Pronunciation training as a “local practice”

Purpose of the study: If noticing plays an important role in successful L2 acquisition, learners will need to be made explicitly aware of phenomena in their L1 or L2 that may have escaped their attention, but which may still hinder their efforts to communicate efficiently with native, or proficient, speakers of an L2. Especially when it comes to pronunciation training, individual learners will fail to see the relevance of such a contrastive approach if the L1 features discussed are merely based on the national standard language, and are absent from their own local variety. In countries which exhibit immense linguistic variation, such as the People’s Republic of China, it would be important to investigate to what extent the English pronunciation training curriculum can modified to accommodate the needs of local learners who either do not speak the national standard language widely used in contrastive analyses, or pronounce this with a strong regional accent. An auditory analysis of the English pronunciation features of local users would provide information that could form the basis for a “hierarchy of error” (cf. Collins & Mees, 2003; Van den Doel, 2006; Szpyra-Kozłowska, 2014) to be included in a localised pronunciation curriculum more directly tailored to their needs. Method: To demonstrate how an analysis of this type might be conducted, an example is provided from an exploratory survey conducted in Jiangsu province in China – a region which is split linguistically into two different groups of dialects: Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Northern Wu. Based on descriptions of these dialects such as those provided in Chao (1976) and Norman (1988), predictions were made about the English pronunciation features of speakers with such backgrounds, which were compared and contrasted with the accent features actually attested in recordings of such speakers. All recordings consisted of reading passages and free speech collected from third-year student teachers at Jiangsu Second Normal University in Nanjing. Results: Despite the limited scope of the study, it emerged, as predicted, that there were clear differences between speakers with either a Mandarin or a Wu background, especially as regards the realisation of English /ð/ and English final /n/. However, both groups of speakers also shared a number of pronunciation features which may be seen as typical of the province, but which would be absent in non-regional speakers of the standard language. Conclusions: There appeared to be enough variation in the pronunciation of English, both between different groups of speakers from Jiangsu province and as compared to speakers of Standard Mandarin Chinese, to warrant a larger-scale investigation of the same type into the localized pronunciations of Chinese learners of English. This could be used to corroborate the preliminary findings presented here, and provide enough data to develop materials tailored to the needs of different groups of learners, both in Jiangsu province, other parts of China and beyond. These suggestions for further research will also be contextualised with examples drawn from multidialectal and multilingual settings in the Netherlands. References: Chao, Y.R. (1976). Contrasting aspects of the Wu dialects. In: A.S. Dil (Ed.), Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics: Essays by Yuen Ren Chao, pp. 35-47. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Collins, B.S. & Mees, I. M. (2003). Practical Phonetics and Phonology. London: Routledge. Norman, J. (1988). Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szpyra-Kozłowska, J. (2014). Pronunciation in EFL Instruction: A Research-Based Approach. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Van den Doel, R. (2006). How Friendly are the Natives? An Evaluation of Native-Speaker Judgments of Foreign-accented British and American English. Utrecht: LOT.