Pronunciation-specific adjustment strategies for intelligibility in L2 teacher talk: results and implications of a questionnaire study

Abstract

A questionnaire study was conducted to examine how 120 highly experienced EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers in Japan adjust their pronunciation in order to facilitate and refine their students’ learning skills to approach mutual intelligibility in second language (L2) classrooms (i.e. pronunciation-specific teacher talk). The results of this questionnaire study exhibits that the majority of these teachers reported their conscious and/or intuitive efforts to make classroom input comprehensible to their students via phonological input modification. Then, by coding the questionnaire results, 12 pronunciation-specific adjustment strategies (e.g. speech rate and fluency modification, assimilation and liaison avoidance) were identified, and their frequency among the teachers was measured (e.g. they are likely to enunciate their speech, especially at a lexical level). These findings will not only aid and inform teachers on scaffolding and how to boost mutual intelligibility in L2 classrooms but will also assist to advocate and increase learners’ awareness of the essential importance of acquiring accuracy in L2 pronunciation.

Keywords:

• intelligible pronunciation
• pronunciation instruction
• teacher talk
• foreigner talk
• teacher questionnaire

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our gratitude and sincere appreciation to Roy Lyster, Danial MacKay, Katriina O’Kane, and to the anonymous Language Awareness reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. A small number of teachers can be promoted to be teacher trainers on the basis of the amount of teaching experience and the level of teaching skills.

2. A reviewer pointed out that teachers will only be able to identify conscious strategies in responding to the questionnaire. As it will become clearer in the later part of this paper, not many teachers in the current project consciously paid attention to how they modified their speech, but the questionnaire made them realize the fact that they were actually adjusting their speech styles without much attention.

3. According to Chaudron's comprehensive overview of teacher talk studies, teachers tend to have a mean rate of speech of 100 words per minute with beginning learners, but speed up to 140–160 words per minute with advanced learners (1998, p. 66).

4. Due to the fact that Japanese is a mora-timed language, NJs tend to pronounce each syllable with equal stress, which leads NJs to have difficulties in producing complex syllables allowed in English such as consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant (CCVC), CCVCC, and CCCVCC (Riney & Anderson-Hsieh, 1993).

5. As one of its three Japanese writing systems, Katakana borrows English words and adapts them within the Japanese phonetic system (e.g. /terebi/ for ‘TV’ and /konpjyutar/ for ‘computer’). It is well known that NJs tend to continue to use Katakana English, resulting in a lot of confusion for NE listeners (Riney & Anderson-Hsieh, 1993).

6. Their judgement of the interdental fricatives as a prioritized teaching target needs to be interpreted with caution. It could be used as evidence that the teachers in the current study might have conflated the accentedness-comprehensibility distinction, because these sounds with low functional loads are hypothesised to make little impact on comprehensibility (Jenkins, 2000). Yet, there is another possibility that the teachers might have felt it safer to teach the interdental fricatives in conjunction with the reality of Japanese EFL classrooms: their students likely have high expectations to use English in future business and academic settings, whereby they need advanced oral L2 skills to successfully interact with a wide range of interlocutors, some of whom might have negative attitudes towards foreign accented speech (Munro, 2003). In other words, it is not surprising that the teachers in the current study chose to teach these sounds to avoid unwanted accent-related discrimination which their students might face in future communicative settings, especially given that the mispronunciation of the interdental fricatives is perceptually salient and it negatively relates to accentedness (but not to comprehensibility) (for discussion, Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Segalowitz, 2011). We would like to make a strong call for future relevant studies which will investigate the communicative and social impact of the interdental fricatives in listeners’ reaction towards L2 speech with a controlled experimental design.