Teaching and Researching English Accents in Native and Non-Native Speakers is a volume of eighteen papers on the theme of ‘accents’ in English. The papers are of variable quality and often present very preliminary work, but all try to push the theme of ‘accent’ into new, more multi-disciplinary areas. All but four of the papers are by authors affiliated with universities in Poland. The papers are organized into four sections: ‘Pronunciation: Production and perception’, ‘Pedagogy’, ‘Phonology’ and ‘Sociolinguistics’. The book might have benefitted from an introduction to each section, and certainly would have benefitted by including an index. As the title of the volume suggests, the papers try to strike a balance between a teaching perspective and a research perspective. It should be of interest to teachers and researchers looking to broaden their perspective on ‘accented’ English as well as to graduate students looking for novel and promising thesis topics.
The section on production and perception opens with a paper by Una Cunningham, ‘Teachability and learnability of English pronunciation features for Vietnamese-speaking learners’. This work compares teaching pronunciation in a classroom to use of home mp3 lessons. The mp3 and live lessons ‘covered the same points’ but there are no details given on the lessons or differences between the two. It is claimed that the mp3 group made no pronunciation progress, although the live lesson group did make progress on most of the pronunciation goals. Although the participants were given the opportunity to provide feedback, there is no discussion of whether any was provided and, apparently, the author has no clue as to whether the approximately 30 participants in the mp3 condition actually listened to the lessons. The results discussed are broken down by specific pronunciation issue, but individual differences are not discussed. Perhaps next time the lessons will be online, and time on task can be better observed so that a relevant comparison can be made. It is a shame this volume opens with one of the weaker papers.
The second paper in the production and perception section is stronger: ‘On the irrelevance of sounds and prosody in foreign-accented English’, by Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska. The author points out that many aspects of accent are not due to the inability to produce the English sounds, but due to faulty letter-to-sound rules with interference either from L1 or from English irregularities. There are preliminary studies showing evidence that these disruptions in letter-to-sound rules are worse for intelligibility than a persistent deviation in the sounds produced.
‘Foreign accent ratings in third language acquisition: The case of L3 French’, by Magdalena Wrembel, is another preliminary study. It broadens the notion of foreign accentedness by examining the role of L2 in learning a third language (French in this case). Raters were asked to assess French spoken by one French native speaker (as a control) and ten Polish native speakers with ‘very good’ English (although no ratings of their English are mentioned) using 20 samples of speech from the eleven speakers. Raters were also asked to guess the native language of the French spoken by the Polish (and one French) native speakers, with the hypothesis that those who knew English better would have more English interference. Results here were murky. The paper has a large number of parameters investigated for such a tiny data set. Further, there was no native speaker of English speaking French, which would have provided perhaps a more important control.
‘Acquiring angma: The velar nasal in advanced learners’ English’, by Wiktor Gonet, Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska & Radosław Święciński, is a stronger and more focused paper. It compares the acquisition of angma (ng sound /ŋ/) in various phonetic contexts, and to the acquisition of vowels. The study includes 60 Polish learners of English (20 each in years one, three, and five of learning English) producing angma in 15 words for each of the four phonetic contexts investigated. Of course, given the wide variability of language learning paths, a within-subject design would have been nice, but also would have taken over five years. The study shows that the context in which a sound is found strongly influences the observed difficulty of acquisition.
‘Vowel quality and duration as a cue to word stress for non-native listeners: Polish learners’ perception of stress in English’, by Arkadiusz Rojczyk, is a tiny study comparing cues to stress in Polish and English. Diphone synthesis is used to create target utterances. Listeners are asked to judge whether they hear the noun or verb version of ‘record’ for a randomized set of utterances varying in which vowel is in the first syllable (two versions of reduced vowels and one full vowel) and in different durations used to support the vowel quality or to conflict with it. In the experiment, the listeners were able to use duration as a cue to lexical stress. The listeners were selected from a second year class on the basis of whether or not they could produce a reliable stress difference in record (verb) and record (noun). Unfortunately, we do not know how English native speakers would have rated the stimuli, nor do we know what the students might have been taught or not taught about lexical stress in English.
The final paper in this section is ‘An EMA study of articulatory settings in Polish speakers of English’, by Radosław Święciński. In this interesting contribution, electromagnetic articulography is used to investigate ‘speech ready’ positions for articulations in Polish and English by native speakers of Polish. Although it is a tiny study (four Polish speakers, no native speakers of English), the results do show some evidence for differing speech ready positions for the two ‘near native’ speakers of English compared to those judged by the author to speak Polish-accented English.
The section on pedagogy opens with ‘The effect of explicit and implicit corrective feedback on eliminating pronunciation errors’, by Mirosław Pawlak. This paper includes an interesting review of the literature in the area, with a small and inconclusive pilot study.
Also in the pedagogy section is Martin Hinton's ‘An aptitude for speech: The importance of mimicry ability in foreign language pronunciation’. This is an interesting area, but the details of the study are a little sparse. We know nothing about the rater or whether or not the rater of French mimicry was the same rater of English pronunciation, nor of the consistency of those ratings. Only correlation numbers are given, with no information on the distributions.
‘MultiROMs and online applications used for teaching phonetics in a secondary school: A critical review’, by Elżbieta Szymańska-Czaplak & Alicja Wujec-Kaczmarek, provides a review of language materials that include audio files. The authors make a couple of recommendations, based on a brief survey. This might be useful to English language teachers.
The final paper in this section is Alice Henderson's ‘The English pronunciation teaching in Europe survey: Initial results and useful insights for collaborative work’. As the title suggests, this is a brief review of responses to a survey about teaching English pronunciation. Topics in the survey include self-assessment, training and methods.
The section on phonology opens with ‘English vowels: The long and short of it’, by Linda Shockey. Despite a legend describing ‘red’ and ‘blue’ lines in a grayscale graph, this contribution is a clear and useful overview of ‘long’ and ‘short’ vowels in English – historically, phonetically and phonologically – and from the point of view of teaching English as a second language.
‘Quantitative intervocalic relations: Evidence for foot structure’, by Tomasz Ciszewski, is one of the most interesting papers in the volume, although it describes productions by only two speakers and only reading items (no spontaneous speech). It neatly ties together articulatory considerations with observed acoustic differences.
The final paper in the phonology section is ‘Segmental and prosodic reasons for non-native timing of her in Polish learners, English speech’, by Andrzej Porzuczek. Although this paper focuses only on the word her, this word was selected for the many aspects of the word that make it challenging for Polish learners of English. The results have implications for language instruction.
The final section of the book, ‘Sociolinguistics’, opens with ‘Stratification of English as a lingua franca: Identity constructions of learners and speakers’, by Višnja Josipović Smojver & Mateusz-Milan Stanojević. This paper examines the sociolinguistics of versions of English that are more like that spoken by native speakers or more like the native language of the speakers. The study discusses the results of a survey about attitudes toward having a Croatian accent while speaking English.
‘Intonation in the perception of Brummie’, by Kamil Malarski, is an interesting little study about the perception of the Birmingham accent, ‘Brummie’. A perception study of normal speech and speech that is low pass filtered (preserving mostly intonational information) suggests that the negative perceptions of Brummie may be predominantly due to intonation.
‘Sociophonetic transfer in Polish learners of English: The case of nasals’, by Anna Gralińska-Brawata, is a strange little study involving the analysis of 50 productions of one word in English and one word in Polish, both of which providing contexts preceding a fricative in which either a nasalized vowel appears or a vowel followed by /n/. The results and aims are a bit obscure.
In ‘[ˈbe ɾɚ] or [ˈbetə]? Do Polish learners of English accommodate their pronunciation?’, by Magdalena Zając, is a small pilot study involving four Polish learners of received pronunciation (RP) English in conversation with a Canadian speaker and a Standard Welsh speaker. The study investigates the use of tapping and rhotization (common in Canadian speech and not in RP speech). The most fluent of the four Polish speakers did appear to adapt pronunciations to the interlocutor. Little is given on language learning history of the participants, however, and nothing on any accommodation that might be done by the English native speakers.
The final paper in the sociolinguistics section, and in the volume, is ‘Glottal stops in General American (intervocalic environments)’, by Przemysław Ostalski. This is a tiny impressionistic study of recordings of three male General American broadcast-experienced speakers differing in age. According to the impressionistic categorization, all three glottalize intervocalic /t/ at about the same frequency (8–9%), although the author expected higher rates based on previous work cited. Even though frequency of glottalization is indistinguishable across the three speakers, the author computes a correlation of glottalization with age (and finds none). The broadcast experience or style of speech does not seem to be considered here as a factor. It would have been nice to have ended the book on a stronger paper.
In sum, this collection of papers provides some (mostly preliminary) investigations into broadening the view of accents in English from a multidisciplinary point of view. There are some interesting initiatives and some interesting results, and some rather weak contributions as well. Still, it should be of interest to those researching English accents, or teaching English pronunciation, especially those teaching Polish learners.
