japan to teach English and hit mainstream success as a band there in 2006. Their songs are typically a mix of English and Japanese, though not in this way.

Japanese music is well known for including English in its lyrics, this thought to be the result of English’s status as the current dominant world language. However, while English is a core subject for all school students starting from age 12, many people are reluctant to use their English in part due to a lack of focus on communication skills in these lessons. As a result, the English in music is often unintelligible or inserted at random, perhaps for the “cool” factor rather than any sort of communicative purpose. As a result, in my opinion, this English is rarely listened to or considered by the average listener. Okazaki Taiiku instead encourages active listening by overusing ‘r’ sounds and employing English-like pronunciation of both Japanese and English, the latter being something that many Japanese English learners shy away from out of embarrassment but perhaps might be encouraged by musicians like this normalizing playing around with mouth shapes and tongue placement. On a similar note, English singers showing Japanese listeners that English lyrics don’t have to be gibberish or beyond understanding could be a helpful nudge to get people trying to listen more actively to the music they consume or to perhaps seek out more music to practice their listening on.

During my time teaching, some of my students were reluctant to listen to Western music because of the language barrier, so songs like this may help listeners to see that the divide between Japanese and English is not as strict or insurmountable as they might think. Playing around with language and pronunciation is something that I think many of us could stand to do in our learning journeys to take some of the edge off, so I hope that educators will make use of media like this to spur learners into equating trial and error with fun.

Do Canadians Close Their Mouths More While Speaking Because It’s Cold?

Brian

You have no idea how many hours I have spent in the classroom teaching, listening to, and analyzing American English pronunciation. Actually, I have no idea either. We would go over all of the sounds, especially vowels, figuring out the differences between bat, bet, and bit, and between bot and but.

As I corrected my students’ pronunciation, and attempted to model it myself, I started to realize something: while my students were repeating the sounds accurately, it didn’t sound natural. But it was me that didn’t sound like the recording. In order to teach the lessons, I had to speak differently, which meant moving my jaw and opening my mouth more than I was used to.

I was born, lucky me / In a land that I love / Though I am poor, I am free

“Welcome to Nagamori Minami Junior High School. What’s your name?”

“My name is Victoria Tothill-Brown.”

“Can the students call you ビクトリア (bi-ku-to-ri-a)? It’s the same thing, right?”

“Why don’t we try it together with them? They can pretend they’re imitating a cell phone buzzing on a table. V-v-v-v…”

“It’s too hard. They can’t do it. Let’s just call you ビクトリア.”

—

“ブラウン (bu-ra-u-n)-san…”

“トッヒルブラウン (to-hhi-ru-bu-ra-u-n), please.”

“Your gym membership payment was rejected by your bank again this month.”

“Did you bill me under トッヒルブラウン? That’s my name at the bank.”

“Your name is too long to fit in the boxes allotted on the form.”

“Then you’ll have to find a way.”

“Can’t we file you under ブラウン?”

“That’s my father’s surname, my mother’s is Tothill. I was named after both of them, so no, you may not because that’s not my name.”

“But it would make your life here easier.”

English pronunciation – Can it be a criterion to measure English level?

Yerim Lee

As a speaker, learner, and English teacher, I’ve been wondering what good English pronunciation is. There are numerous kinds of pronunciation in this world, but there’s no definition or criteria of which pronunciation is the ‘good’ one. When I was young, my English teachers used to tell me that I had a good pronunciation, which led to the situation where I often was selected to read the text book out loud. In addition to that, some friends thought my English was very good and even asked me whether I came from the States. Looking back to those days, I think it is a very funny thing that people saw me as having very good level of English only because of my pronunciation. But, did I really have a good pronunciation? What are the criteria to decide so? In my personal opinion, the basis of good pronunciation depends on the perception of listeners.

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First Nation’s English: A response to Simon’s Post ‘Non-standard French in the Uashat mak Mani-Utenam Reserve’

Posted by Dean Garlick

(This piece was originally a comment to Simon’s post, but I thought it could use greater visibility and could serve as a separate post on its own).

I’ve also noticed a similar stigmatizing effect in English with First Nations speakers as the one Simon describes in his piece on the French used by the Innu in Sept-Îles. There is often a unique cadence, pace, and grammatical structure that is unique to First Nation’s speakers’ English that unfortunately is often perceived as ‘slow’ or ‘stupid’ by speakers of standard varieties of English. This is extremely frustrating, but more of a reflection of how First Nations peoples are generally viewed and in fact becomes yet another ‘justification’ for discriminatory attitudes.

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