Questão 66802

A university lecturer is teaching a course on sociolinguistics to future language teachers. The week's topic is language variation, change, and linguistic prejudice, with a focus on phonological variation. The lecturer wants to challenge the students' often deeply ingrained belief that there is a single 'correct' pronunciation of PORTUGUÊS-INGLÊS. To do this, she decides to focus on the phenomenon of R-dropping, or non-rhoticity, characteristic of many prestigious British accents (like Received Pronunciation) and some American accents (like those in Boston and New York City). She plays two audio clips of a speaker saying the sentence 'I parked the car far from the Harvard yard.' The first speaker has a rhotic (General American) accent, pronouncing all the 'r's. The second speaker has a non-rhotic (RP) accent, not pronouncing the 'r's at the end of 'car', 'far', and 'yard'. A student immediately comments, 'The second speaker is dropping letters. Isn't that lazy or incorrect?' The lecturer uses this comment as a teachable moment. She draws on a key principle from sociolinguistics: 'Phonological variation is systematic, not random. Features like non-rhoticity are not errors, but are rule-governed characteristics of specific dialects. The social prestige (or stigma) attached to a particular pronunciation is a historical and social construct, not a reflection of its intrinsic linguistic correctness. In fact, in England, non-rhoticity has historically been a marker of high social class.'

Based on this scenario, which pedagogical action would be most effective in deconstructing the students' linguistic prejudice?