"When using an authentic audio or video it is important to use only 'native speakers'."
============
"It depends" is my pithy (and, possibly, slightly annoying) answer.
Context is something I always think about first.
If you're preparing students for an exchange program in Canada or a person to emigrate to the UK for work, it would make sense to use a lot of materials that would prepare them for being in that environment. So, you'd probably have more native speakers, specifically native speakers from those particular countries.
However, given the number of non-native English speakers in the world, and English's current (but not permanent) status as the lingua franca, it is important to include people whose L1 is a language other than English.
In more general circumstances, it would be beneficial to include a variety of speakers. Multiple people or varying backgrounds reading the same text (e.g., a poem), can be extremely useful. With respect to teaching the pronunciation of ELF, it raises awareness of features of pronunciation that are (more or less) common to all speakers, as well as those that will be more challenging for students to hear / pronounce (e.g. vocalic epenthesis in Korean speakers). In short, it allows learners to explore what it means to be 'intelligible' in terms of pronunciation. The idea that our choice as (pronunciation) teachers is between the two standards of RP and AmE is not particularly useful anymore (though we're having trouble convincing Korean consumers of this). Instead, the focus is using something like CSP Wong's "New Approaches and Goals" in our classes: intelligibility, awareness-raising, and self-monitoring, with a critical element in our pronunciation teaching being explicit attention to awareness-raising. Furthermore, even if you don't take an ELF approach to pronunciation teaching, you'd still need a variety of speakers if you want to reflect the reality of the world's population.
To conclude, I'll put another way: A video using a non-native speaker is not, by definition, inauthentic. (Why do we assume that it is?)
True! How could authenticity rely on, er, "nativeness" (surely there's a better word!)? Moreover, even students who are planning on going to study in Canada or the UK need to be able to understand a variety of ways people speak English. Those populations aren't as homogenous as the students from a country like South Korea might assume.
ReplyDelete"A video using a non-native speaker is not, by definition, inauthentic. (Why do we assume that it is?)" - Nails it!
ReplyDelete