Corrective feedback and unintelligibility

Abstract

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.