Voice and Mirroring in SLA: Top-Down Pedagogy for L2 Pronunciation Instruction

Abstract

There are two broad approaches to the research and teaching of second-language (L2) pronunciation—‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’—which roughly align with structural and communicative approaches to language teaching. A bottom-up approach, explicitly focusing on de-contextualised linguistic forms, is structuralist and predominated in the second half of the 20th century; a top-down approach to L2 pronunciation takes a more communicative orientation, defining the instructional goal not as acquiring a native-speaker accent, but rather as ‘intelligibility.’ In consideration of this pronunciation goal (i.e. intelligibility) and recent L2 acquisition theoretical frameworks emphasising the role of social and contextual factors in shaping interlanguage (IL) systems, we argue that a top-down approach is paramount to L2 pronunciation instruction. Drawing on variationist research on IL phonology and a brief recount of International Teaching Assistant pronunciation course programs in the US, we present the Mirroring Project as an effective top-down pedagogical approach for L2 pronunciation instruction.