Hi, Steph!



--- In iatefl_pronsig@..., "stephanie gilkes"
<stephaniegilkes@...> wrote:
> Would you (and other pronsig members) agree with the following? In my opinion,
ELF phonology is not as fraught with sociopolitical issues as researchers such
as Jenkins assume. (Jenkins 2000, also cf.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/jan/22/tefl.wordsandlanguage) Jenkins'
concerns about 'native speakerism' apply more to other areas of language
teaching, such as the sociolinguistic examples I gave above. In other words, if
we make a prescriptive statement that a particular pronunciation of a segment
should be the global 'norm,' we are just delineating an area of phonological
space. To English learners, it is just a statement about articulatory behaviour:
it is irrelevant that the norm comes from a particular 'native' variety.
Whereas, if we state that a certain sociolinguistic practice should be the
global 'norm' (e.g. the handshaking example above), this is cultural
imperialism, because it is a statement about social behaviour.

I agree with you. And I would like to add that some of the Lingua Franca Core
features are not practical, e.g., maintaining tense/lax opposition in vowels. I
think that is too demanding, except perhaps for German speakers or speakers of
those languages with this contrast.

I went to Mexico last year and met a tour guide switching beautifully between
Spanish and English, but his English pronunciation did not make qualitative
distinction between /i/ and /I/, replacing the contrast with that of quantity.
And no one seemed to have problems with that.

I know that ELF people are constructing a corpus called "Vienna-Oxford
International Corpus of English (VOICE)
http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/index.php ," but I am disappointed to find
that there is no phonetic and scarce prosodic transcriptions in the corpus. Such
transcriptions would have provided a useful dataset to explore empirically what
people are doing pronunciation-wise in Lingua Franca situations.

> Having said this, of course, I'm Australian, so a rigid requirement for
American English pronunciation would put me out of a job! Oh well. Incidentally,
what are your university students majoring in? English? Or do they take English
as part of another degree? I haven't taught at any universities in Japan, only a
senmon gakko (for one semester). I worked for Japanese companies as a technical
proofreader and on-demand English teacher; usually preparing businessmen for
overseas postings. However, I'm planning to return to Japan in 2011/2012, and
will aim to work at a university then.

Hey, Steph, you are very welcome to our university!

-Takehiko Makino, Chuo University, Tokyo