Revisiting the Intelligibility and Nativeness Principles

Levis, John M.

doi:10.1075/jslp.20050.lev

Cited by 72 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 57 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In addition to the theoretical emphasis mentioned above, at least two further reasons may be offered for the lack of relevance she describes. One of these is a long-standing pre-occupation with native-like accuracy in assessments of L2 production, in accordance with the "nativeness principle" (Levis, 2005(Levis, , 2020. In their historical overview, Munro and Derwing (2011) pointed to a dearth of empirical pronunciation studies motivated by the opposing "intelligibility principle, " despite repeated calls for an instructional focus on intelligible L2 speech going back at least as far as Sweet (1900).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

Munro

2021

Front. Commun.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hierarchies of difficulty in second-language (L2) phonology have long played a role in the postulation and evaluation of learning models. In L2 pronunciation teaching, hierarchies are assumed to be helpful in the development of instructional strategies based on anticipated areas of difficulty. This investigation addressed the practicality of defining a pedagogically useful hierarchy of difficulty for English tense and lax close vowels (/i I u ʊ/) produced by Cantonese speakers. Unlike their English counterparts, Cantonese close tense-lax pairs are allophonic variants with [i u] occurring before alveolars and [I ʊ] before velars. Each tense-lax pair represents a “phonemic split” in which members of a single L1 category are realized contrastively in L2. Despite evidence that English tense-lax distinctions are challenging for Cantonese speakers, no previous empirical work has closely considered the problem from the standpoint of vowel intelligibility across multiple phonetic contexts and in different words sharing the same rhyme. In a picture-based word-elicitation task, 18 Cantonese-speaking participants produced 31 high-frequency CV and CVC words. Vowels were evaluated for intelligibility by phonetically-trained judges. A series of mixed-effects binary logistic models were fitted to the scores, with vowel quality, phonetic context (rhyme) and word as factors, and length of Canadian residence and daily use of English as co-variates. As expected, the general hierarchy of difficulty for vowels that emerged (/i/ > /u/ > /ʊ/ > /I/) was complicated by large differences across phonetic contexts. Results were not readily explicable in terms of transfer; moreover, different words with the same rhyme were not produced with equal intelligibility. The most serious modeling complication was the sizeable inter-speaker variability in difficulties, which could not be accounted for by model co-variates. Although some difficulties were roughly systematic at the group level, it is argued that establishing a pedagogically useful hierarchy on such data would prove intractable. Rather, L2 learners might be better served by assessment and instructional targeting of their individual problem areas than by a focus on errors predicted from hierarchies of difficulty.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

Munro

2021

Front. Commun.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Defining successful Lx acquisition this way justifies characterizations of "non-native-accented" input as having a "negative effect" (Young-Scholten, 1995), as well as characterizations of variation in multilinguals' productions as "mispronunciations" (e.g., Bosch & Ramon-Casas, 2011;Llompart & Reinisch, 2021), as "less accurate" than native speakers' productions (Hayes-Harb & Masuda, 2008) or "inauthentic" (Flege & Liu, 2001). This ideology has, of course, been challenged (e.g., by Falkert, 2016;Golombek & Jordan, 2005), often in the context of promoting intelligibility (as opposed to native-likeness) as a goal for Lx learners (e.g., Levis, 2005Levis, , 2020, though it is important to note that the intelligibility construct is also not devoid of social influence and bias (see, e.g., Babel & Russell, 2015;Ingvalson et al, 2017). Many scholars have further challenged the underlying native/non-native speaker dichotomy altogether (e.g., Cheng et al, 2021;Kabel, 2009;Moussu & Llurda, 2008), highlighting the ways in which racism and the racialization of "non-native" teachers of English underlie ideologies of preference for nativespeaker language teachers (Ramjattan, 2019a(Ramjattan, , 2019b.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whose Input Matters? The influence of socially-differentiated input sources in adult Lx phonetic learning

Hayes‐Harb¹,

Barrios²,

Tripp³

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Input is a necessary condition for language acquisition, and in the language classroom, input may come from a variety of sources, including the teacher and student peers. Here we ask whether adult Lx learners are sensitive to the social roles of teachers and students such that they exhibit a preference for input from the teacher. We conducted an experiment wherein adult English speakers heard words in an artificial language. During an exposure phase, in one condition a “teacher” produced words with 25 ms of VOT on initial stop segments and a “student” produced the same words with 125 msec, and in another condition the VOT durations were reversed. At test, participants judged productions by a different “student” and demonstrated a preference for the productions that matched the VOT durations of the teacher during exposure, providing evidence for an influence of social factors in differentiating input in Lx acquisition.

show abstract

“…The two teacher characteristics should be treated separately and not as interchangeable constructs as done in previous research (Swanson, 2012). Levis (2020) makes a similar distinction between intelligibility and nativeness in language teaching and how each principle addresses teaching goals. These unique features are distinct and have varied influences on individuals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predictors of Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in Teaching EFL: An Examination of “Nativeness” and Teachers’ Training

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study aimed to establish the link between teacher training and “nativeness” on teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching English as a second language. By applying a teacher’s sense of efficacy scale, we measured the self-efficacy of a total of 281 foreign teachers in Chengdu, China. We adopted MANOVA and tested the influence of “nativeness” and teachers’ training on teachers’ self-efficacy. Our analysis shows that while being a native speaker does not necessarily influence a teacher’s self-efficacy, trained teachers have higher self-efficacy than untrained teachers. Thus, the current study lends credence to the view that language proficiency should not be allied with being a language teacher. Instead, educational administrators and policymakers should focus on language teachers’ professional development rather than emphasizing the native/non-native teachers’ distinction.

show abstract

Revisiting the Intelligibility and Nativeness Principles

Cited by 72 publications

References 57 publications

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

Whose Input Matters? The influence of socially-differentiated input sources in adult Lx phonetic learning

Predictors of Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in Teaching EFL: An Examination of “Nativeness” and Teachers’ Training

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About