Towards a near-native speaker’s pronunciation: The most challenging aspects of English pronunciation for Polish learners and ways of dealing with them: The suprasegmental level

Abstract

The article presents the most characteristic and recurring pronunci-ation problems of Polish learners of English at the suprasegmental level of the language (all aspects above the individual phoneme), which not only reveal a non-native accent, but also frequently lead to misun-derstandings. Apart from presenting and discussing these problems, their possible causes are considered as well as practical solutions to minimalize their impact. Overall, Polish learners “overpronounce” i.e. they give equal stress to most words in a sentence; they do not reduce the vowels in unstressed syllables thus losing the regular rhythm of an utterance, which is crucial for English. They also fail to link words together using the available devices (even though the Polish devices are almost identical), because of which they sound unnaturally “stac-cato-like”. Additionally, Polish learners tend not to use sufficient eli-sion (dropping sounds, a phenomenon which also exists in Polish) and assimilation (which, when used, is lifted from Polish and easily visible in the case of incorrect voicing – final devoicing and mid-word voicing). Word stress placement, especially with “cognates”, duration of articu-lation and use of English articulatory settings are also problematic areas. Surprisingly, this cannot be said about intonation, which does not pose substantial problems for Poles. In the conclusion, it is sug-gested that making all learners of English (not only Polish ones) aware of common prosodic mistakes (L1 transfer mainly) and consistent work on dealing with them, will improve their pronunciation, thus making communication in English more effective in today’s globalised world.