Second language speech learning with diverse inputs

This chapter presents a study on the acquisition of vowels by 10 adult L1 Danish / L2 English learners in Denmark. Participants’ oral production was recorded, and later evaluated by a panel of 10 L1 Canadian English speakers. Effects of heterogeneous L2 input, typical in foreign language instruction, were found. The results suggest that variable input and L1 transfer are sources of the difficulties in learning English vowel sounds. The study underlines the difference in L2 input consistency in foreign language instruction versus a second language setting.