Training, Language and Culture (Mar 2022)
The role of prosody in expressing culture-specific speech behaviour of language teachers in English
Abstract
The article explores prosody as one of the most salient aspects of speech in expressing culture-specific speech behaviour of Russian teachers of English and their English counterparts. The significance of the research has been determined by the need to establish the features that display one’s identity in a foreign language. Our concern is with the L1 strong influence on L2, due to which non-native speakers fail to conform to native-speaker norms of English. The question of whether to teach students native speaker-like pronunciation/prosody or tolerate the interference of their mother language was once strongly debated and many tend to abandon native-speaker norms for various reasons. However, based on a recent students’ survey we can note that their view is to acquire the appropriate norm and sound native speaker-like. Moreover, the study analyses several groups of teachers of British and Russian origin and their classroom English language to point out certain prosodic features indicating their native accent and culture. Each of the segmentals is illustrated with examples from authentic demonstration lessons. A general scientific descriptive method is applied alongside the method of phonetic investigation. The assumption that prosody conveys strategies of politeness theory in the speech of language teachers in classroom discourse was confirmed by study results. We observe maximum correlation between implicit and explicit modality in the classroom management by the group of British informants whereas socially and culturally conditioned speech behaviour of the Russian teachers determined by the type of discourse accepted in society leads to a marked difference from the dominant strategies and prosodic features regarding politeness in British culture. The findings demonstrate the key role of prosody in the study of im/politeness. The ar- ticle may be of interest to specialists in intercultural communication, phonetics, didactic communication and to anyone researching the issues of the culture-specific speech behaviour of English language teachers.
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