English phonetic and pronunciation resources for polish learners in the past and at present

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to present the contribution of Polish practitioners and theoreticians to teaching English phonetics and pronunciation to Polish learners of English. In this analysis, which is far from being a critical review, we plan to examine books with a contrastive Polish–English phonetic component and/ or aimed at a Polish reader. We take into consideration resources written over a period of nearly 90 years, from Benni (1924) to Porzuczek et al. (2013). Our analysis encompasses the most-favoured standards of English by Poles, i.e. Received Pronunciation and General American. Although all the examined resources share a unifying theme of English phonetics they differ in many respects, such as: the scope of discussion (a rudimentary introduction to, or a comprehensive course in, English pronunciation), the choice of model variety (Received Pronunciation, presented in most of the selected literature, or General American), objectives (a textbook, a practice book or both), the targeted audience (an average English learner/intermediate reader or a university student in an English Department), the language of instruction (English or Polish) as well as the accompanying materials (recordings on tapes, CDs or DVDs). Most of the above-mentioned textbooks include a selection of useful additional phonetic materials, e.g. Sobkowiak’s (1995) well-known list of words commonly mispronounced, Porzuczek et al.’s (2013) list of English vowels and diphthongs in different contexts; Sawała et al.’s (2009) list of loanwords, etc. We also take a closer, contrastive look at one selected feature, which is the TRAP vowel in a sample of six textbooks to examine how this issue has been tackled at different times, by different authors over the period of nine decades, and also to see whether the treatment of it was affected by any trend in EFL methodology. It is hoped that this analysis apart from reviewing the phonetic literature will also encourage some readers to familiarize themselves with pioneering or recent teaching resources that have been published in Poland.