The accentual patterns in the interlanguage of majors of English at Mentouri University, Constantine

Abstract

Grappling with the subtle nature of second-year Master of Arts students’ interlanguage accentual patterns, unravelling its most salient, recurrent inducers and arriving at grounded assimilations of how to palliate the impact of expediting variables have been the overriding pursuit and ensuing theoretical and practical contributions of the present thesis. We hypothesised that failure to bring their accentual patterns with L2 settings would peripherally be ascribable to crosslinguistic influence as it is outstripped by that of intralinguistic factors. To gather different genres of data, we administered students’ and teachers’ questionnaires and a diagnostic test. The analyses of the data revealed that the students fell short of accommodating their prosodic phonology to quintessentially English parameters. Crosslinguistic influence from French, which is held accountable for many errors, seems itself to emanate from hyper-reliance on spelling-pronunciations fuelled by internalised French pronunciation well-established rules. Such errors mirror multi-tiered deficiencies in how learners have over the years coped with this prosodic component: little phonetic awareness of the correlates of English stress along with rudimentary guidelines regarding where accent falls along with overt naivety regarding utilisation of pronunciation-promoting strategies and accompanying habits, and sporadic deployment of dictionaries. Other variables pertain to infrequency of teacher-fronted feedback as well as absence in the Spoken Language Proficiency and Listening Comprehension module of research-based findings’ outcomes, peculiarly those bearing on pronunciation-acquisition by English as a foreign language learners operating in instructed, multilingual settings, and traditional philological comparisons as well as contrastive analysis. The thesis terminates by setting up a plethora of linguistic and pedagogical guidelines and delineating how these could work in tandem with each other and how intertwined they may be for fostering a neater command of primary accentual structures that is more aligned with Anglo-Saxon norms.