Shift emphasis on the acquisition of English as a second language

Abstract

This work aimed at addressing the issue of displacement of accent in second language (L2) acquisition. To do so, we performed an analysis of a corpus constituted by the productions that the surveyed individuals (ten high school students and five teachers) performed for eight English words which are likely to be object of change of the stress pattern when produced by speakers who have, as first language (L1), Brazilian Portuguese. It was noticed that the shift seems to be driven by processes of transference of the syllabic structure in L1 to communicate in L2, which can be represented through an autosegmental model. The research data seems to point towards the fact that the lack or ineffectiveness of input provided to the student, accounts for the difficulties in the acquisition and oral production of L2.