DOCTORAL   DEFENCE
October 2, 2008   10:00
Kateřina Tomková

Perception
of Non-Native Pronunciation of English
by Native Speakers

EXPERIENCE AND MOTIVATION
•
•Teaching English since 1986
•Specializing in Phonetics since 1991
•Running the TomCat Playgroup since 1993
•Adrian Underhill: Sound Foundations (1996)
•J.C.Wells: Summer Course of English Phonetics at UCL(1996)

figure 5



What next ???
•Rhetorics ?
•Elocution ?
•
•
•
» NO

Instead, by studying the PERCEPTION
of non-native pronunciation of English, to find out which aspects of pronunciation are vital for
positive/negative personality perception.

THE CORPUS
•15 non-native speakers of English
•Texts for them to read; a question to answer
•Recordings
•5+1 assessors, native speakers of English
•Questionnaires

SAMPLE RECORDING
•Speaker 1 – Ivana Hrůzová


EVALUATION
•Phonetic assessment based on the system devised in 1996. Legend of graphic profile on page 76 of
dissertation, booklet page 10-11.
•Sociolinguistic assessment based on Questionnaires; criteria: intelligibility, confidence speaking
English, elligibility for a childminding job, appropriateness of speech behaviour. Other criteria
(secondary) not fully used.
•Correlations between them

CORRELATIONS
•The group of 4 good speakers by phonetic criteria remained the same.
•
•Two shifts occurred between the 5 average speakers and 6 inferior speakers. Speakers 11 and 3
obtained much better results by perception than by phonetic criteria.
•

COMMON FEATURES
•Their speech is appropriately loud.
•Their speech is appropriately slow.
•
•In other words, their loudness is sufficient for being comfortably heard,
•and their tempo is sufficiently moderate for their pronunciation mistakes to be decoded.

CONCLUSIONS AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
In teaching, appropriate LOUDNESS and TEMPO must be emphasized.
ECHOING is to be avoided.