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The Teaching Of Decoding And Meaning Building

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Helping intermediate students interpret different accents in authentic spoken texts. Philip Weir Contents Introduction Page 3 Analysis Page 4 1. What defines an accent? 2. Top-down and Bottom-Up processing 3. The teaching of decoding and meaning building. Problems and solutions Page 8 Unfamiliar accents Distinguishing the phonemes Connected speech Conclusion Page 10 Appendices Page 11 Introduction Most course books will contain a variety of different regional British accents, although the majority of which will mainly focus on Received Pronunciation as will its pronunciation section. It should be noted that only 3% of the British population speak RP, although “it is convenient that …show more content…

Jeremy Harmer stated that learners need to be exposed not only to one variety of English (British English, for example) but also to varieties such as American, Australian and Irish English just to name a few. (Harmer, 1998) Understanding regional accents can be overwhelming, however, with the right training, skills and awareness, the students will be better equipped to interpret different accents. Analysis 1. What defines an accent? 2. Top-down and Bottom-Up processing 3. The teaching of decoding and meaning building. 1. What defines an accent? J.C Wells points out that an accent is special to every individual and that each one has its own idiolect and that there are many aspects that affect an accent (Wells, 1982). These aspects can include: The sex of the speaker. Women tend to speak in a higher pitch and maybe more animated, The class of the speaker. Are they upper or working class? As this will affect everything from stress to the vocabulary used. i.e. Received Pronunciation vs A broader regional accent, L1 interference. Is the speaker a non-native? The L1 will certainly be reflected in the L2 of the speaker, The geographical location of the speaker, The style of speaker. Speech rate can be fast in some regions and slower in others. Looking at all these aspects in combination, we soon realise that an accent is not a black and white feature and that we cannot say that all the Irish do not pronounce the TH properly

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