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English Pronunciation Instruction: Research-based insights
Edited by Anastazija Kirkova-Naskova, Alice Henderson and Jonás Fouz-González
[AILA Applied Linguistics Series 19] 2021
► pp. 223–252

Chapter 10
Corrective feedback and unintelligibility

Do they work in tandem during tandem interactions?

| University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3
| University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3

This chapter addresses the relative salience of L2 English pronunciation errors, which may inform teaching priorities in contexts where learners are consciously oriented towards a native speaker model. Error salience is considered from two interrelated viewpoints: errors’ potential for leading to miscommunication (unintelligibility), and their capacity for eliciting remedial response from interlocutors (corrective feedback). Our study, which builds on our previous research into the two domains, uses the bilingual French-English SITAF tandem corpus. The analysis of the English conversational data reveals that L2 mispronunciation was the single most important factor leading to communication breakdowns, whereas vocabulary was most likely to generate corrective feedback (CF) from native English interlocutors. Pronunciation-induced miscommunication was principally linked to suprasegmental features, especially erroneous word stress.

Keywords: L2 pronunciation, teaching priorities, tandem learning, corrective feedback, intelligibility, communication breakdowns, French learners of English
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
  • Methodology
    • The SITAF tandem corpus
    • Identifying corrective feedback instances
    • Identifying miscommunication instances
  • Results and analysis
    • Corrective feedback instances
      • CF focus
      • Details of pronunciation CF
      • Corrective strategy, CF request, and learner uptake
    • Miscommunication instances
      • Overall triggers
      • Details of pronunciation triggers
  • Discussion
  • Pedagogical implications
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 13 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aals.19.10sch
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