For many years now the debate as to the English pronunciation model to be selected for training both in academia and for schools in Poland has proved unresolvable. When pronunciation instruction is executed, anything that conspicuously departs from spelling pronunciation is accepted. It appears that teachers implicitly and largely unconsciously follow the idea of the somewhat impoverished instructional model of English as a Lingua Franca ELF put forward by Jenkins 2000. Until recently, no reasonable, well-argued-for alternative was available, whereas now the model suggested in Szpyra-Kozłowska 2015: Native English as Lingua Franca NELF fulfils the needs of both students in English departments as well as ordinary users of English. This paper reports on the preferences as to the desirable standard in pronunciation instruction among students in academia — but not among those of English language departments — as learners of English as a Foreign Language for whom language proficiency may be an important professional asset in their future careers. To investigate the above, a research survey of the quantitative-qualitative type was implemented in the form of a questionnaire. The focus is not so much on the numerical favourites as on the reasons behind a stated preference. The respondents seem to aspire to realistic but nonetheless high goals.

Artykuł omawia potencjalne korzyści odnoszone przez uczestników periodycznych weekendowych warsztatów naukowych w zakresie dydaktyki języka angielskiego prowadzonych w ramach Małopolskiej Chmury Edukacyjnej. Poza intensywnym doskonaleniem warsztatu językowego w wybranych zakresach tematycznych, uczestnicy otrzymują pewne wartości dodane, merytoryczne oraz w ramach rozwijania umiejętności personalnych. Intensywny trening wymowy to podstawowa merytoryczna, korzyść dodatkowa, zwłaszcza, że ten aspekt języka jest zwyczajowo pomijany w szkolnej edukacji językowej. Wprowadzenie i ćwiczenie elementów samooceny, praca zespołowa oraz konstruktywna informacja zwrotna - a zatem elementy interakcyjne, bez których opanowanie języka obcego nie jest możliwe - to kolejne z omawianych wartości dodanych. O ile skuteczność instruktażu fonetycznego jest udokumentowana badaniem w oparciu o przeprowadzone testy wejścia oraz wyjścia, to już trafność autoewaluacji jest wątpliwa, co pokazuje analiza odpowiedzi uczestników. O potrzebie trenowania pozostałych umiejętności świadczą zarówno reakcje oraz zaangażowanie uczestników, jak i opinie towarzyszących im opiekunów.

No abstract

As one of the most prominent elements of intonation sentence stress frequently contributes to the meaning expressed by speakers. It most typically signals details of an utterance information structure, but it also performs a contrastive or emphasizing function, thus expressing focus in the spoken discourse. In English and many other languages its location, while exhibiting certain regularities it additionally determined by extra relevant or relative information. As such, either alone or in combination, it may communicate certain additional shades of meaning that, similarly to the contribution of sentence intonation, may escape the attention of EFL speakers. The paper explores the comprehension sensitivity of Turkish speakers of English when it comes to identifying meaning details contributed by sentence stress. It investigates their awareness as detected through perception of variable sentence stress location. The target group are Turkish advanced speakers of English, with various levels of competence, and only sporadic phonetic training in English for part of them. In a perception-based experiment they were asked to identify the details they perceive. Their results were then compared and analysed, also in relation to what their native language (with a distinction into sentential and focal stress) adds in terms of this module of utterance intonation. Finally, their results were correlated with those achieved by Polish advanced speakers of English as investigated in a similar study conducted earlier. The interpretation of the results reveals that Turkish EFL speakers are more sensitive to the highlighting or contrastive function of sentence stress, achieving overall better result here than when they are to judge its contribution to notion such as politeness or impatience. They are also rather competent at detecting the prominent element in an utterance.

The paper discusses the emergence of L1-induced word-stress patterns in the spoken production of Polish advanced speakers of English. In Polish, unlike in English, a great deal of word-stress predictability is attested, and the paper investigates whether this affects the actual production. The investigations are couched within the broad area of contact linguistics and are analysed in the usage-based cognitive phonological approach. A possible lack of exemplar connections to standard English forms is postulated here, so that EFL speakers develop patterns where the connections are being made to their native exemplars. The Frequency in a Favourable Context criterion is used here to estimate effects of use pattern that are distinct in the investigated languages. The data were obtained in a series of production tasks in a test-like format, by students in the English Department at PUK in Kraków. The results were analysed to the effect that they demonstrated a high level of L1 influence bordering possibly on innovation and propagation of new pattern of use, with cognate forms demonstrating the more rigid adherence to L1 stress locus.