Abstract
This paper presents data on the production of English vowels [i ɪ ɛ æ u ʊ] by Brazilian English Language Teaching (ELT) undergraduate students before and after taking a course on English Segmental Phonology. Brazilian learners tend to assimilate the contrasts present in [i ɪ], [ɛ æ] and [u ʊ] into the prototypical categories of Brazilian Portuguese [i], [ɛ] and [u], respectively. Thus, this paper investigates the influence of receiving explicit metalinguistic instruction of English segmental phonology on the production of the target pairs of vowels. The data analysis is of acoustic nature (spectral quality), and the results show that some learners created new phonetic categories for the English vowels after receiving the metalinguistic instruction.
Highlights
Having a minimum control of the pronunciation of a second/foreign language (L2) is required for oral communication. Accurate production of both segments and prosodic elements are necessary for intelligibility (e.g. Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010; Morley, 1994; Pennington, 1996, 1998), which, roughly explained, refers to how much your interlocutor understands of your speech; and for comprehensibility (Parrino, 1998; Singleton & Ryan, 2004), which is related to the efort your interlocutor needs to employ in order to understand your speech. herefore, it goes without saying that pronunciation instruction, even though very oten neglected by language teachers for various reasons, should be a constant part of L2 pedagogy (Silveira, 2004; Tomlinson, 2005; Yule & Macdonald, 1994)
He six vowels in focus are challenging for Brazilian learners due to the natural diiculty to perceive and produce sounds of an L2 which are not present, or not contrasted, in the learner’s native language (L1). his diiculty does not exist because people lose their ability to learn new sounds at a certain
2 Method he data come from 13 Brazilian undergraduate students majoring in English Language Teaching (ELT) at a federal university in the state of Ceará, Brazil
Summary
Having a minimum control of the pronunciation of a second/foreign language (L2) is required for oral communication Accurate production of both segments and prosodic elements are necessary for intelligibility His article, in turn, aims to investigate how Brazilian ELT undergraduate students may improve their production of English vowels [iɪɛæuʊ], which are challenging for Brazilian Portuguese speakers, ater taking a graduate-level course on English Segmental Phonology. He six vowels in focus are challenging for Brazilian learners due to the natural diiculty to perceive and produce sounds of an L2 which are not present, or not contrasted, in the learner’s native language (L1). K. Kuhl et al, 2008; Leather, 2003; Pierrehumbert, 2001, 2003)
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