116 Demonstrationto their importance for the second language learner...

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Smutek to uczucie, jak gdyby się tonęło, jak gdyby grzebano cię w ziemi.

Roach has suggested the
following:
'It would not be practical or useful to teach all learners of English to produce
assimilations; practice in making elisions is more useful, and it is clearly
valuable to do exercises related to ... linking.' (Roach 1991: 130)
Roach also stresses the importance of work on connected speech for lis-
tening. The most serious problem second language learners have in this
area are the comprehension problems caused by the blurring of word-
boundaries. What seems to be called for here is to make learners aware of
what is going on and to help them build up the right expectations about the
kind of sound patterns they are likely to be confronted with in normal
native speech.
It will always be the teacher's decision to judge the relative benefits of the
effort necessary to acquire active or even native-like competence in
connected speech. In our experience, simplifications which occur inside
words often go unnoticed and hardly ever cause trouble because the middle
of a word is not as prominent as its beginning. Take, for example, elision in
[krismas], where the fact that there is no /t/ in 'Christmas' will not even
reach consciousness level. In those cases, however, where the learners' first
language exhibits the same simplification strategies as the second language,
we have found that learners can profit greatly from having their attention
drawn to what exactly is happening on the sound level. In the first
language, natural fluency is a matter of course and connected speech
phenomena are regarded as 'sloppiness' only in extremely formal styles
when the level of self-consciousness is high. In the second language our
self-consciousness tends to be high at all times. But once learners know
that simplifications are normal, once they possess declarative knowledge
about connected speech phenomena, they are often able to convert this
knowledge into active, procedural knowledge with astounding ease. In 9.2
we will look more closely at how the three connected speech phenomena of
assimilation, elision, and linking are treated in coursebooks.
9.2 Assimilation, elision, and linking
Assimilation
It is noticeable that American pronunciation materials tend to have more
extended coverage of assimilation than materials based on British
pronunciation. The reason for this might be that assimilation features are
more frequent in American English than in British English; certainly they
are more prominent psychologically, as is witnessed by the existence of
alternative spellings (for example, 'gotcha', 'wanna'). Perhaps it is this that
makes for the strong feeling on part of teachers of American pronunciation
that learners should be made aware of them.
Focus on connected speech 111
The assimilation phenomenon exemplified in 'gotcha' is palatalization: the
fact that before a [j]-sound [t] turns into [tj], [d] turns into [ds], [s] turns
into [J], and [z] into [3]. Such sequences often occur when a verb, an
auxiliary, a question word, or a negative particle are followed by 'you' or
'yet' (for example, 'can't you', 'should you', 'where did you', 'when's your
date', 'won't you', 'not yet', etc.) Phrases such as these are extremely
common in everyday colloquial speech, and a semi-official alternative
spelling has established itself in American English: 'cantcha', 'wheredja',
'wontcha', 'wouldja', etc. Morley (1992: 42) includes an extensive list of
such combinations. Hagen and Grogan propose the following activity for
practising these assimilations in context:
Exercise 11: Interview
Part A: Interview a student in the class and a native speaker of
English. Write their answers in the blanks, and remember to have them
sign their names. Use the reductions studied in this chapter (some of the
more difficult ones are given to you in parentheses). Study each question
before you speak so that you do not have to read it. You may want to
practice with a partner first.
1. What did you (whajya) do yesterday?
2. What do you (whachya) do every day?
3. How did you (howja) get your first job?
4. When's your next vacation?
5. Where did you (whereja) go on your last vacation?
6. What can't you do?
7. What shouldn't you do?
8. Why did you agree to this interview?
Answers:
1.
2.
(Hagen and Grogan 1992: 168)
In this particular case, the use of a question and answer game suggests itself
quite naturally, as questions are by far the most frequent syntactic
environment in which these assimilations occur. Very often, though, such
natural contexts are not at hand.
TASK 92