The previous section discussed the aspects of English speech timing where Polish learners have been reported to face problems. This section provides a review of opinions concerning the significance of these aspects for the teaching/learning process.
3.5.1 Long and short vowels
The phonological functions of segmental duration are regarded as important by most authors dealing with language pedagogy. For instance, Jassem (1971: 54) writes:
With respect to segmental quality shades (especially within vowels), the teacher can afford some tolerance in requirements given the quite wide acceptability margin. However, with respect to phonological duration, the language norms are more rigid. [translation mine]4 In her rather permissive approach to non-native English pronunciation, Jenkins (2000) also stresses the importance of long-short vowel opposition in English. Because foreign learners with a syllable-timed L1 background usually find it difficult to attend to qualitative vocalic contrasts of English,
3 Depending on the approach, aspiration may also be considered part of the stressed vowel following a voiceless plosive.
4 „W zakresie odcieni głoskowych (szczególnie w obrębie samogłosek) nauczyciel może sobie pozwolić tu i ówdzie na pewną liberalność w swych wymaganiach z uwagi na wspomniany wyżej dość szeroki margines poprawności. Natomiast w zakresie iloczasu normy poprawnościowe są bardziej sztywne” (Jassem 1971: 54).
a considerable proportion of their performance may become unintelligible whenever both kinds of errors are combined. The distinction between long and short or tense and lax vowels form an important issue in practical English pronunciation courses, and most popular British English dictionaries (cf. section 1.2.1) indicate intrinsic vowel length explicitly in phonemic transcription.
Another important function of vocalic duration, also discussed in previous chapters, is to indicate the phonological voiced/voiceless consonant contrast in syllable-final position. Because it is often the only phonetic cue to the contrast (cf. section 1.2.2), it must be included in English pronunciation teaching syllabus.
3.5.2 Vowel reduction
Bogle (1996) and Kenworthy (1987) insist that vowel reduction must not be neglected in teaching English pronunciation. This is especially important in interactions with native speakers. Jenkins (2000), however, considers vowel reduction redundant in communication. The pronunciation teacher’s approach to this problem should still note the difference between L1 and FL in this respect. Even if Jenkins’s point of view is favoured, the learner’s awareness of vowel reduction in English seems indispensable for successful comprehension of native English speech.
3.5.3 Accentual lengthening
Scholars dealing with language pedagogy are practically unanimous in recognising the crucial role of robust indication of phrasal or sentence prominence for communication efficiency (cf. Bogle 1996, Kenworthy 1987, Celce-Murcia et al. 1996, Jenkins 2000). Among the acoustic cues to prominence, duration appears to be one that is relatively easy to control by the learners. However, the dearth of unambiguous results in studies attempting to describe and explain the relations between individual acoustic cues and their perception by the listeners should remind us that the temporal relations alone may not adequately reflect the nature of encoding and decoding prominence signals.
3.5 The relevance of timing problems... 57
3.5.4 Stress-timing
Timing and rhythm are regarded as high pedagogical priorities (e.g. Kenworthy 1987, Nunan 1995, Bogle 1996, Jenner 1999, Celce-Murcia et al. 1996, Roach 2002, Szpyra-Kozłowska et al. 2002, 2003). Adams (1979), Anderson-Hsieh et al. (1992), Cutler (1993) and Fear et al. (1995) claim that patterns of alternating strong and weak syllables are especially significant for speakers of stress-based languages (cf. Setter 2006). Such opinions are supported by perception studies, which have shown that timing may be more important for speech recognition than segmental details (e.g. Kozhevnikov and Chistovich 1965, Wingfield and Klein 1971, Jassem 1971, Faber 1986).
Tajima et al. (1997) manipulated the English speech sample of a Chinese speaker to match the timing of a native American speaker and in the opposite way they made native American speech syllable-timed to resemble the rhythm of Chinese. It turned out that in both cases the intelligibility of speech samples changed by up to 25% to demonstrate positive correlation with stress-timing.
A similar conclusion concerning the greater intelligibility of native-like speech timing has been drawn by Smith et al. (2003) from a study of perception and production of temporal vowel contrasts by Chinese English learners. Finally, Adams (1979) even suggests that improper speech timing may lead to a communication failure.
The importance of English speech timing raises concerns about its teachability and learnability. It has been observed that rhythm differences between L1 and L2/FL may make the learning process more difficult (Anderson-Hsieh and Venkatagiri 1994). Adams (1979), Taylor (1981), Bond and Fokes (1985), and Faber (1986) consider rhythm to be one of the most difficult features of English for foreign speakers to master. However, of the rhythm correlates, syllable-duration as a significant cue to word and phrase stress can be efficiently taught (Gilbert 1984; Halliday 1989; Chela-Flores 1994, 1998; Setter 2006).
Another problem that the pronunciation teacher faces already at the stage of designing a syllabus is the order of segmental and suprasegmental topics to be introduced and practised. On the one hand, the traditional design where suprasegmental issues follow segmental ones is often challenged on account of the alleged greater significance of suprasegmentals. However, the influence of phonological structures of prosodic units is a decisive factor that determines their duration in both native and non-native speech. Without the learner’s satisfactory command of foreign speech sounds and their combinations, achieving native-like speech timing patterns is a highly difficult task.
According to Barry (2007: 114),
It is important that individually learnable properties of language be brought into focus — informationally important (prominent) words, informationally less important words (and syllables within multi-syllabic words), long and short vowels, spectrally reduced vowels, consonant elision, etc. The contextualized introduction and practice of these properties in an optimal sequence is, of course, a non-trivial task. But their command will lead to a globally correct prosody and, in time, to a sense of prosodic “rightness” for the particular communicative intention in the same way that learning verb or noun morphology and syntactic regularities will lead to a command of the correct form and sequence of words. In neither of these areas would one think of introducing teaching points by appealing to a sense of “Morphology” or “Syntax”. We suggest that the appeal to a general idea of “Rhythm” which is abstracted from the prominence pattern of the particular utterance is equally unproductive.
The general question whether the actual native timing patterns are mainly reflections of some “global” rhythmic models or rather a sum of the “local”
timing determinants of their constituents will certainly not be answered in this dissertation but it will frequently be asked to make the interpretation of the results of the present research more comprehensive.
3.6 Conclusion
Although interference is not the only source of foreign-accentedness of FL performance (cf. Waniek-Klimczak 2009), it is probably the element whose influence is the most systematic and predictable. Therefore, supported by traditional contrastive analysis (Lado 1957, Brière 1968, Wardhaugh 1970), it should remain a focus of the foreign language teacher. The potential interference problems described in this chapter as being the most typical of Polish learners are investigated in the subsequent parts of the dissertation in order to evaluate the scale of the problems, interspeaker variability, and the dynamics of interlaguage change with respect to timing. They form a basis for the formulation of research hypotheses presented in Chapter 4.
3.6 Conclusion 59
C
HAPTER4
T HE DIAGNOSTIC STUDY
OF P OLISH LEARNERS’ E NGLISH SPEECH TIMING
4.1 Introduction
Following the discussion in Chapter 3, we recognise speech timing as an important aspect of foreign language production. Timing in any language, as indicated in Chapters 1—3, depends on a range of interacting factors. Many of these factors are universal and determine speech unit length in similar ways across languages, while others perform language-specific phonological functions. As stated in the introduction, the general goal of this study is to describe the non-native timing characteristics of Polish learners’ English speech. We consider the read speech of advanced learners in order to control for the content of analysed speech samples and minimise the effects of low general language proficiency on the timing of learners’ oral production. We focus on the timing within an IP, a relatively independent speech unit in communication, trying to observe the contribution of constituents at various levels of the prosodic hierarchy. In order to achieve this, we analyse the timing differences between native English speakers and Polish learners, assuming that L1 interference is an important source of pronunciation errors. As has been discussed before, the timing of Polish learners’ English pronunciation differs from native speakers’ production systematically for a number of reasons:
1. FL speech production is generally slower and marked by more pauses and other dysfluencies. This observation can be treated as extension of H&H theory (Lindblom 1990) and other theories (e.g. Gahl 2006) which claim that reduction, including quantitative reduction, is more radical in more familiar and more frequently occurring items (cf. also Munro and Derwing 1994).
2. Even in familiar and frequent units, the learner may encounter sounds or sound clusters of greater articulatory complexity, which slow down FL
pronunciation. The difficulty level may vary individually but it may also be determined by L1-FL relations.
3. L1 sounds of longer intrinsic duration may be substituted for FL-specific ones (e.g. /x/ for /h/ — cf. Jassem’s classification presented in section 1.2.1).
4. Certain durational features are used systematically to perform phonological functions in FL only, while in L1 either they are not exploited or the magnitude of length variation is different in the two languages.
The interest of this study is focused mainly on performance discrepancies resulting from the last of these points, while the other three must be taken into account as potential sources of extraneous variables.