Elina Tergujeff

LEARNER PERSPECTIVE ON ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION TEACHING IN AN EFL CONTEXT

Abstract This paper reports on an interview study with EFL learners that aimed to explore learners’ perceptions and views on English pronunciation teaching. The participants of the present study were ten EFL learners studying in the public educational system of Finland. Six of the participants were pupils attending basic education class nine, i.e. 15- to 16-year-old lower secondary level pupils. Two were primary level pupils attending basic education class four (aged 10), and two were upper secondary school pupils (aged 18). The interviews were thematic, and the learners were encouraged to speak freely about the English pronunciation teaching they were receiving and their opinions on this. In addition, they were asked to discuss their goals in English pronunciation, and to consider their pronunciation learning in class and out of class. The interviews were part of a wider study, mapping English pronunciation teaching practices in the context of Finnish schools. On the basis of the findings, the learners do not seem to have aspirations to native-like pronunciation, but rather aim at achieving intelligible and fluent speech. Only few reported an accent preference (British or American). The primary level learners expressed satisfaction with the amount of pronunciation teaching, whereas most of the lower and upper secondary level learners claimed that pronunciation teaching was insufficient. Despite their criticisms of their pronunciation teaching, the learners reported that they had learnt English pronunciation at school. In addition, many of the learners described learning pronunciation outside school, e.g. through media and personal encounters.

The English Pronunciation Teaching in Europe Survey: Factors inside and outside the Classroom

In the past two decades, a number of studies have looked at how English pronunciation is taught, focusing on teaching practices, materials, training and attitudes to native speaker models from both the teachers’ and the learners’ perspective. Most of these studies have been conducted in English-speaking countries such as the USA (Murphy, 1997), Great Britain (Bradford and Kenworthy, 1991; Burgess and Spencer, 2000), Canada (Breitkreutz, Derwing and Rossiter, 2001; Foote, Holtby and Derwing, 2011), Ireland (Murphy, 2011) and Australia (Couper, 2011; Macdonald, 2002). In Europe, pronunciation teaching has been studied in Spain (Walker, 1999) and, more recently, in Finland (Tergujeff, 2012, 2013a, b). Work has also looked at attitudes towards native speaker models and the degree of success in reaching the model, for example, in Poland (Nowacka, 2010; Waniek-Klimczak, 2002;Waniek-Klimczak and Klimczak, 2005), Serbia (Paunovic, 2009) and Bulgaria (Dimitrova and Chernogorova, 2012). In Finland, Lintunen (2004) and Tergujeff, Ullakonoja and Dufva (2011) focused on learners, not teachers, but both studies included a survey section exploring methods in English pronunciation teaching.

Second language prosody and its development: connection between different aspects

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the development of L2 prosody and, in particular, whether different aspects can affect each other. Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish took part in a pronunciation and oral skills course and were recorded for various speaking tasks before and after the experimental intervention. Read-aloud declarative sentences (statements) from nine learners were acoustically analysed for several tonal and temporal aspects, focusing on the marking of primary stress. The results reveal that the learning of Swedish tonal word accent 2 (H*LH) facilitates other tonal developments towards native-like utterance intonation. A link between tonal and temporal developments in the marking of primary stress was, however, not found, but the duration measurements suggest that articulation rate and tonal developments may be connected. The study’s implications for teaching and future research regarding any L2 – not only Swedish – include that aspects of learning L2 prosody should not be treated as separate, and that more emphasis should be placed on the possible connections between the learning of different aspects.

Good Servants but Poor Masters: On the Important Role of Textbooks in Teaching English Pronunciation

Textbooks are the most commonly used teaching materials among European EFL teachers (Henderson et al., 2012), and it is undeniable that they have a central role in foreign language teaching overall. Scholars across time have claimed that the role of textbooks cannot be overestimated: textbooks determine a major part of classroom teaching (see Sobkowiak, 2012). This paper discusses the influence of textbooks in English pronunciation teaching in an EFL environment. It presents a study in which the occurrence of four typical pronunciation teaching task types and four pronunciation teaching topics were analysed in three data sources: textbooks, classroom observations, and learner interviews. The results indicate that textbooks do have an influence on teaching. This is clearly shown when it comes to task types or pronunciation teaching topics that are absent from the textbooks: they do not occur in the teaching either.