HOW TO TEACH AMERICAN ACCENT// International Journal of Educational and Scientific Research 4(12), 2021/ Chief Editor K. Kumpulainen /OEAPS OU - Tallinn, Estonia (Open European Academy of Public Sciences). Vienna, Austria 30.04.2021: OEAPS OU., 2021. P. 9-12.

It is no secret that people intuitively understand the level of English proficiency by the accent, and this happens in the first seconds of a conversation. Each dialect of English has its own unique pronunciation – from British to Australian. And in countries where the dialect is spoken, having an appropriate accent will help you sound more natural. Do you want to feel more confident speaking English without a foreign accent in the United States? One way to do this is to speak with an American accent, although this is by no means easy. Just as having a British accent will help you fit in better in England, an American accent will help you communicate fluently with native American English speakers. The North American English accent is one of the most popular among students of English as a foreign language, and there are a huge number of resources that will help you master it. Here are several steps to help you improve your American accent and sound like native speakers.

LEXICAL BUNDLES IN L1 AND L2 ENGLISH DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS

Based on contrastive interlanguage analysis, this study explores the usage of lexical bundles occurring in doctoral dissertations produced in the English language related studies in the USA by L1 American English speakers and in Turkey by Turkish speakers of English in the last ten years between 2010-2019. In our analysis of the data, we identified a significant number of types of 4-word bundles from both corpora from a structural and functional perspective. The findings regarding the types of lexical bundles and their structural and functional dispersions revealed significant differences between the two corpora. While L1 English writers refrained from heavily utilizing formulaic sequences, the opposite could be observed in the works of L2 English authors. This study has significant implications for academic writers producing work in the English language since corpus-informed lists and concordances might be of great help to L2 speakers of English in identifying appropriate lexical bundles that are specific to their disciplines.

Forum: Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice

Purpose African American English (AAE) speakers often face mismatches between home language and school language, coupled with negative attitudes toward AAE in the classroom. This forum, Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice, will help researchers, parents, and school-based practitioners communicate in ways that are synergistic, collaborative, and transparent to improve educational outcomes of AAE speakers. Method The forum includes a tutorial offering readers instructions on how to engage in community-based participatory research (Holt, 2021). Through two clinical focus articles, readers will recognize how AAE develops during the preschool years and is expressed across various linguistic contexts and elicitation tasks (Newkirk-Turner & Green, 2021) and identify markers of developmental language disorder within AAE from language samples analyzed in Computerized Language Analysis (Overton et al., 2021). Seven empirical articles employ such designs as quantitative (Byrd & Brown, 2021; Diehm & Hendricks, 2021; Hendricks & Jimenez, 2021; Maher et al., 2021; Mahurin-Smith et al., 2021), qualitative (Hamilton & DeThorne, 2021), and mixed methods (Mills et al., 2021). These articles will help readers identify ways in which AAE affects how teachers view its speakers' language skills and communicative practices and relates to its speakers' literacy outcomes. Conclusion The goal of the forum is to make a lasting contribution to the discipline with a concentrated focus on how to assess and address communicative variation in the U.S. classroom.

Cultural and politico-religious challenges impacting critical reading of text for Iranian postgraduates in Australia

This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts, each with opposing viewpoints, on current socio-political and nationalistic debates of Iran. They were then involved in a focus group discussion for further critique of each other’s viewpoints. Findings indicate two major Persian constructs that influence CR: hefz-e zaaher ‘keeping up appearances’ and ta’sob/gheyrat, approximating to ‘one’s honor combined with prejudice and bigotry’. Findings also reveal that participants’ CR is contributed by heavy emotional attachment to nationalistic views engendered by Persian poetry. Chafe (1982), too, found that emotional attachment in appraising text was true with American English speakers. Finally, the focus group discussion had a slight impact on encouraging CR. Overall, it seems that participants’ repositioned journeys in Australia have influenced their perspective.

Linguistic Diversity in Appalachia

This study investigates how American English speakers from within and outside the Appalachian region interpret negative auxiliary inversion (NAI). Previously observed in Appalachian and other English varieties, NAI has surface syntax similar to yes-no questions but receives a declarative interpretation (e.g., Didn’t everybody watch Superbowl 53, meaning ‘not everybody watched’). Previous work shows that NAI is associated with a reading in which some but not all people participated in an event, as opposed to one in which no one participated. Results from an interpretation task revealed that Appalachian participants tended to obtain the ‘not all’ and not the ‘no one’ reading for NAI. In contrast, non-Appalachian participants’ interpretations exhibited greater inter- and intraspeaker variability. Appalachian participants with more ‘not all’ interpretations reported positive attitudes toward NAI use, and they also distinguished between attested and unattested syntactic subject types (e.g., everybody, many people, *few people) in a naturalness rating task. Appalachian participants with more ‘no one’ interpretations had more negative attitudes toward NAI use and made no distinction between subject types. These results highlight how individuals from Appalachia interpret NAI differently than individuals from outside the region and suggest that language attitudes may impact semantic interpretation within a nonmainstream speaker group.

The Entanglement of Dialectal Variation and Speaker Normalization

This paper explores the relationship between speaker normalization and dialectal identity in sociolinguistic data, examining a database of vowel formants collected from 88 monolingual American English speakers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Audio recordings of Finnish- and Italian-heritage American English speakers reading a passage and a word list were normalized using two normalization procedures. These algorithms are based on different concepts of normalization: Lobanov, which models normalization as based on experience with individual talkers, and Labov ANAE, which models normalization as based on experience with scale-factors inherent in acoustic resonators of all kinds. The two procedures yielded different results; while the Labov ANAE method reveals a cluster shifting of low and back vowels that correlated with heritage, the Lobanov procedure seems to eliminate this sociolinguistic variation. The difference between the two procedures lies in how they treat relations between formant changes, suggesting that dimensions of variation in the vowel space may be treated differently by different normalization procedures, raising the question of how anatomical variation and dialectal variation interact in the real world. The structure of the sociolinguistic effects found with the Labov ANAE normalized data, but not in the Lobanov normalized data, suggest that the Lobanov normalization does over-normalize formant measures and remove sociolinguistically relevant information.

Where do negative stereotypes come from? The case of Indian English in the USA

Language attitudes inform social stereotyping, which in turn affects linguistic judgments (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick 2007). Nonstandard varieties are particularly subject to negative stereotypes, being evaluated as “less friendly” and “hard to understand” (Giles & Watson 2013). In this study, we investigate attitudes towards Indian English, a variety of English spoken by one of the largest immigrant populations in the USA (approximately 2.4 million), to understand the roots of linguistic stereotyping towards this variety of English. We compared attitudes of American English speakers towards Indian English and British English. Our results show that while American English speakers do not explicitly indicate any communication problem with Indian English, they disfavor Indian English compared to British English. This disfavoring of Indian English aligns with Raciolinguistic theories, suggesting that post-colonialism, especially Whiteness, is a factor in language prestige and how different varieties are perceived.

Perceptual dissimilation of /l/ and (not) /n/

We test Ohala’s (1993) hypothesis that phonological dissimilation can result from perceptual errors. Using a task in which American English speakers hear and orthographically transcribe nonce words, we test whether they are more likely to omit an acoustically present /l/ or /n/ when heard in a word where another token of the same sound is present. We find that this is the case for /l/ but not for /n/. These results mirror the actual prevalence of dissimilation in American English, where /l/-dissimilation occurs occasionally, but /n/-dissimilation rarely or never.