Both native and nonnative language teachers often find pronunciation a difficult skill to teach because of inadequate training or uncertainty about the effectiveness of instruction. But nonnative language teachers may also see themselves as inadequate models for pronunciation, leading to increased uncertainty about whether they should teach pronunciation (Golombek & Jordan, 2005). Although studies have regularly shown that instruction is effective in promoting pronunciation improvement (Saito, 2012), it is not known if improvement depends on the native language of the instructor, nor if learners improve differently depending on whether their teacher is native or nonnative. This study investigated the effect of teachers' first language on ratings of change in accentedness and comprehensibility. Learners in intact English classes were taught one class by a nonnative-and one by a native-English-speaking teacher. Each teacher taught the same pronunciation lessons over the course of 7 weeks. Results show that native listeners' ratings of the students' comprehensibility were similar for both teachers, despite many learners' stated preference for native teachers. The results offer encouragement to nonnative teachers in teaching pronunciation, suggesting that, like other language skills, instruction on pronunciation skills is more dependent on knowledgeable teaching practices than on native pronunciation of the teacher.

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on the role the phones play in contrasting words (i.e. lexical contrast). Experiment 1 established adult native English speakers’ baseline sensitivity to the novel [b]–[β] auditory contrast. In Experiment 2 we examined whether adult native English speakers infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] in an artificial language based only on their distributions to phonological contexts. We observed no evidence that these participants were able to do so. In Experiment 3 we investigated whether learners infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] from the role they play in lexical contrast and observed both perceptual and lexical processing evidence to suggest that adults may use meaning-based cues to the lack of contrast to learn that two phones are allophones of the same phoneme. Together our findings suggest that adult L2 learners may prioritize information about function (in this case, lexical contrast) over the phonological distribution of phones as they determine the phonological status of L2 sounds.

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