Pronunciation features noticed by L1 Vietnamese MOOC users: In search of sociolinguistic salience
Résumé
The massive open online course (MOOC) English Pronunciation in a Global World -EPGW (Rupp, 2019) has been used by many enrolees around the world over the past five years. This paper examines the potential of using learner data from EPGW for pronunciation research, focussing on the role of salience in English pronunciation learning and teaching. Salience refers to the prominence of linguistic features to language users, a concept deployed in fields like variationist linguistics and language acquisition. There are two types of salience: linguistic (distance measurement) and sociolinguistic (social perception). We explore EPGW as a tool for directly investigating sociolinguistic salience through user-generated data that have not been influenced by the presence of (educational) authorities. In the case study presented here, we focus on Vietnamese-speaking enrolees in four runs of EPGW between 2019-2021. Results from these EPGW users show that they comment on a range of segmental and suprasegmental features, with suprasegmental features more prominent in unprompted comments. While the units in EPGW need to be adjusted to unequivocally establish that sociolinguistic salience is at the heart of the enrolees' comments, the authors argue for increased attention in pronunciation teaching to the social value that learners attach to English pronunciation features.
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