AdvApplPhon Begrijpelijk Engels, Laura Rupp, LTM

• Engels
• HBO
• Studiejaar 2

Highschool teachers hardly spend any time on teaching pronunciation. What reasons do they give?

Teachers say:

no time

time-consuming

not tested in CE (centrale examen)

insecure about their own skill and knowledge

It is easier to understand a speaker who makes grammatical mistakes but who has good pronunciation
than to understand a speaker who makes no/few grammatical mistakes but who bad pronunciation.

1. True
2. False

Listeners find native speakers of English more credible than non-native speakers with a clear foreign accent.

1. True
2. False

Which do you find more credible?

Watch the videos in the next two slides. Listen to their accents. What do you notice?

If there's time, maybe watch (part of) the following videos. 
 

Rutte, vocab, use of grammar, sentence structure are usually on point. Vowel length (and Dutch interference) make him sound far from perfect

Frans Timmermans (politician, diplomat, First Vice President of the European Commission since 2014), sometimes makes small mistakes in his grammar, vocab, or sentence structure. Hardly noticeable because of his pronunciation.

Aside from his native Dutch, Timmermans is fluent in English, French, German, Italian and Russian

In 2008 Israël and Iran were on the brink of war because a French official had made a pronunciation mistake.

1. True
2. False

What pronunciation mistake(s) exactly did the French make?

h-dropping

wrong vowel length

>> ‘hit’ now sounds like ‘eat’ <<

Listeners mostly attribute positive personality traits to speakers of English with bad pronunciation.

1. True
2. False

Dutch companies lose about 25% of their international trade due to the bad English spoken by their employees.

1. True
2. False

In general, the Dutch speak better English than they give themselves credit for.

1. True
2. False

In the CEFR learning targets pronunciation is not explicitly mentioned.

1. True
2. False

From: Rupp (2014)

From: CEFR (2020)

The LFC (lingua franca core) is a set of pronunciation features that are important for the intelligibility between non-native speakers of English.

1. True
2. False

The 'TH' is an important feature from the LFC.

1. True
2. False

Word stress, sentence stress and vowel length are important features from the LFC.

1. True
2. False

Initial research suggests that good pronunciation supports the other language skills.

1. True
2. False