Tanja Angelovska

University of Salzburg, Austria

When a psycholinguist enters the multilingual classroom: Bridging the gap between psycholinguistics and pronunciation teaching

Abstract


In the last decades, psycholinguists and teachers have tussled with several challenging questions about the acquisition and teaching of L2 pronunciation: How is L2 pronunciation acquired? (How) is L2 pronunciation taught (most effectively)? Our knowledge about the answers to these questions has increased enormously. Likewise, there is evidence that the interest in and the quality of L2 pronunciation teaching has also increased considerably (cf. Lee, Jang and Plonsky, 2015). Yet, there is a general agreement that both psycholinguists and teachers experience more difficulties when it comes to dealing with learners who already use two languages daily (cf. Angelovska, 2019) and approach the task of acquiring the pronunciation of a target third language (L3). L3 learners are different from L2 learners as the former possess a larger repertoire of (meta)linguistic knowledge about pronunciation and phonological awareness about all prior languages (cf. Angelovska, 2018). The three (or more) sound systems, the potential sources for transfer, their type and direction and the various code-switching practices (cf. Heredia and Altarriba, 2001) challenge the outcomes of the L3 pronunciation learning and teaching process. Hence, some additional questions arise for both researchers and teachers: Is the phonetic similarity between the prior languages a trigger for morphosyntactic transfer in third or additional language acquisition? To what extent can psycholinguistic research results shape the practice of pronunciation teaching?
The goal of this talk is to bridge the gap between these current fields by synthesizing existing psycholinguistic evidence. I will first briefly outline what we have and what we lack, then I will address some of the several burning questions from a psycholinguistic perspective and conclude by outlining possible implications for pronunciation teaching in multilingual classrooms.

References


Angelovska. T. (2018). Cross-linguistic awareness of adult L3 learners of English: a focus on metalinguistic reflections and proficiency. Language Awareness, 27, 135–152.https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2018.1431243Angelovska, T. (2019). Instructed L3 Acquisition of English. In J. I. Liontas (Ed.), TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching. Hoboken. NJ: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0957Heredia, R. R. and Altarriba, J. (2001). Bilingual language mixing: Why do bilinguals code-switch? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 164–168. https://doi.org/10.1111%2F1467-8721.00140Lee, J., Jang, J., and Plonsky, L. (2015). The effectiveness of second language pronunciation instruction: A meta-analysis. Applied Linguistics, 36, 345–366. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amu040