Pronunciation as Categorisation: The Role of Contrast in Teaching English /R/ and /L/¹

Abstract

For many years, the difficulty adults have in learning second language pronunciation was explained with reference to the Critical Period Hypothesis-the belief that adults cannot, learn new phonological contrasts, perhaps due to physiological changes in the brain around puberty (Lenneberg 1967). This idea was in line with the contemporary theory of Generative Linguistics (Chomsky 1965), which took the view that language learning is achieved by an innate Language Acquisition Device which operates below the level of consciousness so is inaccessible to explicit teaching. It was also supported not just by the individual experience of many teachers (Macdonald 2002), but also by studies which appeared to demonstrate that explicit instruction in pronunciation was ineffective (Macdonald, Yule, and Powers 1994). For these reasons, pronunciation was given little attention in English language teaching during these years (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin 1996), and the belief that new contrasts could not be learned became a self-fulfilling prophecy, challenged -only by a few dedicated teachers (Baker 1981; Rogerson and Gilbert 1990).