Papers by Stephanie Lindemann
Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 2016
Research on communication difficulties between native and nonnative speakers (NNSs) has generally... more Research on communication difficulties between native and nonnative speakers (NNSs) has generally focused on NNSs. However, native speakers’ (NSs) level of familiarity with nonnative accents can also affect communication. This study investigates whether implicit training (exposure to Korean-accented English through sentence transcription) and explicit training (learning about linguistic differences with a focus on Korean-accented English) can improve NSs’ comprehension of Korean-accented English. Participants in both training conditions showed greater improvement than the control group on sentence transcription tasks but not on multiple choice questions that assessed comprehension of a brief lecture. The results replicate past findings showing the effectiveness of implicit training and provide novel evidence of the effectiveness of explicit training. This suggests that explicit training can be effective in improving NSs’ understanding of short utterances when the training ensures pa...
Multilingua, 2022
The internationalization of Anglophone universities could allow English-dominant students to bene... more The internationalization of Anglophone universities could allow English-dominant students to benefit from experience with English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, but US students have often complained of difficulty communicating with such instructors, especially International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Research has largely focused on helping ITAs assimilate linguistically and culturally, although many applied linguists suggest that ITAs’ students would also benefit from training in skills for communication across linguistic difference, through attention to their language attitudes, familiarity with diverse Englishes, and communication strategies. We report on an intervention designed to address all three, here focusing on students’ willingness to engage in collaborative communication strategies. The intervention, conducted in a computer science department and reaching over 300 first-year students from varied linguistic backgrounds, included an online and an in-class com...
Public discussion of Arizona policy regarding non-native English-speaking teachers often presuppo... more Public discussion of Arizona policy regarding non-native English-speaking teachers often presupposes that assessments of a teacher’s intelligibility are clear-cut and obvious. This paper discusses research indicating that such judgments are by no means straightforward; fair and accurate assessments also require consideration of the role of the listeners. For example, listeners’ attitudes toward non-native speakers may influence how they interact with non-native speakers, as well as the degree to which they acknowledge those speakers’ proficiency. Even without clearly negative attitudes toward the speaker, listeners’ perception may be biased by expectations so that the same pronunciations are heard as different depending on the listener’s beliefs about the speaker’s language background. In some cases, it is the perception of “standard” English that is inaccurate, effectively imposing a higher standard on non-native than on native speech. These findings suggest that impressionistic as...
English phonetics and phonology often focus on improving learners’ pronunciation. However, phonol... more English phonetics and phonology often focus on improving learners’ pronunciation. However, phonological processing is ‘a two-way street’ involving both speaker and listener. Thus, pronunciation instruction in this globalized time needs to be complemented with ways to help listeners understand a wide range of accents, thereby challenging the native speakerism and standard language ideology of more traditional English teaching. In this paper, we share our experiences of promoting listener abilities in university courses in Sweden and the US, two very different teaching contexts. In Sweden, Jeong takes a truly phonetic approach, starting from students’ own pronunciations rather than a ‘standard’ model, and focuses on ability to comprehend diverse accents. In the US, Lindemann uses native-speaking students’ complaints about supposedly incomprehensible instructors, not as justification for further training of instructors who are already proficient English users, but as an opportunity to ...
International Journal of Applied Linguistics
Language in Society
This study investigates how the descriptor ‘broken English’ is used to construct speakers as nonn... more This study investigates how the descriptor ‘broken English’ is used to construct speakers as nonnative within standard language ideology. In-depth analysis of examples found through WebCorp, used to search US websites, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English found that the term was largely used to refer to comprehensible English identified as nonnative. Users of such English were constructed as Other, usually highly negatively. The rarer cases of more positive descriptions referred to encounters outside English-speaking countries, consistent with monolingualist ideology, and when used for a more distantly superior person, made them more attractive through greater apparent accessibility. Four mechanisms are discussed by which use of the term naturalizes ideologies. Crucially, its ambiguity promotes slippage between ‘neutral’ and negative uses, allowing any English identified as nonnative to be characterized as ‘broken’, slipping into ‘not English’, with such descriptions trea...
Issues in Applied Linguistics, 2010
Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 2016
Research on communication difficulties between native and nonnative speakers (NNSs) has generally... more Research on communication difficulties between native and nonnative speakers (NNSs) has generally focused on NNSs. However, native speakers’ (NSs) level of familiarity with nonnative accents can also affect communication. This study investigates whether implicit training (exposure to Korean-accented English through sentence transcription) and explicit training (learning about linguistic differences with a focus on Korean-accented English) can improve NSs’ comprehension of Korean-accented English. Participants in both training conditions showed greater improvement than the control group on sentence transcription tasks but not on multiple choice questions that assessed comprehension of a brief lecture. The results replicate past findings showing the effectiveness of implicit training and provide novel evidence of the effectiveness of explicit training. This suggests that explicit training can be effective in improving NSs’ understanding of short utterances when the training ensures pa...
This chapter considers the nature of attitudes towards L2 pronunciation, drawing on attitudes and... more This chapter considers the nature of attitudes towards L2 pronunciation, drawing on attitudes and ideology research on non-native English, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and non-native speech in other languages. Attitudes to non-native English and ELF varieties have most often been found to be negative, especially on status dimensions, leading to learners of English being “corrected” for accents that deviate from a particular native variety and tested on how “nativelike” they are. Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that studies typically find that these learners have internalized the preference for nativelike English, including clearly prejudicial beliefs about personal traits of individual speakers. If nativelike accents were inherently preferable rather than certain identities associated with those accents being preferable, we should see similar negative attitudes towards native English speakers’ pronunciation of other languages, but the few cases in which it has bee...
Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 2016
Public discussion of Arizona policy regarding non-native English-speaking teachers often presuppo... more Public discussion of Arizona policy regarding non-native English-speaking teachers often presupposes that assessments of a teacher’s intelligibility are clear-cut and obvious. This paper discusses research indicating that such judgments are by no means straightforward; fair and accurate assessments also require consideration of the role of the listeners. For example, listeners’ attitudes toward non-native speakers may influence how they interact with non-native speakers, as well as the degree to which they acknowledge those speakers’ proficiency. Even without clearly negative attitudes toward the speaker, listeners’ perception may be biased by expectations so that the same pronunciations are heard as different depending on the listener’s beliefs about the speaker’s language background. In some cases, it is the perception of “standard” English that is inaccurate, effectively imposing a higher standard on non-native than on native speech. These findings suggest that impressionistic as...
Language in Society, 2010
... STEPHANIE LINDEMANN ... Montgomery argues that rap has features of an anti-language, includin... more ... STEPHANIE LINDEMANN ... Montgomery argues that rap has features of an anti-language, including its difficulty for outsiders to understand and its over-lexification of items such as money and drugs, for which he provides numerous examples (though some are not limited to use ...
Language in Society, 2002
ABSTRACT This study investigates whether there is a relationship between negative at-titudes towa... more ABSTRACT This study investigates whether there is a relationship between negative at-titudes toward non-native speakers and poor comprehension of those speak-ers. Twelve native English speakers whose attitudes toward Koreans had been assessed were asked to complete ...
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2003
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2005
This study attempts to discover how native US English speakers construct social categories for pe... more This study attempts to discover how native US English speakers construct social categories for people outside the US. A close look at one group's belief system provides insights that can be used in addressing linguistic discrimination, with information on how varieties and features of varieties are perceived. Here 79 US undergraduates labeled maps with descriptions of English spoken by international students, and 208 rated the English of students from 58 countries. Familiarity and socio-political relationships with countries of origin appeared to play a role in responses. Evaluation was often central to description, with a category of stigmatized, often "broken", English used for all non-native speakers except perhaps (Western) Europeans. Salient subgroups were: negatively evaluated "Chinese" English, somewhat negatively evaluated "Mexican" English, and "harsh" and "guttural" Russian English. Respondents had competing frameworks for classifying Indian and German English. A model of these overlapping categories and implications for addressing linguistic prejudice are suggested.
English for Specific Purposes, Jan 1, 2001
This study investigates the roles of just, a lexical item that is among the most frequent in dist... more This study investigates the roles of just, a lexical item that is among the most frequent in distinguishing academic speech data from roughly comparable written data, in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Concordance analysis showed that just frequently co-occurs with metadiscourse and hedging; a closer functional analysis in selected speech events showed that these collocations were often used with a mitigating function. Minimizers, including limiters as well as mitigators, together made up the overwhelming majority of tokens, while the more frequently taught "temporal" function was much less common, especially in the more formal speech events. Analysis of the phonetic forms of the various functions of just suggest that the mitigating use involves a very reduced token, whereas other functions such as that paraphrasable by "exactly" are more likely to use a full vowel and to be stressed. This suggests that materials for teaching non-native speakers academic English would benefit from greater attention to issues of phonetic detail, as an inappropriately stressed mitigating just may be misinterpreted by native listeners.
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Papers by Stephanie Lindemann