Professor Reveals Why You Have An Accent In Foreign Languages | Dr. Tracey Derwing

all right guys uh Louis here if you're trying to learn a language and specifically for this interview we're going to talk about pronunciation so for those of you guys trying to improve your pronunciation and trying to you know speak with a better accent because you know maybe you're an adult learning a language that then this interview is going to be really interesting so Tracy I'm just going to let you introduce yourself and also try to convince the listeners of why they should listen to your advice when it comes to pronunciation okay well I've been around for a very long time so I have lots of experience so they could listen to me just given that I've been in the field for so long uh my name is Tracy derwing and um I'm a professor emeritus from the University of Alberta and I'm also uh a an Adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia um when I was a graduate student in psycholinguistics I was teaching at night time uh to to support myself and um I taught adult newcomers to Canada in an ESL program and um that had a profound effect on me and it shaped what I ended up doing for my PhD which was looking at how um native speakers differ in communication skills when talking to Learners and there's a big range there it turns out uh but also I ended up teaching pronunciation uh quite a bit in that period I ended up teaching pronunciation along with uh some of my fellow teachers one of whom was Murray Monroe and muray and Murray and I were both studying Linguistics at the same time we ended up being really curious about pronunciation and we developed a a long time working program where we work together on pronunciation issues right and um I just want to ask because it seems like um uh a lot of people are struggling with pronunciation and obviously for me you know coming from a french- speaking country I see a lot of frenchspeaking people really struggling with English although you know the two languages are are somewhat close but in terms of you know pronunciation and all this it's kind of far apart uh I I'm not really sure why it is that people struggle with pronunciation but I suspect and correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like simply the main issue is that they're not focusing on pronunciation at all we're learning about grammar we're learning about vocabulary but we're not doing a lot of dedicated practice when it comes to improving our accents well I'm sure that contributes to it for people who do struggle there's a real range though in terms of individual um differences in aptitude for for for pronunciation so lots of people are really good right from the beginning and you know have really very good pronunciation to start with whereas other people really struggle um so I think that makes it more challenging for teachers because they want to do things that are going to help everybody in the class and if some of the people in the class don't really need it uh then you know they don't want to be was ing their time uh working on pronunciation so you know in the sense that everybody has to learn grammar everybody has to learn vocabulary but not everybody needs to work on pronunciation for the people who need it though it's a real problem because you know if if you can't communicate your your intended message you're in big trouble so um you can have excellent vocabulary skills and grammar and so on but if if you can't communicate your message and people don't understand you then you're nowhere right so pronunciation is really crucial but not for everybody and I think that that's part of the the problem there there are such individual differen right I see um I I want to ask a question first early in the interview because I suppose a lot of people are wondering uh should I even bother with trying to improve my pronunciation so I I'm going to uh formulate a more accurate question so is it possible in your opinion uh looking at the research that we have to uh work on your pronunciation as an adult learning a language and then end up sounding like a like a native uh speaker well it's highly unlikely that um people are going to sound completely native like what you need is to sound uh highly intelligible that is people understand exactly what it is that you're trying to say and you want to be easy to understand and that's comprehensibility so you know somebody can be intelligible and still The Listener has to really focus to understand what they're trying to say well you don't want that you want somebody to be really comprehensible easy to understand fully intelligible but if people run into problems you know when they're talking to somebody else and and find that they're having to repeat themselves regularly and they're you know they're having uh noticeable problems with pronunciation then for sure they should try and get help because uh pronunciation instruction if it's done appropriately can be really effective and we've done several studies where we've shown that where people given a a very limited intervention can uh improve significantly where listeners really notice the difference so um you know can pronunciation instruction make you sound like a native speaker probably not I mean that's very very rare where people who learn a language as an adult can sound like a native speaker it can happen but it's really rare the goal should be highly comprehensible highly intelligible speech but there are things you know um about our phys ology really that that affect learning right so Janet worker a professor at University of British Columbia she and her colleagues showed that babies really react right away to the ambient language the language of their mother and the people around them and they start ignoring sounds that are not part of their L1 in very early months right and ultimately that makes it uh easier and faster to learn your L1 but it makes it harder to learn sounds and Pro in a second language you know going down the line so we're we're just kind of programmed early on to really focus on our first language so that's a little bit of a barrier and then uh you know fley Monroe and McKai did this wonderful Landmark study years ago in 1995 where they looked at uh immigrants to Canada who Came From Italy and they came at different periods in their life so they looked at people who came in their first year their second year their third year up to about I think it was 21 or 22 years of the age so they had these categories of people then they they um looked at at whether or not they had accents and sure enough you know people who came after the age of four uh started to have accents in their English even though they were raised in a native speaking environment right so we're now there and there was nobody who came after puberty who didn't have an accent so that there part of this is biological right it's uh it's different from some other aspects of language learning because some of some of this is actually biological however uh that said uh you know lots of people learn a language as an adult and they are highly successful so you know we just need to accept that some things are are inevitable um but but there's no question that people can improve their pronunciation today I want to talk about a language learning platform called I talkie that I have been using for years now if you're learning a language it's really important to get targeted feedback from a native speaker or teacher to really know what is going wrong with the way that you speak the way that you use the language and with iie you can get one-on-one personalized lessons with Native teachers to improve your listening and your speaking skills and italki has more than 30,000 teachers worldwide and also you pay per lesson so there's no subscription at all and you can learn anytime and anywhere as long as you have uh your desktop or your laptop or your mobile device you can have a lesson so you guys know that I do a lot of language learning on my own but honestly there's no good replacement for a good teacher so you can click through the link below in the description to start your language learning Journey with I talki and also you can buy $10 worth of credit to get $5 worth of credit for free if you use my exclusive promo code LS 2025 but this discount is only going to be available for the first 50 users so try it now and start your 2025 language learning Journey right and I I definitely think that this should be um the main uh objective for people just being intelligible and getting people to understand you I guess you know if you really want to sound like a native speaker I mean the question is really why I guess if you're a spy maybe or if you're an actor asire and actor an actor like those are really the two professions where it would be handy to to be able to to sound like a native speaker but really there isn't much else and as long as you're you know easy to understand I mean people forget that they're talking to somebody who has an accent you stop notic ing it right after a while if you get to know somebody you just that's just the way they talk and uh it's part of your identity and it's it's not a big deal it's only when you know conversations start to be impacted by an accent then it's a problem right and just as a a funny anecdote I was watching um about a week ago was mission Impossible with Tom Cruz and in this particular uh volume of mission impossible uh there was also what's his name Henry caval the British actor and he was supposed to play an American like CIA agent and I just thought you know sometimes the way he says things he's obviously not American so just you know as a little anecdote even for British actors it's hard to like impersonate an American person but um then goes the other way like uh there's a a movie what was it it was Kevin Cosner in Robin Hood this was years and years ago it is the worst accent ever like he he's an American playing a Brit right and oh my goodness it's just a and it's really worth watching I mean uh sometimes I showed little Clips in my own classes because I I wanted people to see how how difficult it is even when it's the same language right it's just a different dialect right uh I want to talk about the specifically the steps that people can take to improve their their pronunciation but first I want to talk a little bit about the the studies because I'm really curious as far as when you do and I realize there's a wide array of of studies going on but when you're trying to evaluate the the efficacy of a certain intervention for improving pronunciation uh what are how are these studies to designed really what is happening okay so when we do an intervention um I'll tell you about a particular study that we did but the format is is similar uh in terms of how we do the evaluation but um my colleagues and I were approached by a Window Factory and uh the executives said that they were concerned about some of the people in the their uh in their company who had been promoted time and again and with each promotion they needed to use English more and uh and they it was starting to be a real challenge right U because they had pronunciation difficulties the average length of time that these people had been in Canada was 19 years so they had been exposed to English a lot for 19 years right and had been working in English all that time but they're and they they really struggled so uh most of them were Vietnamese one was Cambodian which is a similar language right and they asked us the the the executives asked us to do an intervention so we did and it was only 17 hours total but it was spread out over about um three months and also they had to promise to do listening homework every night which which their teacher designed for them so their teacher was Jennifer foot who's now an academic who works in pronunciation but she was an instructor at that time and um and I uh worked with them oneon-one a little bit as well so what we would do is we would collect uh language samples from them initially uh before we did the program and then we collected the same kinds of samples afterwards and then we would take parts of those uh samples from before and after randomize them and then we had listeners who would listen to these samples of speech and rate them for comprehensibility and uh so that's how we and and we had them rate for fluency and for accentedness as well and so they would do these ratings and then we could separate out the you know befores and The Afters and look to see whether there was a difference and in this case every person improved there was a statistical difference right so it was noticeable to listeners that these people had improved with only 17 hours of actual contact time but they also had been doing quite a lot of listening homework that was spe specially designed for their problems right and uh and they were starting to notice like even in the the latter classes they would start correcting each other right so they were really noticing things that they had never noticed before so listening is important but it needs to be directed listening where um a a teacher can can determine where there are problems that are going to interfere with intelligibility or comprehensibility and then direct the attention of the Learners to those areas sometimes you have to explain how to how to produce a sound sometimes you have to work on getting people to notice like noticing is just absolutely key how that's how you can determine whether there's been Improvement or not uh now our uh participants they felt that they'd improve too and and some of the staff who worked with them really noticed a difference right um talking about uh feedback this is um I think I want to talk about this because a lot of people listening to this interview are going to be people most likely learning languages on their own and uh the one thing that they're probably lacking uh is feedback not just in terms of pronunciation but you know just in terms of their language use and I know that a lot of people are very reluctant to either Tutors or teachers but just in terms of pronunciation how important do you think is feedback from an actual person well I think it's really important and I think that's that's a big problem for a lot of people because uh ideally the best thing to do would be to find a teacher who knows what they're doing a teacher who has had uh training in how to teach pronunciation because one of the things you need to determine is what matters to intelligibility what you know what is it that the student is doing that is interfering with their Productions that that makes them hard to understand so you sort of have to assess that and if you don't know anything about teaching pronunciation that can be difficult to do so um there are lots of uh people on the internet who call themselves accent coaches but in fact and they say that they have all this success and great training and everything a lot of those places are just scams and you know you're and they can actually make you sound worse and uh so if you can find a teacher who has training in how to teach pronunciation that is the ideal but if you don't have that there are other options like um what you could do is see if there's somebody who wants to learn your L1 and you can trade lessons uh and and get some at least some basic feedback from from somebody who's a a human now there are apps that can help you with some things right so for instance you talked to Ron Thompson so you know about the English accent coach so if there are particular vowels that you or other segments that you have difficulty with you can get some feedback that way um he he's focusing on perception and obviously perception is is uh really crucial you need to be able to perceive a sound in order to produce it so if if perception is something that is causing you some difficulties then for sure an app like English accent coach will be effective because you'll get feedback on your perception and he has shown that um improving perception can lead to improvements in production as well so that's at the segmental level it's harder when we start talking about super segmentals you know things like um uh intonation and uh stress and um speech rate and so on those things are are harder and really it's easier if you have a human giving you some some feedback on those and there are some websites now that claim that they help you with your pronunciation and uh claim that they're going to um improve your pronunciation to the point where you can even sound like a native speaker but that's really not the case so for example there's an app called Gish and it's in lots of different languages they offer in many different languages it's AI based and you can have a conversation with an AI tutor and I think it's like fantastic for developing fluency and probably for enhancing grammar and uh vocabulary but uh a a colleague of mine and her colleagues Shannon M mccrocklin she carried out a study recently on Gish and it's not very helpful in terms of pronunciation I think that's going to improve over time but right now it's not there you know it's still still much better if you can access a human right um yeah this I've definitely seen this I mean there are lots of apps and websites claiming that you know they have uh they use Google's speech recognition technology or whatever and lots of false positives lots of false negatives and the feedback is is just very general it's not really targeted I found so right um and what you really need is somebody who's going to say here's what you're not doing right this is what you're doing this is what you need to do and let's work on that and get you to that stage where where you're producing it so that it's intelligible so you you mentioned uh three options in terms of getting feedback uh first is a teacher who was trained in teaching pronunciation which I suspect is somewhat hard to find for a lot of people second option is a sort of language Partners I'm assuming a native speaker of let's say if I'm learning Japanese and I find a Japanese person who wants to learn my native language and we exchange like this third option is the apps which are not you know fully developed at this point I personally like the second option talking that's what I do about five to seven hours a week I talk with Japanese people uh on the internet and uh some of it is pronunciation practice uh do you think this is a very good option because I mean I realize that as a native speaker they they're going to see I mean they're going to hear my mistakes but at the same time they're not really trained in teaching pronunciation so do you think this is a problem well it's better than nothing for sure because first you can set some ground rules I mean one of the problems with people who aren't train teachers is that they don't want to correct you if I I mean they don't want to uh interrupt a conversation if and and they want the the flow to be there and they don't want to be interrupting you all the time and they they worry about criticizing somebody or correcting somebody right they don't want to correct um yeah like people are reluctant to correct other people so if you set some ground rules at the outset saying look I want you to correct my pronunciation I want you to interrupt me I want you to do this and I'll do the same for you if you have that agreement then that's going to be helpful because you'll notice a pattern after a while of the same kinds of errors that they notice and you can start looking elsewhere for help if if they can't help you with a listen and repeat kind of thing then you can start looking yourself for some possible solutions but at least that helps you know where you're having communication breakdown right where the problem are so it's it's helpful in that respect and we know that um pronunciation can improve on its Zone over a long period of time if you continue to have complex conversations in the language that you're learning so we did a longitudinal study where we looked at people who did not get any pronunciation instruction they came to Canada and when they were well they had been in Canada for about 3 months when they started the study they were all relative beginners in learning English they'd all studied some English in their home countries but uh hardly any speaking or listening it was almost all just reading and writing so so anyway they were beginners when they came and we tested them uh I think six times in the first year we tested them at the end of the second year at the end of their seventh year in Canada and then again at the end of of their 10th year so we really had a good picture of their uh pronunciation development over time and when we did the 10th year data collection uh we compared that to all the other times but what we were really interested in was whether there was ongoing Improvement between year seven and year 10 and I should tell you too that we also interviewed them each time so we had a really good idea of how much English they were using uh over the course of a normal day and um what we found was that there were some people who in the absence of any pronunciation instruction continued to show significant Improvement between year 7 and year 10 but they were using English in complex ways all the time at work or uh in other ways there were other people who actually regressed so their pronunciation got and and there were a couple of people who who went back to being at the same level that they were when they started you know 10 years before because they weren't using English very much they were able to find other ways you know they they didn't have to communicate very much in work uh at their work and and they could do a lot of it through writing they relied on their spouse you know uh they had other ways of living their lives without really using very much English at all and they they actually got worse so there was a lot of up and down over the years but I mean the the the good outcome is that it's a matter of use it or lose it so the people who continued to use their second language in a really um meaningful way continued to improve without any effort they weren't getting any instruction whatsoever but they were continually improving over time um at a much slower rate than they were improving early on like you know Murray and I have talked about uh the window of maximal opportunity and for us that's uh the first six months or so that you have massive exposure we noticed that people are most malleable in terms of their pronunciation in that first six months and that's really when a lot of pronunciation instruction should happen but it doesn't for reasons that we've already discussed uh most people don't get pronunciation instruction when they first arrive but that would be really uh optimal if they could get some pronunciation instruction on arrival however uh even without any instruction if you continue to use the Lang anguage you're going to uh continue to improve so it's never too late you know I mean it's better if you could get some help earlier but it's never too late and you can and interventions work really late so you know like the The Window Factory people that they had been in Canada on average 19 years that's a long time and they improve significantly with a short intervention you know we went back and did a delayed post test with those people uh 3 months after and they had continued to improve like once we stopped the instruction we were worried oh maybe they'll backslide but no they actually got better in terms of their comprehensibility after we quit the intervention you know three months before so it it is a use it or lose it proposition you just keep at it and and you'll continue to make Improvement and so in terms of the uh you you mentioned that ideally you should get uh pronunciation instruction early on is the it has to be early on or ideally it should be early on because then uh is it that if you don't get this instruction then you start using the language in ways that are you know with the wrong pronunciation patterns and it sort of stays that way in the long term is that the reason right yeah yeah so so they these patterns get entrenched right right right and I think Ron mentioned to you that you know you might um mispronounce a a high frequency word that you learned really early on and then you can learn some new words uh much later and those words may have some of the same segments that you mispronounce in that High Frequency Word but you pronounce the the new word better right because you've learned it um when you've got more capacity uh but but those old words stay mispronounced for for a very long time so it's just better if you can sort of um uh address the issue as as early as possible so for example you know one time I was doing some testing for another colleague at a language school I was just helping out but uh this young woman came and I I assessed her but she was a Spanish speaker and she had really noticeable epenthesis so what that means is that you know when in English when you have a word like school she would say es school and a spoon would be es spoon so any time that there was a word initial S followed by a stop she would insert an e vowel um and that's because that's a a phonological rule of Spanish you know you they say ESP where we say Spain and they say esua instead of school right so these are all related words but but they have to have that a there they're not allowed to have a word initial S followed by a stop so hers was really noticeable and I found it really distracting you know and I thought oh I I said to her do you mind staying for 5 minutes after we finish this testing because I I want to talk to you about something and she said fine so I explained to her what she was doing we practiced and talked about about you know what a and she could do it just fine she had no problems saying Spain or school or spoon she she could do it she just needed to be told right so I said uh how long have you been studying here and she said three months and I said has any teacher said anything about this to you and she said no nobody's said anything and it's like well that's too bad because it I found it really distracting because she used a lot of words that began with an S and and plus a stop and so it was really disruptive and uh and it was so easy for her to do without that athesis but somebody needed to tell her and that's that's a a problem like we we do need to have more trained teachers who understand how to assess what's going on there are other problems that are or I shouldn't say problems there are other things uh segments let's say that people may substitute where it really makes no difference at all so for instance you know a lot of people when they are learning English uh don't have interdental fricatives in their own language so th andth okay so sometimes they'll substitute athe like in the word the they'll substitute a d so they sayth instead of the well it makes no difference right it's just so easy to understand and uh anybody can follow it it's predictable it's it's no big deal so why would you waste time working on that when you might have some other problem like with a vowel that is going to cause real problems for the listener right but I I I just feel like uh what you we need to have or more teachers who can identify those aspects of an accent that are going to cause problems for listeners and focus on comprehensibility and intelligibility don't worry about other differences that that aren't going to affect meaning at all right so it's a matter of priorities right yeah that this is um this is definitely interesting and I'm definitely guilty of this as well I mean talking with Japanese people and I realize that sometimes I need to correct their their their pronunciation but sometimes I mean usually I talk to them you know after work it's like 600 7 p. m. and sometimes you know they say things you know they're really trying but there's so I mean I'm just like where do I start uh there are so many things uh you know vocabulary issues grammar issues and then there's pronunciation so it's not really ideal but yeah definitely they need someone to tell them at least once and then they can uh self-monitor I I want to talk about um something that we haven't talked about up until now it's pretty obvious that listening plays uh a big role in improving your your your accent because you need to I'm assuming um improve your perception first but um we haven't talked about reading and my uh my idea here is that perhaps if you learn to read and you read a language then you associate sort of the the written form uh with how you can pronounce the word then maybe if you're good at reading then it can help with pronunciation what are your thoughts on this well I think reading is fantastic for development of vocabulary and grammar but I I think mostly reading isn't very helpful for pronunciation unless if you if you do um have a a a text and you have an audio version of that same text that could be very helpful so if you're listening to what you're seeing on the page that that can be very helpful because you know you're going to come across words that you don't know how to pronounce and if you're listening to it on audio at the same time uh that could be very useful you know and even well and especially with English right because English just got uh somewhat odd spellings right and even native speakers often mispronounce words that they've read because they haven't heard them so you know if you think of a word like Chasm which is spelled CH hm you know I've heard people say Chasm and uh obviously they've only read the word and they never heard anybody say it or they haven't recognized that that's what somebody was talking about if they said Chasm so uh so if you have a an audio recording that goes directly along with the text then I could see some benefit for pronunciation but if you're just doing silent reading no I don't see any help offered by reading um now some people say that they think reading aloud is a good idea for developing pronunciation but um if you're not getting any feedback I don't think that's going to be helpful either especially in English because English is the spelling is so weird right like some languages where the orthography and the sound system are really transparent um maybe it would be helpful to practice reading aloud a little bit like finish apparently is completely transparent but um not English it's it's not a good I English French same thing I mean it's so weird yeah French is not good either so yeah it's listening is better than reading for sure right yeah was I want to talk about a a specific um technique that I sometimes get asked about and I I haven't really used it too much it's uh shadowing I don't know if you've um if there's any research on shadowing what do you think of it in terms of pronunciation yeah shadowing uh is a very helpful technique uh so the I just want to mention a a website where people can read about some of these things because uh this this website was developed by John Levis it's called pronunciation for teachers.

com so the pronunciation for teers is all one word. com and it's a a website that has short easy to read essays about some of these techniques and uh about some of the other terms in uh pronunciation research so shadowing is when people try to uh follow a model uh as as uh fast as they can um and and produce that model in the same way uh as as you know produce make their own Productions uh m what the model is saying now there's a related technique called mirroring and I think mirroring is probably even a bit more effective so with mirroring students pick a model they pick somebody who they want to sound like who they want to emulate right somebody who whose uh language skills they they appreciate and then they watch a video of that person and they transcribe exactly what that person said but they also look at the gestures they look at at uh the facial changes and so on and they try to mirror that individual so when they transcribe the uh the passage that they want to copy or mirror they Mark where the stress is they break things out into thought groups um you know they they try to uh give themselves some uh special Clues as to or reminders as to what to do when they mirror that person so then they use that and they they look at the video again and they try and emulate that person by making the same gestures and speaking exactly the same way and um there there was a a person named Colleen Meer who did several studies as as a part of a mirroring project and uh she found that this was a really effective way to um help people uh sound more like people that they admired and it doesn't have to be another native speaker right it could be a highly proficient non-native speaker and some of her students chose non-native speakers uh and and found that to be very effective right right mirroring yeah that definitely something I want to uh look into after this interview uh what about uh working uh if you want to work on your pronunciation is it better to work on individual sounds or on entire words entire sentences well that that depends on where your problems lie right so if you have certain segments that you're having difficulty with then individual words are good right so you might use something like English accent coach if you know that you have certain vowels that you have problems with then you can work on them but if you're just working at the word level you're not going to get to se super segmentals that's not going to help you with stress or intonation or Rhythm or um speech rate fluency you know so really I think that people uh probably need a little bit of everything right so going from the level of individual sounds to discourse level because you know um ultimately your goal is going to be to communicate with other people in conversations so that's going to be at the level of discourse so for sure if you've got specific uh segments that you have difficulty with then yeah practice them at the level of of the segment and then the word but eventually you're going to have to look at all these other aspects like super segmentals and uh um and we know that they both contribute to intelligibility and comprehensibility both segmentals and super segmentals so you need to go well beyond the level of the word for that and you know we we've we've seen studies for instance um where uh stress for example like word stress if if people give equal stress to every syllable in an utterance they're going to be harder to understand in English than if they um have stress in the appropriate places right well Tracy this has been really great very insightful uh once again for the listeners I'm going to put all of the takeaways from this interview on my website I'll put a link in the description louisr.