CAN ORTHOGRAPHY INFLUENCE INTERLANGUAGE PHONOLOGY? THE CASE OF POLISH LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AND THEIR PRONUNCIATION OF DIPHTHONGS [eɪ] AND [əʊ]
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2016-05-25
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en
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Abstract
According to Selinker, interlanguage is a separate linguistic system that adult L2
learners create during the acquisition of their target language (Selinker 1972), and it
is linked to both their L1 and L2 as well (Tarone 1994). Interlanguage has already
been studied taking into consideration its particular components, one of which are
pronunciation patterns. What influences the pronunciation patterns of
interlanguage is an orthography, which can trigger L1 like pronunciation. The present
study aimed at testing the hypothesis in the case of adult Polish learners of English,
levels Intermediate to Mastery, and their pronunciation of English diphthongs in
spontaneous speech (according to Tarone (1982), it is during spontaneous speech
when interlanguage is the most visible). The research consisted in analysing the
database of mispronounced words, created within a project (called PLEC) ran at the
University of Łódź in Poland. All the words in the database contained
mispronunciations, but it was not always a diphthong that was mispronounced. All
the tokens in the data bank that contained diphthong [eɪ] or diphthong [əʊ] in their
target phonetic shape were taken into consideration. These diphthongs have their
counterparts in Polish, but they are always written with two letters and the two
grapheme-representations are fixed for particular diphthongs, which is not the case
in English. Therefore, the expectations of the study were - inter alia - that the one
grapheme-representations of the diphthongs would more often be mispronounced
than their two grapheme-representations (two more hypotheses were also stated but
the chi-square analyses showed that the results for them were insignificant). It turned
out that the hypothesis was in fact rejected by the results for the diphthong [eɪ] but it
had to be alternated in case of the diphthong [əʊ] (the majority of one graphemerepresentations
of the latter were mispronounced, but there were no two graphemerepresentations
of the diphthong in the database to make an appropriate comparison,
that is why the second variable became more than one grapheme-representations, as
there was one such in the database: a four grapheme-one) and then it was in fact
confirmed. As no gratifying explanations for the contrastive results were found, it was
finally assumed that what influences pronunciation patterns of interlanguage could
be in fact a few factors that somehow cooperate with each other, hindering or
facilitating L2 learners pronunciation. Such a hypothesis could be a subject of future
studies.
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