Ease
of acquisition and ease of comprehension: Finding the equilibrium |
|
Peter
Trudgill (Fribourg) |
In a paper presented at AMU in
1998, I said that my own response to the question of 'why teach RP?' was 'why
not?. We have, after all, to teach something'. I also said that 'I am a non- RP
speaker, but I believe that it is convenient that students learning English
English still have a non-regional model available to them'. I have not changed
my mind on these points. The present wokshop, however, gives me an an
opportunity to give a more nuanced account of this view. I base this account on
analyses of the English pronunciation of students at the University of
Fribourg. Fribourg is a bilingual university where a majority of students are
native speakers of Swiss German or French, but where there is also a large
minority of Italian speakers. This has the consequence that students of English
quite spontaneously use this language to talk to each other, as well as to
members of staff of the English department, and even weaker students achieve a
high degree of fluency. I present an account of those phonological and phonetic
features of English which cause difficulties for students of the different
language backgrounds, and then make a number of teaching proposals based on
analyses of comprehension difficulties caused by aspects of students'
pronunciation for native English speakers i.e. me.