Author’s name:
Evelina Y. Blok
Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia
Abstract:
Since teaching pronunciation is nowadays associated predominantly with initial stages of language instruction, backsliding effects in phonetics that appear at later stages of language learning remain unaddressed and are thus subject to habitual backsliding and, eventually, fossilization. The paper investigates patterns and extent of foreign accent and backsliding in German consonants produced by Russian native speakers, focusing on two primary factors: allophone types and their phonetic position. The study presented in this article consisted in foreign accent judgements performed by a group of expert listeners who were presented with recorded samples of German speech produced by Russian learners. The study revealed a tendency where the most salient backsliding effects are generally associated with the most aggravated sounds. Under aggravation we mean a numerical value (ranging from 0 to 4) representing a sum of features that makes a normative production of a German phone difficult for Russian native speakers. An aggravated sound is a German phone that is phonetically different from any Russian sound, and/or representing a consonant contrast lacking in Russian (aspiration, semi-voicedness), and/or standing in a phonetical position that triggers negative transfer from Russian due to its phonotactic rules (palatalization in consonants preceding a front vowel). It was also established that, in most cases, no backsliding in a consonant manifests underlying orthography issues. The findings of this research project may be instrumental in developing new approaches to teaching German pronunciation to Russian learners, that would eradicate backsliding over the entire period of language instruction, taking into consideration the patterns of such backsliding at any given level of language proficiency.
| Section | CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING. TOPICAL ISSUES IN EDUCATION |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2022-57-1-138-154 |
| Downloads | 183 |
| Key words | pronunciation teaching; foreign accent; phonetic interference; negative transfer; contrastive analysis; backsliding |
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