Sun-Young Shin, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

In 2022, the ALIS leadership team met the TESOL Quarterly (TQ) editorial team to launch a new format of webinar series to give the authors of the most downloaded TQ articles a platform to share their research stories and interact with readers. We believe this new webinar series will provide an informative venue for researchers to directly engage readers with specific questions about the articles. It will also enhance the journal's readership and help authors reach a wider audience.

The first speaker was Dr. Kazuya Saito (University of London), who talked about his TQ article Saito (2021). In this article, I will summarize what Saito discussed regarding his recent TQ paper in response to selected questions for those who missed this insightful webinar.

Saito’s TQ article mainly reports two meta-analytic studies which identify the key phonological features -- including segmental, prosodic, and temporal aspects of pronunciation -- that underlie the judgments and teaching of comprehensibility and accentedness of ESL speakers. Comprehensibility and accentedness are distinguishable domains of pronunciation. The former is about the ease of understanding speech, but the latter is related to its degree of native-likeness. Saito found that listeners pay attention to these three different phonological features equally for English comprehensibility, but they prioritize segmental accuracy for judging native-like pronunciation of English. His meta-analysis results also show that the impact of instruction was observed for comprehensibility but not much for reducing accentedness in English. It is thus important for language learners to be reminded of the fact that sounding native-like in English may not be a realistic goal, especially in the era of World Englishes. Instead, their efforts should be more targeted on improving their comprehensibility by working on their segmentals with high functional load, word stress, intonation, and fluency.

In the webinar, Saito addressed a few questions about his TQ article raised by readers and webinar attendees. Below I summarize Saito’s responses to the top three most asked questions about his paper:

Question 1:

Your meta-analysis paper suggests that segmental accuracy is the most significant predictor of L2 accentedness. However, even if explicit instructions are provided, segmental issues are resistant to improvement. Do you think segmental features are more challenging to teach or learn than suprasegmental features in English?

Response 1:

A lot of studies have shown that prosody and fluency improve as a function of practice and immersion (Saito, 2015), but high-level segmental accuracy is more related to aptitude than to practice or experience. On the other hand, according to the Functional Load (FL) principle (Brown, 1988), some relatively important segmental features can be identified for successful understanding in second language communication. They tend to be susceptible to the influence of training. For example, the mispronunciation of English consonants /l/ and /r/ by many ESL learners is known as one of the most common consonant substitution errors that negatively affect English-speaking listeners’ comprehensibility judgments. However, these segmental issues can be explicitly taught by teachers who aptly point out different shapes and locations of tongues when these consonant sounds are pronounced. L2 English learners can improve the level of comprehensibility of their speech through the continuous focused exercise of specific consonants and vowels in a well-planned English speaking course. With that being said, note that it is not easy to master native-like segmental control in English, but to sound like a native speaker is not an ultimate goal of many ESL learners, particularly in the context of World Englishes. Nonetheless, the instructional effects on both comprehensibility and accentedness still need to be further investigated, particularly in the long-term context, an issue raised in the next question.

Question 2:

Pronunciation instruction is explicit and involves listening and speaking. If using studies investigating the effects of implicit instruction with delayed post-test, do you think the impact of segmental and prosodic training would be different?

Response 2:

In L2 grammar and vocabulary, the effectiveness of implicit and incidental training (e.g., recasts) can be more clearly observed in delayed rather than immediate post-tests (Li et al, 2016) because L2 development takes time and certain language developmental characteristics can only be observable at a later stage. Meanwhile, in L2 speech, there is some suggestion that incidental training may result in more gains, especially when target sounds are extremely difficult to learn. Nevertheless, this issue in exploring the effectiveness of explicit versus implicit instruction in L2 pronunciation is still in need of further research. Another area for needed further investigation lies in the role of the listener factor in comprehensibility judgment because comprehensibility always occurs in a two-way process between a speaker and a listener. The next question deals with this issue.

Question 3:

As this study has shown, expert and mixed (with novice included) listeners differ in how they evaluate comprehensibility and accentedness. While oral exam candidates are evaluated by trained raters, it is the novice listeners who do the actual evaluation in real life. Would such discrepancy suggest that the comprehensibility of speaking responses should be rated by novice listeners in the target audience (e.g., similar populations as those in the candidate’s working environment for a business English test)?

Response 3:

One important issue which lies at the heart of L2 speaking assessment is exploring the effects of different raters’ or listeners’ backgrounds on speaking test scores. Among various components of speaking proficiency, comprehensibility is known to be a multifaceted, dynamic phenomenon determined by the linguistic characteristics of speech and by a listener’s background. Thus, what is comprehensible to one listener might not be intelligible to another listener if they do not share similar exposure and attitude towards accented English. However, such an interaction between speech characteristics and listeners’ backgrounds can be a cause for concern in an assessment context where raters are expected to reach a consensus on their scoring to achieve an acceptable level of interrater reliability. In that vein, high-stakes proficiency tests usually train professional raters to assign a single global proficiency rating following the criteria outlined by professional testing boards. Nevertheless, this practice might introduce some bias in assessing L2 comprehensibility if raters are too accustomed to the speech of a specific English variety. Thus, ideally, if a certain testing context for a target language use domain includes naïve listeners as major stakeholders, it would be desirable to have them as raters along with the linguistically trained professional raters. For example, an undergraduate student who is not familiar with foreign-accented English speech is often invited as a rater in the International Teaching Assistant (ITA) speaking test context.

To conclude, this webinar series by Dr. Saito provided us with insights into pronunciation teaching and learning, particularly, into how English teachers can select or construct various teaching and assessment activities better in order to enhance the comprehensibility of ESL learners’ speech. ALIS and TESOL Quarterly will continue this webinar series by inviting other prominent TQ authors to promote communication between scholars and readers and dissemination of useful pedagogical information to many ESL/EFL teachers and researchers.

References

Brown, A. (1988), Functional load and the teaching of pronunciation. TESOL Quarterly, 22(4), 593-606. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587258

Li S., Zhu, Y., & Ellis, R. (2016). The effects of the timing of corrective feedback on the acquisition of a new linguistic structure. The Modern Language Journal, 100(1), 276–295. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44134984

Saito, K. (2015). Experience effects on the development of late second language learners’ oral proficiency. Language Learning, 65(3), 563–595. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12120.

Saito, K. (2021). What characterizes comprehensible and native‐like pronunciation among English‐as‐a‐Second‐Language speakers? Meta‐analyses of phonological, rater, and instructional factors. TESOL Quarterly, 55(3), 866-900. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3027