Hi,
This may sound quite weird to the native speakers, but actually has obsessed my mind for quite a while...One of the most important aspects that makes comprehending authentic listening sources pretty hard for EFL Ss is the way Stops (Voiceless ones) are left out in speech. This is quite common in London related accents. Why haven't we got ANY course series, with part of which dealing with this linguistic feature? How are EFL Ss supposed to work out kind of neatly produced Lg, and then come up with Sth completely strange to them? (This is also the case with some other features you can't simply expect to hear in the Lg presented in Course books).....Thank you in advance...
I don't know. I agree. Even in the first half of last century, Henry Sweet (the phonetician that GBS used as a model for Professor Higgins (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play) ) observed that almost all RP speakers used it although few of them would admit it.
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Another thing, I hope I'm not shaking anyone's tree too hard here.... there are few enough speakers of RP to consider it a chimera. The vast majority of Britons speak something else, or in some other way. Aiming at it is therefore as difficult as it is dubious.
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