Abstract
The study assessed the relation between the overall degree of perceived foreign accent in non-natives' English speech and some extralingual factors. These variables include musical ability, phonic mimicry ability and type of personality. Five native speakers of English were asked to auditorily evaluate the samples of free English speech produced by each of 79 non-native talkers using the equal-appearing interval scale. The 5-point scale was used to rate each of the variables for each non-native speaker and the interclass correlation coefficients were calculated to identify the most important predictors of L2 pronunciation quality. The findings reported may be important for the learning and teaching second languages.
Highlights
This paper reports research which attempts to identify factors which explain the variance in a second language (L2) phonic competence
Preliminary analysis revealed that much the same English phonic competence (EPC) ratings were provided by the five raters
The three measured variables were correlated with the total pronunciation ratings (0.2787 on the 0.05 level)
Summary
This paper reports research which attempts to identify factors which explain the variance in a second language (L2) phonic competence. Considerable individual variation can be observed in adults’ mastery of L2 production and perception, the L2 literature, as well as our common experience as language users, generally indicates the most adult L2 learners will permanently speak the L2 with a foreign accent One interpretation of this observation is, in the scientific study of foreign accent, that success in acquiring the phonetics and phonology of an L2 is dependent on a number of variables which influence the performance of individual L2 users. Identifying such factors may be important for the teaching and learning foreign languages. The relative importance of many factors is uncertain because many variables relating to subject characteristics tend to be confounded, and because of the lack of adequate experimental control in some studies
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