How learners "repair" second language phonology and whether they may become native speakers.

Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk
School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University,
Poznan, Poland

ABSTRACT

In this paper I will propose the notion of "repair" to account for the way in which listeners react to second language speech. Confronted with foreign speech, the listener "makes up for what has gone wrong in L2" from his native language perspective, i.e. he suppresses processes which "must have happened in L2" to result in the output s/he hears. I will claim that the suppressed processes can be found, among others, in the listener's native casual speech (but also in other areas of language use), and that they can be reinforced and made conscious (cf. the notion of metacompetence) for the benefit of the acquisition of second language speech.