This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional issue 22 May 2019
Pronunciation straddles two domains: it is part language – like grammar or vocabulary – and part skill – like speaking or listening. This unique position makes pronunciation teaching interestingly varied, and potentially very enjoyable too. It is so much more than the ‘listen-and-repeat’ stereotype that is sometimes attached to it, and can’t be reduced to one single thing in this way. In this article, I will suggest that we can, in fact, divide it into four general areas, and I will label these with a mnemonic of four words, each beginning with m: muscle, mind, meaning and memory.
Let me briefly introduce these four broad areas:
There is clearly a very physical aspect to pronunciation – the use of muscles, which control the articulation of speech. We could label this area muscle.
But as with grammar and lexis, there is a strong cognitive element too: the recognition and understanding of rules and patterns. This we may label mind.
As with speaking, there is an interactive element to pronunciation – communicating meaning and adapting your speech to an interlocutor. We could label this as meaning.
Finally, we should remember that pronunciation is not only a productive skill, it is also receptive. Learners must build up a mental repertoire of how chunks of language sound, and develop the ability to recognise and remember these in the speech of a variety of different interlocutors. This area we could label memory.
For each of the four areas outlined above, the classroom implications
are different. Let’s look in a bit more detail at each of them in turn.
1 Muscle: Pronunciation as articulation awareness
Feel it This aspect of pronunciation concerns the physical articulation of the sounds and prosody of the language. Everybody is an expert at doing this in their own language, and we can enunciate things without any conscious awareness of how we do so. However, in learning a new language, we have to master new articulation habits, and this requires focusing our attention onto what we are doing. For example, we have to make a sound and be aware of how the muscles around the mouth feel while we are doing it, so that we can make the sound again in future. Adrian Underhill calls this muscle awareness ‘proprioception’
Teach it Demonstration may be sufficient in some cases, especially when the articulation of a sound is easy to see – for example, the closed lips for the phoneme /m/. However, articulation is not usually so visible. For example, you can’t see what is going on when you make the phonemes /s/ and /z/. In cases like this, you will need to use guided discovery techniques. For example, to raise awareness of place of articulation, help the students to become aware of their tongue position for /s/ and /z/, with the tip almost touching the alveolar ridge. For manner of articulation, get them to notice the vibration in the throat which accompanies /z/ but not /s/.
Apart from guided discovery, we will need to provide opportunities for practice, and repetition is a useful form of practice for the more physical aspect we are discussing here. I call activities for this purpose ‘workouts’. A workout consists of a drill in which the students repeat chunks of text containing a high concentration of the target pronunciation feature, so that it is very noticeable. While your students are repeating, encourage them to pay attention to their articulation. In this way, they build a mental association between how each phoneme sounds and how it feels.
2 Mind: Pronunciation as knowledge
Think it This area of pronunciation concerns the students’ awareness of rules and patterns in the pronunciation of the target language. An example of a rule might be that the past tense -ed ending is an extra syllable only when the root verb ends with the phonemes /d/ or /t/. An example of a pattern might be that the final e in a word like tape usually means that the preceding vowel is pronounced as it is in the alphabet (in this example, the a of tape is pronounced /eɪ/). Notice that this aspect of pronunciation is clearly distinct from the previous, physical articulation aspect. The students may be physically capable of saying the /eɪ/ phoneme easily, yet fail to do so in the word tape, because they aren’t aware of the spelling pattern
Teach it We may choose to present pronunciation patterns explicitly. Alternatively, we may present activities which are designed to make the patterns very salient and let the students work out the patterns for themselves, implicitly or explicitly. Games and puzzles work well because they provide a motivating way of obliging the students to pay attention to the rules and patterns of the target phonology. You may notice that your students can do pronunciation puzzles silently, without exercising their mouth muscles at all, which attests to the fact that these kinds of activities focus more on mind than muscle. Interestingly, however, students tend to say the words and phrases to themselves while they do the activities. Sometimes the doing helps the thinking!
3 Meaning: Pronunciation as an interactive skill
Use it This area of pronunciation involves adjusting your pronunciation to make yourself understood, as well as tuning into your interlocutor’s pronunciation as best you can, in order to understand them. It is about communicating meaning in a cross-linguistic context – a process known as ‘accommodation’. The importance of accommodation in pronunciation learning has been highlighted by Jennifer Jenkins. She points out that English now plays the role of a lingua franca, used as a global medium of communication. In this context, accent variation is bound to be the norm rather than the exception and, consequently, the need for flexibility in both speaking and listening is paramount.
Teach it Classroom communication activities usually involve some form of information gap – one student has information that another needs in order to complete the activity, and must communicate it verbally. The activity may be designed in such a way that the successful transmission of the information depends on a specific pronunciation feature, and the classic examples of this are minimal pair activities, such as distinguishing Can you collect it? from Can you correct it? Success in a minimal pair activity depends on the students being able to articulate and/or hear the difference between words which differ only in one phoneme. The idea may be extended beyond the phoneme to other features such as word stress and tonic stress – for example, distinguishing the workers protest from the worker’s protest.
Minimal pair type activities work well for practising accommodation
in class if the teacher highlights the fact that the objective is to get
across the intended message, rather than pronounce the words like a
‘native speaker’ or some other idealised model. In this area of
pronunciation, we need to evaluate in terms of what works, rather than
in terms of what is correct.
4 Memory: Pronunciation as a receptive skill
Hear it This area concerns the overlap of pronunciation with listening. All too often, students have an idea of how words and phrases look on the page, but not how they sound in speech. They may understand the written form and expect the spoken form to resemble it closely. The way that words sound in the stream of speech, possibly in different accents, comes as an unwelcome surprise. I’ve used the label memory for this area to capture John Field’s idea that part of what listening involves is building up a repertoire of mental traces – memories of specific instances of chunks of language heard in the past, which can be used as a reference to aid comprehension in the present.
Two areas of special difficulty emerge when we consider what makes
listening difficult. The first is connected speech. There are features
such as linking, elision, weak forms and assimilation, which students
may find difficult to decode. The other area of special difficulty is
accent variation, and this takes on an even greater importance in a
lingua franca context (see above), where accent variation is so
pervasive that there is no longer any type of pronunciation which may be
considered ‘standard’.
Teach it We can give our students samples of language which contain a high density of a given pronunciation feature, so that that feature becomes very noticeable to them. This high density of a given feature is a typical property of texts with word-play such as rhyme, alliteration and rhythm – for example, poems, raps, chants, limericks, and so on. We may ask the students simply to listen to these, since the focus is receptive. However, in practice, it is better if they attempt to recite the texts themselves, because there is no better way of enhancing awareness of a feature than attempting to produce it. To this end, we can use micro-drilling – where you repeat very small fragments of the text over and over, and the students repeat. This forces attention onto the sound substance (to use Richard Cauldwell’s term), rather than the meaning of the fragment.
As regards accent variation, we can make sure there are a variety of
accents in any recorded materials we use. We can also point out areas of
pronunciation which are particularly prone to accent variation, such as
/r/ and /θ/.
The purpose of this article has been to highlight the plurality of areas involved in teaching pronunciation. It is a plurality which arises because of the particular position that pronunciation occupies across the distinct domains of language and skills. It is important for teachers to keep these different facets of pronunciation in mind, to ensure they provide an appropriate balance of classroom activities. In short: when teaching pronunciation, keep the four Ms in mind – muscle, mind, meaning and memory.
Cauldwell, RPhonology for Listening Speech in Action 2013
Field, J Listening in the Language Classroom CUP 2008
Review of Geoff Lindsey (2019) English after RP: Standard British Pronunciation Today Palgrave
Macmillan
If you teach English pronunciation, you will know that most
text books present a model which claims to be either standard American or
standard British. The latter is often referred to as RP (Received
Pronunciation), and is usually represented by a set of phonetic symbols chosen
over half a century ago by A. C. Gimson. Geoff Lindsey makes the point that if
a person speaks in exactly the way that these symbols indicate, they will sound
comically old-fashioned. His new book English
after RP sets out to describe they ways in which standard British has
evolved away from RP. He suggests alternative phonetic symbols which would be
more appropriate for modern Standard Southern British English, but he also
recognises that the traditional set will not be changed overnight, given the
number of text books still using them. If we are to stick with the symbols
currently in use, we will need to avoid taking them at phonetic face value –
the symbols no longer accurately describe the facts.
The main body of the book consists of 31 bite-sized chapters
of only two or three pages. They are very readable and more-ish like a bowl of
cherries. I’ll just give a few examples which I found particularly interesting.
Lindsey says that pronunciation is moving in the direction
of spelling, perhaps because people tend to defer to the authority of the
written form. One example is hurricane,
where the second syllable is increasingly likely to rhyme with cane, rather than having the vowel
reduced to schwa. This perhaps ties in with the point Lindsey makes in another
chapter, where he says that vowel reduction is not quite so common. I imagine
that both of these features – spelling pronunciation and less reduction – will
also become more common in international versions of English, since learners
often learn pronunciation under the influence of the written form.
Other chapters challenge the traditional classifications of
monophthongs and diphthongs. Some vowels which were traditionally viewed as
monophthongs like the vowel in FLEECE are better analysed as diphthongs, while
others move in the opposite direction, such as the vowel in SQUARE.
Lindsey points out that in some respects there is a pull
towards Americanization – for instance in word stress, there is a leftward
tendency – for example, from prinCESS to PRINcess. However, in certain other
respects British English is resisting American influence – for example, the /t/
between vowels is rarely being softened to something like a /d/ in words like city.
Seemingly, some forms which were once viewed as parochial or
stigmatized have now become accepted as possible standard forms, such as
pronouncing the vowel in BATH the same as the vowel in TRAP, or introducing an
intrusive /r/ in a phrase like law and
order. Lindsey says that pronouncing THING as FING is getting more common,
especially among younger speakers, so that while it not yet accepted as
standard, it may be in the future.
I think this book will be invaluable for teachers of
specifically British English, and teachers of ESOL in a British context. For
English teachers in other contexts, it will also be of interest for background
insights, but not so directly usable. I feel that today, with English in role
as a global lingua franca,
we no longer need to be so precise and specific about target models. Lindsey
suggests that we mustn’t take Gimson’s symbols too literally because they don’t
represent the modern standard. I would suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t take any symbols too literally, since we
don’t necessarily need to aim for any standard model.
To show what Lindsey’s suggested symbols look like, I have placed them in the PronPack vowel chart here:
We sometimes dehumanize pronunciation in the way we talk about it. If a learner mispronounces a word, we might say, ‘It isn’t pronounced like that; it’s pronounced …’ (and then we model the ‘correct’ way). In the dictionary, there are transcriptions to tell us how words are pronounced. Talking about weak forms, we might say, ‘In these words, the vowel sound is reduced to a schwa’. On the topic of word stress, we might say, ‘Most two-syllable nouns are stressed on the first syllable’. I’ve highlighted the verb forms above to demonstrate how easy it is to slip into the passive when talking about pronunciation, which is fine, but what it does is conceal the identity of who is doing the action. It doesn’t tell us who pronounces things this way – it removes the human from the equation.
This passive creeps into the very label we use to refer to
the prestige accent in the British portion of the English-speaking world: Received Pronunciation (RP). Received here is a rather old-fashioned
synonym for accepted, and again it
begs the who question: Who accepts this accent?
If RP is the acceptable accent, we may also want to talk
about what is not acceptable, and
again, we often find the passive creeping in: H-dropping (saying Arry for Harry) is regarded as
lazy; Pronouncing TH as F (saying fink
for think) is frowned upon. Who
regards accent features as lazy or frowns upon them?
This question is perhaps easier to answer for languages
which have an academy to resolve questions of what is or isn’t correct. This is
the case of French and Spanish for example. It is the academy which accepts
this or frowns upon that. However, there isn’t an academy for English, so who does the accepting or frowning here?
Let me suggest a provisional answer: it is the court of
public opinion. This is vague, but it may be enough. However, there is one
feature which stands out very strongly for me: this ‘court’ only has local
jurisdiction – different places have different courts. Let’s look at one
concrete example of what this means; in England,
public opinion views the pronouncing of R after a vowel in words like car as unusual; in the USA, the
opposite – it is the dropping of that R which is marked. Acceptability, it
seems, is not universal.
This has implications for pronunciation teaching. Teachers
often assume that we should work toward a standard model that is accepted in an
English speaking country (such as RP in the case of England). But why would learners be
specifically concerned about what kind of pronunciation is acceptable in England?
They might have a reason of course (for example, if they are going to live in London), but we can’t assume they do, given that English is an
international language. If the English frown upon people saying fink for think, so what? Your learner may have no intention of spending time
in England
or among the English. Avoiding English (or American) frowns is not a sufficient
reason to teach anything.
Jennifer Jenkins, in her book The Phonology of English as an International Language (OUP 2000),
was right to suggest that the elevation of English to world lingua franca
status has major implications for pronunciation teaching. As a lingua franca,
English is no longer ‘owned’ by the people of any country – it is the
‘property’ of all. This means that the court of public opinion is now global.
Nobody has the right to judge whether somebody else’s pronunciation is
acceptable or not. There are no centrally determined ‘standards’ any more. It
no longer makes sense to talk about whether a pronunciation is ‘correct’ – what
matters is whether it works or not. If somebody expresses an opinion starting
with ‘I fink …’ and the other person
understands perfectly, then it has worked.
Teachers may object to the toppling of standards such as RP
or General American (GA) on the grounds that there is nothing to replace them
with. But perhaps we don’t actually need to replace them – in fact, it’s worth
considering whether they were ever effectively models the first place.
Firstly, let’s consider it from the learner’s angle.
Learners studying in a system which takes RP or GA as a standard rarely come
out with that accent themselves. Learners usually come out with an accent which
is all their own. This will usually have clear traces of their L1 or other previous
language learning experiences, but this does not necessarily make their accent
less effective than RP or GA in a global context.
Secondly, let’s consider the teacher’s perspective. The
majority of English teachers world-wide do not themselves have an RP or GA
accent, and obviously, these teachers will be modelling a ‘non-standard’
pronunciation (unless they are capable of faking a standard accent for the
duration of the lesson). This has always been the case, even when there was a
pretence of RP or GA being the model. In reality, then, ‘toppling the
standards’ is actually discovering the virtue in necessity. If a teacher is an effective
and intelligible speaker of English, it doesn’t matter that their accent is
‘non-standard’.
Returning to the beginning of this article, I suggested that
we are dehumanizing pronunciation when we fail to acknowledge the who in expressions like ‘it’s pronounced
…’, ‘It’s reduced to a schwa’ and ‘It’s frowned upon’. These expressions set up
an arbiter of correctness by stealth – a court of public opinion which is
usually English or American. To humanize pronunciation is to be open and honest
about this, for example, ‘That’s the standard pronunciation in England,
but I pronounce it differently myself’, or ‘English speakers often reduce this
to a schwa, but it’s perfectly intelligible if you don’t’. If your learner
asks, ‘Yes, but what’s the correct pronunciation’, you can explain that people
pronounce it in a variety of ways and they’re all correct.
Humanizing pronunciation models is changing the way we talk
about them, but it is not taking the attitude that ‘anything goes’. You will be
serving the learner badly if you leave them unaware of pronunciation habits
which are likely to make them unintelligible in the wider world. An example of
this would be a local L1-influenced pronunciation which is not very common
globally, such as the Spanish /b/ – /v/ conflation, the Brazilian way of
replacing an initial /r/ with an /h/, or the Japanese conflation of /l/ and /r/.
More generally, there are plenty of potential problems caused by
spelling-induced pronunciation, such as saying bear so that it sounds like beer.
This is perhaps the only aspect of pronunciation in which it is truly
appropriate to talk about ‘error’.
I would like to conclude this article with five short
observations about models in pronunciation teaching which are implied by it:
1. Learners have
different needs Learners do not all have the same needs. Some wish to integrate into a
native speaker environment. Others wish to be intelligible in international
contexts using English as a lingua franca. What is an appropriate model for one
is not necessarily appropriate for the other.
2. Teachers have
different accents
Teachers do not all have one of the prestige accents RP or GA. It would be
unrealistic and unhelpful to expect them to fake an accent in class, or else
avoid speaking altogether and use audio recordings instead. Within the
classroom, the most realistic and appropriate model is probably the natural
accent of you, the teacher.
3. Standard accents
are not necessarily more intelligible
There is nothing intrinsically superior about RP or GA. Other accents, or
blends of accents, may be equally intelligible. Standard accents may gain their
prestige for historical and social reasons which have no relevance for the
language learner – we can’t simply assume that they are better without
question.
4. Few learners
acquire the precise accent of their model
Learners do not necessarily acquire the model they aim for in any case. For
instance, they may initially aim for RP, but in time they may decide to settle
for something different, such as Spanish-accented English, if their L1 is
Spanish. This may be for a negative reason – they decide that RP is
unattainable in the time available, or it may be for a positive reason – they
realise they would actually prefer to retain some of their own linguistic identity
while speaking English, or they find that their own accent is perfectly
intelligible.
5. Learners will need a receptive tolerance of a range of accents Pronunciation is just as much about listening as speaking. As listeners, learners will hear many accents, not just RP or GA, and so they need to be aware of some of the ways in which accents vary.
Jenkins, J. (2000) The Phonology of English as an International Language Oxford, OUP
PronPack is now available in Australia from Bookery! To celebrate, we have added Australia to our atlas of “Air Traffic Control”boards – see a free sample of the game here. Download the various versions here (Activity 3.1 New Versions).
This article was first published in Speak Out issue 60. Speak Out is the journal of the IATEFL Pronunciation special interest group. In this article, I will suggest that following the recognition of English’s role as a global Lingua Franca, there has been an impasse created by two conflicting reactions: dogma and denial. I will discuss the possible implications of ELF for pronunciation teaching goals, and suggest how we can distinguish features which are important for global intelligibility from those which are not. I will highlight the importance of distinguishing productive and receptive goals, and consider the issue of what part models play in a context where accent variability is a central concern. I will consider contexts where simple intelligibility is not enough. Finally, I will suggest that a shift in how we express goals, from product (model accent) to process (accommodation) may provide a means of getting past the impasse of dogma and denial.Continue reading “ELF: Beyond Dogma and Denial”
1 Know your objective. Pronunciation is about being understood by people all over the globe. It’s not about pretending to be American or British. You don’t need to teach every small detail of the way they speak in the US or UK – very few learners will ever learn that, and there is no reason to anyway. English is a world language now – it doesn’t belong to any particular country.
2 I’m OK! Say that to yourself. Teachers sometimes feel they aren’t a good pronunciation model because they aren’t ‘native speakers’. That’s not true. If you are an intelligible speaker of English, you are a perfect model. When we think of English as a lingua franca, the term ‘native speaker’ no longer makes sense – we are all native speakers of it!
1 Know your objective. Pronunciation is about being understood by people all over the globe. It’s not about pretending to be American or British. You don’t need to teach every small detail of the way they speak in the US or UK – very few learners will ever learn that, and there is no reason to anyway. English is a world language now – it doesn’t belong to any particular country.
