Oral Realisations of Orthographic Diphthongs in English Language

Abstract

This study aims at presenting an analysis of how Brazilian students of English language realise the English orthographic diphthongs orally. We are based on the theoretical principles of Second Language Acquisition, Linguistic Variation in L2 and the concepts of Interlanguage, Phonological Awareness and also on the studies about the grapho-phonic influence in L2. The corpus analysed is constituted of 52 words containing orthographic diphthongs that are realised as monophthongs according to the norms of pronunciation of English language. The data collection was carried out through a questionnaire with 22 questions, and a list of 31 sentences to be read out loud. This collection resulted in 1.045 realisations by 21 students of intermediate and advanced levels of English. The main results show that most of the participants produced the English orthographic diphthongs in accordance with the norms of pronunciation of that language. However, we detected phonetic-phonological deviant forms and aimed at establishing the relations between the oral realisations and the linguistic aspects in order to reveal which aspects may influence those deviant pronunciations of the studied segments.

Keywords

• orthographic diphthongs
• oral realisations
• english language