A pronúncia do R retroflexo do inglês por alunos de uma escola de idiomas em Serra Talhada-PE

Abstract

his research aims to analyze the pronunciationofEnglish Language retroflex in the speech of students of a language school located in Serra Talhada-PE.For that, we use as theoretical and methodological support the assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics, which seeks to explain the language in use, as well as its relation with society, in order to analyze the social factors that act on the phenomenon, in the studied community of speech.In the same way, we turn to Phonetics and Phonology, in a Structuralist perspective, with the intention of describing the studied phone, as well as the linguistic factors that can act on it.Assuming that there is variation in the speech of individuals belonging to the same linguistic community, and that this variation extends to the process of learning a foreign language, we select some factors, linguistic and extralinguistic, raising hypotheses that such factors may cause a variation in pronunciationof the retroflex, namely: theposition of the phone in the word, the level of proficiency of the learner and the level of monitoring in the reading of the material used in the data collection.Thus, we recorded the speech of 10 informants enrolled in the selected school language for the research –being 5 of the basic level II and 5 of the advanced level –and proposed the reading of the following material for the collection of data that composed the present study: listof words, list of images and a text containing words that presented the retroflex, in order to ascertain our initial hypothesis that the advanced level would present greater proficiency than the basic level in the pronunciation of the phone.Finally, we performed the corpus analysis, concluding that there is variation inthe English Language learners' speech, confirming that students at the advanced level demonstrate greater proficiency in the retroflex articulation than the students at the basic level, and proving that there are both linguistic factors and factorsextralinguistics favoringvariation, such as the replacement of the retroflex/I/by the tepe by the aspirate/r/, in addition to the erasure of the phone.