Differentiating speech accents and pronunciation errors: perceptions of TESOL professionals in Hong Kong

Abstract

It has been the dilemma of many TESOL professionals that they have to decide whether they should treat ESL/EFL learners’ L1-influenced features as ‘identity-revealing’ accents, or ‘fossilized’ pronunciation errors. This paper explores this issue by presenting findings from a mini-survey about how a group of 16 TESOL professionals from a teacher education institute in Hong Kong would classify a list of common Hong Kong English (HKE) accent features as errors or accents, and whether they based their judgements on factors such as ‘social stigmatization’ and/or ‘obstruction to intelligibility’. Results of the survey showed that the majority (66.7%) of the HKE-influenced segmental features scored a high error% of 60 or more even though only a minority of them were felt to be intelligibility-obstructing or socially stigmatizing. Findings from follow-up interviews with six voluntary professionals revealed a general tendency for the respondents to practice what Foucault (1988) called technologies of the self since these TESOL professionals’ considerations reflected a strong sense of subjectivation, or self-regulation and re-invention, based on their institutional roles and obligations as educators, and perceptions of own status and power as English users. Implications for the prospect of a World Englishes HKE phonology are discussed.