Category: Articles

Pronunciation in spontaneous speech does not follow the dictionary form, nor does it obey the ‘rules’ of connected speech often given in pronunciation books. It helps if learners are aware of this.

(This article is an excerpt from new book PronPack: Connected Speech for Listeners)

Streamlining

Why isn’t a racing car shaped like a brick on wheels? Why isn’t a speedboat shaped like a bathtub? It’s all about efficiency, making it faster and easier for the vehicle or vessel to move through air or water. It’s about, in a word, streamlining. Richard Cauldwell uses this term to refer to the changes that speakers make to words and phrases so that they will slip out of the mouth with the maximum speed and comfort. Perhaps the most obvious such change is to simply drop sounds altogether – otherwise known as elision.

(Article first published on Cambridge UPELT website)

Caution: May contain nuts

My argument in a nutshell is this: that the point of the phonemic chart is to help you to teach and your learners to learn. It is not there to police your accent. The widespread idea that the chart represents only RP (‘received pronunciation’) speech, or any other such ‘standard’ form, is profoundly unhelpful. I think we need to embrace a more flexible attitude to the chart, one that takes account of the idea that the symbols are phonemic rather than phonetic. We should recognise that each symbol represents not a single, precise sound but rather a range of sounds which listeners may interpret as that phoneme. In other words, the chart allows different accents.

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A cruel mirror

Accent anxiety is a cruel mirror for those of us who are in the business of teaching English. Many of us feel a sense of inadequacy, and we are harsh in judging ourselves. Partly, this is the widely-reported phenomenon of simply hating the sound of your own voice on recordings. But for teachers, it is more serious, because we are a pronunciation model for our students, and in ELT there are some unfortunate preconceptions about what constitutes a ‘good’ model. Here are some examples of the kinds of things teachers say:

Like many people, I’ve been doing some language study during the lockdown. On my daily walk, I’ve been listening to a Greek course delivered entirely through audio, with no reference whatever to the written form. It remains to be seen if this has worked, since I haven’t had the opportunity use it. But one thing I can be fairly sure of is that my Greek pronunciation won’t be subject to spelling-induced error.

Learning through the eyes

Most learners of English, certainly the ones I’ve come across in my teaching career, have not learnt entirely through the ear as in my Greek experience. Most have learnt through the eyes too. They’ve used books, not just audio, and most have been both guided and misled by the written form. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of spelling in teaching pronunciation, and not only for the productive (speech) skills but also for the receptive (listening).

(This article first appeared on the Cambridge ELT Blog)

Which English do you want – American or British? This is a question which students (or their parents and other stakeholders) typically face at the beginning of a language course. As regards pronunciation, this usually means a choice between the two ‘standard’ accents General American (GA) or Received Pronunciation (RP). It’s as if these accents are products on a supermarket shelf and it’s simply a matter of choosing. But I think presenting a choice in this way is misleading, and here’s why.

I argue for a more democratic use of the IPA symbols in this article, which first appeared in Modern English Teacher 29.3 (July 2020).

There seems to be a love-hate relationship between the English teaching community and phonemic symbols. Some teachers love them, others won’t use them. A third category uses them under duress, but do not feel comfortable in doing so. This article is for anybody, but especially teachers in this third category.

A teacher’s feelings about the material they’re teaching with are often perceptible to the class. If a teacher uses phonemic symbols with confidence and pleasure, that will communicate itself to the class. If on the other hand a teacher uses them but dislikes doing so, it’s likely that this dislike will be part of what the learners take home from the lesson. I would like, if at all possible, to help teachers feel more at home with the symbols – to feel as if they ‘own’ them.

Why the myth about ‘native speakers’ being better language teachers? If you want to learn a language, you’d be well advised to look for a qualified teacher who shares the same first language as yourself, or at least knows it well. I can testify from my own experience that teaching pronunciation to someone whose language I know nothing about is like wading across a river when you can’t see the bottom: you just don’t know where the slippery boulders are! I will call this situation, ‘teaching blind’.

For a Spanish speaker, it seems perfectly natural for a [w] sound to be closely associated with a [g]. The Spanish dictionary entry for hueso, for example, gives the pronunciation as [(g)wéso], the bracketed (g) indicating that it is optional. Similarly, there’s an optional [g] at the beginning of huevo (egg).The g may be explicit in the spelling too. For example, the loan word for whiskey is often written güisque. For an English speaker, by contrast, this g comes as a surprise, and teachers are mystified as to why Spanish learners sometimes insert a g before words that begin with a w.  

Delighted to announce the upcoming release of PronPack 5: Pronunciation of English for Spanish Speakers! This new addition to the PronPack collection takes a different approach by focusing sharply on the needs of learners from one specific language background – namely Spanish. Do your learners drop the consonants at the end of words? Put a ‘g’ before ‘w’? Confuse ‘b’ and ‘v’? Switch ‘chicken’ and ‘kitchen’? The lessons in this book focus on issues like these. The objective is to help learners make themselves more intelligible.

Our estimated publication date is September 1st 2020, available in paperback on Amazon and as an eBook on iBooks and KOBO.