Back to Orthoepia – Spelling in Pronunciation Instruction: “Words Commonly Mispronounced” by Learners of Six L1s

• Authors: Marta A. Nowacka
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This is a continuation of Nowacka’s (2016) study on the importance of local and global errors and spelling in pronunciation instruction. Unlike in the previous research that focused on the performance of Polish learners only, respondents of six different nationalities are included, in search of some cross-national universals or absence of them. This study seeks to answer the following questions: whether there is a need to focus on spelling in a pronunciation course with learners representing six different L1s and if this is the case which graphophonemic / phonotactic rules of English should be explicitly taught to all of these learners and which ones might be L1 specific only. The intention is also to empirically confirm the existence of local errors in the performance of around 240 speakers and 50 more listeners, constituting 291 listeners of six nationalities (Kazakh, Malaysian, Polish, Turkish, Tajik and Ukrainian) and to confirm the usefulness of memorizing Sobkowiak’s (1996) ‘Words Commonly Mispronounced’ even for learners of different L1s.

Keywords

EN

graphophonemic rules; letter-to-sound-correspondence; pronunciation instruction; spelling; ‘Words Commonly Mispronounced’

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2018
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 451-470

Dates

published

2018-12-30

Contributors

author

Marta A. Nowacka

• University of Rzeszow

References

• Bell, Masha. 2009. Reading problems. English Spelling Problems blog. [Online] Available from: http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-english-spelling-system.html?view=sidebar [Accessed: 19th February 2017].
• Bell, Masha. 2010a. E, ea, ei, ie, a and o reading problems. English Spelling Problems blog. [Online] Available from: http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.com/2010/10/e-ea-ei-ie-and-reading-problems.html [Accessed: 19th February 2017].
• Bell, Masha. 2010b. O-e / oa / ol / o / ow / ou ... . English Spelling Problems blog. [Online] Available from: http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.com/2010/08/o-e-oa-ol-o-ow-ou.html [Accessed: 19th February 2017].
• Bell, Masha. 2015. The English Spelling System. English Spelling Problems blog. [Online] Available from: http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-english-spelling-system.html [Accessed: 19th February 2017].
• Bryła-Cruz, Agnieszka. 2013. English. Irish and Scottish listeners’ perception of Polish-accented English: a comparative study. [unpublished PhD dissertation] Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej.
• Carney, Edward. 1994. A Survey of English Spelling. London: Routledge.
• Ellis, Nick C. and S. Cataldo. 1990. The role of spelling in learning to read, Language and Education: 1–28.
• English Spelling Society. 2017a. Irregularities. The English Spelling System. [Online] Available from: http://spellingsociety.org/irregularities-of-english-spelling#/page/1 [Accessed: 10th February 2017].
• English Spelling Society. 2017b. Our aims. [Online] Available from: http://spellingsociety.org/our-aims [Accessed: 19th February 2017].
• James, Carl. 1998. Errors in language learning and use: Exploring error analysis. London: Longman.
• Jassem, Wiktor. 1971. Podręcznik wymowy angielskiej. Warszawa: PWN.
• Jones, Daniel. 1932. An Outline of English Phonetics. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd.
• Lewis, Jack Windsor. 2017. Blog 532 More on Weakforms (xx)nobody, no-one, nor, obvious(ly), on, our. PhonetiBlog. [Online] Available from: http://www.yek.me.uk/Blog.html#blog532 [Accessed: 15th February 2017].
• Majer, Jan. 2002. Sick or Seek? Pedagogical Phonology in Teacher Training. In: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak and P. J. Melia (eds.) Accents and Speech in Teaching English Phonetics and Phonology, 153–176. Berlin: Peter Lang.
• Major, Roy C. 2001. Foreign accent: The ontogeny and phylogeny of second language phonology. Mahwah: NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• [no name] 2016. Key to Frequency, OED Oxford English Dictionary: The definite record of the English language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Online] Available from: http://www.oed.com [Accessed: 11th May 2016].
• Nowacka, Marta, Piotr Cymbalista and Grzegorz A. Kleparski. 2011. Sally Meets Harry: Practical Primer to English Pronunciation and Spelling. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego.
• Nowacka, Marta. 2016. English spelling among the top priorities in pronunciation teaching: Polglish local versus global(ised) errors in the production and perception of words commonly mispronounced. In: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak, Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, Jan Majer (eds.), Research in Language, vol. 14 (2), 123–148. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.
• Pęzik, Piotr and Magdalena Zając. 2012. Developing a corpus-based index of commonly mispronounced words. Book of Abstracts: Accents 2012. Paper presented at Accents 2012 – VIth International Conference on Native and Non-native Accents of English, Łódź, Poland, 6-8 December, 2012: 26, [Online] Available from: http://filolog.uni.lodz.pl/accents/Abstracts-2012.pdf [Accessed: 11th May 2016].
• Porzuczek, Andrzej. 2015. Handling Global and Local English Pronunciation Errors. In: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak and Mirosław Pawlak (eds.), Teaching and Researching the Pronunciation of English: Studies in Honour of Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, Second Language Learning and Teaching, 169–187. London: Springer.
• Richards, Jack C. (ed.) 1974. Error analysis: Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. London: Longman.
• Scheuer, Sylwia. 1998. Interference-motivated pronunciation errors in Polish students of English. A corpus-based study. [unpublished PhD dissertation] Poznań: Adam Mickiewicz University.
• Sobkowiak, Włodzimierz 1996. English Phonetics For Poles. Poznań: Bene Nati.
• Szpyra-Kozłowska, Jolanta. 2005. Intelligibility versus Polish accent in English. Studia Phonetica Posnaniensia. An International Journal for Linguistic Phonetics, vol. 7, 59–73. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Poznań.
• Szpyra-Kozłowska, Jolanta. 2013. On the irrelevance of sounds and prosody in foreign-accented speech. In: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak and Linda Shockey (eds.), Teaching and Researching English Accents in Native and Non-native Speakers, 15–29. Berlin: Springer.
• Szpyra-Kozłowska, Jolanta. 2015. Pronunciation in EFL Instruction: A Research-Based Approach. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
• Szpyra-Kozłowska, Jolanta and Sławomir Stasiak 2010. From focus on Sounds to Focus on Words in English Pronunciation Instruction. Research in Language, vol. 8. Doi: 10.1478/v10015-010-0012-7 [Online] Available from: http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.hdl_11089_9575/c/v10015-010-0012-7.pdf [Accessed: 11th May 2016].
• Szyszka, Magdalena. 2003. Efekty dydaktyki wymowyjęzyka angielskiego w oparciu o transkrypcję fonetyczną. In” Włodzimierz Sobkowiak and Ewa Waniek-Klimczak (eds.), Dydaktyka fonetyki języka obcego II. Konferencja w Wąsoszach, 10-12.5.2002 [Phonetics in FLT 2, Wąsosze 10-12.5.2002], (=Zeszyty Naukowe Państwowej Wyższej Szkoły Zawodowej w Koninie). 2003, 145–149. Konin: Wydawnictwo PWSZ.
• Upward, Christopher and George Davidson. 2011. The History of English Spelling. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Waniek-Klimczak, Ewa. 2015. Factors Affecting Word Stress Recognition by Advanced Polish Learners of English. In” Ewa Waniek-Klimczak and Mirosław Pawlak (eds.), Teaching and Researching the Pronunciation of English: Studies in Honour of Włodzimierz Sobkowiak. Second Language Learning and Teaching, 189–204. London: Springer.
• Wells, John C. 2010. Non-spelling pronunciation, Phonetic blog. [Online] Available from: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/11/non-spelling-pronunciation.html [Accessed: 14th February 2017].
• Wells, John C. 2011a. bilding a cubbard. Phonetic blog. [Online] Available from: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/search?q=bilding [Accessed: 14th February 2017].
• Wells, John C. 2011b. degreasing the galleon. Phonetic blog. [Online] Available from: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co/search?q=galleon [Accessed: 14th February 2017].
• Wells, John C. 2011c. Honorarium. Phonetic blog. [Online] Available from: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/search?q=honorarium [Accessed: 14th February 2017].
• Wells, John C. 2012. ideas. Phonetic blog. [Online] Available from: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/search?q=ideas [Accessed: 14th February 2017].
• Zając, Magdalena. 2015. Compiling a Corpus-Based list of Words Commonly Mispronounced. In: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak and M. Pawlak (eds.) Teaching and Researching the Pronunciation of English: Studies in Honour of Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, Second Language Learning and Teaching, 153–167. London: Springer.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/rela-2018-0022