Listening Perception Accuracy of ESL Learners as a Variable Function of Speaker L1

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

U As we incorporate into our ESL speaking classes a greater number of interactive tasks involving nonnative-speaker/nonnative-speaker (NNS/ NNS) dyads or groups, trying to create the optimum conditions for learners to benefit from negotiated input (Long, 1983; Doughty & Pica, 1986), we have tended to move away from exercises that focus on linguistic form, particularly in terms of the pronunciation and perception of English sound contrasts at the syllable or word level. This would seem to be justified if we could be sure that, as an inevitable part of receiving negotiated input, learners were in fact developing sufficient accuracy in the production and perception of those features of spoken English that play a crucial part in comprehension. According to Long and Porter (1985), accuracy does not suffer when learners take part in interactive pair work with other NNSs. However, this claim was primarily based on the use of grammatical structures and seems, in our experience, to be less tenable when we think of some learners whose accuracy in spoken production does seem to be subject to some variation. We do not know of any studies focusing specifically on level of pronunciation and perception accuracy in NNS/NNS pair work, but we have observed that learners seem to get by with fairly inaccurate pronunciations (in terms of the target) when their NNS partner is very familiar with their speech, particularly in the EFL context where interlocutors share the same L1 (Kenworthy, 1987). We wondered if ESL learners actually found it easier to identify English words when these were spoken by other learners than when they were spoken by English native speakers. In an attempt to answer this question, we designed a listening perception exercise to investigate whether learners became more or less accurate in their identification of English words as a function of the Li of the speaker.