Acoustic Variability in the Production of English Vowels by Native and Non-Native Speakers

The features of non-native speech which distinguish it from native speech are often difficult to pin down. It is possible to be a native speaker of any of a vast number of varieties of English. These varieties each have their phonetic characteristics which allow them to be identified by speakers of the varieties in question and by others. The phonetic differences between the accents represented by these varieties are very great. It is impossible to indicate any particular configuration of vowels in the acoustic vowel space or set of consonant articulations which all native-speaker varieties of English have in common and which non-native speakers do not share. This study considers the vowel quality in a single word by native and non-native speakers.

Imágenes de Hispanoamérica : Un análisis crítico de material didáctico de ELE

This paper investigates how Latin America and its cultures are represented in textbooks on Spanish as a foreign language. The study aims at investigating how much attention and of what type is dedicated to Latin America in the investigated material, whether the textbooks contribute to giving a varied and nuanced image of the Spanish-American cultures and how this relates to the educational goal of promoting an intercultural competence.A qualitative method of analysis has been applied in order to carry out the analysis of three textbooks for intermediate levels of language studies: Caminando 3, Alegria and De acuerdo.The results of the investigation show that the investigated textbooks mostly present a simplified, ethnocentric, homogenized and sometimes postcolonial image of the Spanish-American cultures. Texts where the culture constitutes the context and not the subject can promote a process of identification and consequently an intercultural competence.The study’s main conclusions show that Spanish-American cultures are underrepresented in the investigated material and that a non-native perspective dominates in the majority of the texts. This combined with the lack of variety and profundity, may have consequences for the promotion of an intercultural competence and for teachers’ work with textbooks and cultural content.

Processes and variations in language economisation

This article analyses the processes of reducing language in textchats produced by non-native speakers of English. We propose that forms are reduced because of their high frequency and because of the discourse context. A wide variety of processes are attested in the literature, and we find different forms of clippings in our data, including mixtures of different clippings, homophone respellings, phonetic respellings including informal oral forms, initialisms (but no acronyms), and mixtures of clipping together with homophone and phonetic respellings. Clippings were the most frequent process (especially back-clippings and initialisms), followed by homophone respellings. There were different ways of metalinguistically marking reduction, but capitalisation was by far the most frequent. There is much individual variation in the frequencies of the different processes, although most were within normal distribution. The fact that nonnative speakers seem to generally follow reduction patterns of native speakers suggests that reduction is a universal process.