IPCE-IPAC

IPCE-IPAC (InterPhonology of Contemporary English), launched in 2013, is devoted to the study of variation on the basis of learner corpora of English, and consequently concerned with the acquisition and teaching of English as a foreign language. It is coordinated by Nadine Herry-Bénit, Université Paris Nanterre, Stéphanie Lopez, Northwestern Polytechnical University and Jeff Tennant, University of Western Ontario.

Goals

• to provide an international database of L2 English interphonology comprising learners with different L1 varieties as well as different L2 varieties as their targets/models (and not simply General British or General American);
• to provide data and analyses for phonologists, psycholinguists, education science specialists and trainers interested in the teaching/learning of English as a foreign/second language (PAC-ToE);
• to give a better picture of English spoken by non-natives in its unity and (geographical, social, educational and stylistic) diversity;
• to develop multi-level analyses of spoken non-native English: phonology, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc.

Originality

There are many learner corpora of English, but they typically focus on grammar, vocabulary and, more generally, written forms rather than explicitly/exclusively on phonology, they do not necessarily share a common protocol which allows the comparison of results and the cross-linguistic study of selected difficulties. IPCE-IPAC’s originality notably relies on building comparable data, including with the PAC native speaker corpora.

Methodology

It is inspired by both the PAC and the IPFC (Interphonologie du Français Contemporain) protocols and revolves around:

• 3 wordlists (2 common wordlists and 1 specific wordlist);
• 1 repetition task (of the specific wordlist);
• the reading of the PAC text;
• and two conversations (formal/semi-guided and informal).

The wordlists include 2 common lists applied to all learners from the different surveys (adapted from the PAC wordlists) and an L1-specific list meant to test the difficulties that are frequently observed in the productions of the learners of a given L1.

The general proficiency level of learners who are invited to participate in the study ranges from A2 to C1 of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, 2001).