Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 4.4 Syllables
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A crucial aspect of language acquisition is the mastery of syllable structure.
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Learners often try to make their second language syllable structure fit 
the structure of their first language, by adding or omitting vowels and 
consonants.
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Do you think your own accent gives away where you come from in your L1?
In your L2?
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How important do you think the first language is in learning L2 pronunciation?
Focusing questions
transfer: carrying over elements of one language one knows to another,
whether L1 to L2 or L2 to L1 (reverse transfer)
accent versus dialect: an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is typ-
ical of a particular group, whether regional or social; a dialect is the whole
system characteristic of a particular group, including grammar and vocabu-
lary, and so on, as well as pronunciation
Keywords
4.3 General ideas about phonology learning
Let us now look at some general issues about the learning of L2 pronunciation.

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L1 and transfer
Usually it is very easy to spot the first language of a non-native speaker from their
accent; German speakers of English tend to say ‘zing’ when they mean ‘thing’,
Japanese ‘pray’ when they mean ‘play’. Chapter 10 asks whether this matters: after
all, we can tell instantly whether a native speaker of English comes from Texas,
Glasgow or Sydney, but this does not mean we see their accent as wrong. In the
second language very few people manage to acquire an accent that can pass for
native; at best, L2 users have boasted to me of being mistaken for a native speaker
of some variety other than that of the person they are talking to; for example, a
Swedish speaker of English might be taken to be an American in England. Foreign
accent is all but ineradicable – but then so are many local accents of English.
The components of foreign accent may be at different levels of phonology. The
most salient may be the apparent use of the wrong phoneme. I ordered ‘bière’
(beer) in France and was surprised when the waiter brought me ‘Byrhh’ (a rein-
forced wine). This carries perhaps the greatest toll for the L2 user as it involves
potential misunderstandings. Next comes the level of allophones; saying the
wrong allophone will not interfere with the actual meaning of the word, but may
increase the overall difficulty of comprehension if the listener always has to strug-
gle to work out what phoneme is intended. And it certainly gives rise to character-
istic accents. Consonant clusters may be a difficulty for some speakers; Spanish
does not have an initial /
st/ cluster, so Spanish speakers tend to say ‘estation’ for
‘station’. And we have seen that syllables and clusters pose problems for many.
The reason for these pronunciation problems has been called cross-linguistic
transfer: a person who knows two languages transfers some aspect from one lan-
guage to another; in other words, this is language in a Lang
5
sense of linguistic
competence. What can be transferred depends, among other things, on the rela-
tionship between the two languages. Fred Eckmann et al. (2003) have drawn up
three possibilities:
1 The first language has neither of the contrasting L2 sounds. Korean, for example,
does not have any phonemes corresponding to English /
f⬃v/ as in ‘fail/veil’. A
Korean learning English has to learn two new phonemes from scratch.
2 The second language has one of the L2 sounds. Japanese, for instance, has a /
p/
sound corresponding to English /
p/ in ‘paid’, but no /f/ phoneme corresponding
to that in ‘fade’. Japanese learners of English have to learn an extra phoneme.
3 The second language has both sounds as allophones of the same phoneme. In Spanish,
plosive /
d/ and fricative /ð/ are both allophones of the phoneme /d/. Spanish
learners of English have to learn that what they take for granted as alternative
forms of the same phoneme are in fact different phonemes in English.
Similarly, /
l/ and /r/ are allophones of one phoneme in Japanese.
Which of these creates the most problems for learners? Logically it would 
seem that missing sounds would create problems: German has two fricatives /
ç/
in ‘Tuch’ (towel) and /
x/ ‘Mach’ (make), almost totally absent from English, 
apart from the isolated ‘foreign’ words ‘loch’ and ‘Bach’ for some people. So
English people should have a problem acquiring these German phonemes; but
this is not the case. By and large, totally new sounds do not create particular prob-
lems. One exception might be click phonemes in some African languages, which
speakers of non-click languages find it hard to master, though young babies are
very good at it.
Acquiring and teaching pronunciation
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The combination that appears the trickiest to deal with is in fact when two allo-
phones of one L1 phoneme appear as two phonemes in the second language, as we
saw with Japanese problems with /
l⬃r/. Once you have classed a particular sound as
the same as that in your first language, that is, Japanese /
l/ goes with English /l/, you
find it difficult to split its allophones into two phonemes. The more similar the two
phonemes may be in the L1 and the L2, the more deceptive it may be.
The first language phonology affects the acquisition of the second through
transfer because the learner projects qualities of the first language onto the sec-
ond. The same happens in reverse in that people who speak a second language
have a slightly different accent in their first language from monolinguals. The
VOT research has shown subtle influences on L1 timing from the L2; for example,
French people who know English tend to have slightly longer VOTs for /
t/ in
French, their first language, compared to monolinguals.