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.
PronPack for Spanish Speakers due out September 2020
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.
If you’re an English native speaker in the domain of ELT,
you have the privilege of being sought after. In matters of the English
language, you are seen by many people to be the best kind of expert there is, and
there’s a market for that. Such people will defer to your judgement on what’s
wrong or right. They will prefer you as a candidate for teaching jobs. They
will display an unusual level of interest in the minutiae of your home culture.
They will marvel at effortless vowels. They will pay you for being able to
speak!
” I have been using at my school the series PronPack with excellent results as the activities do not just shift the focus from the traditional teaching of grammar and vocabulary to phonology, but also the worksheets are fun, engaging and meaningful. And above all, students love them! “
Maria Davou
(MA TESOL, PhD Applied Linguistics, ABD) is a teacher, teacher
trainer, researcher and school owner, promoting alternative and
innovative approaches to teaching and implementing them in her own
school.
In my recent plenary at International House, Barcelona, I talked about how pronunciation teaching needs to ajust itself to take into account the role of English as a global Lingua Franca.
Stella: How did you get into teaching phonetics and pronunciation?
Mark: I was teaching at the Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro, and had a few administrative hours on my timetable. They asked me to produce some fun pronunciation materials for the school. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to make sense of the hidden patterns of phonology, and creating tasks and activities which would really engage the learners. I discovered that pronunciation is fascinating, perhaps because it is hybrid. It crosses the frontier between language systems (like grammar and lexis) and skills (like speaking and listening). It also has aspects which are cerebral on the one hand and physical on the other. In this respect, it is like no other aspect of language teaching. To me, language without pronunciation is somewhat two-dimensional. The spoken form lifts it off the page into a fully three-dimensional form. It brings the target language to life.
Mark Hancock with PronPack at English UK South West 201
PronPack has been out and about this October. The month
began with a visit to Stirling in Scotland for the 40th Anniversary
event of SATEFL. I gave a talk on how pronunciation teaching needs to
assimilate the fact that English is a global Lingua Franca. The following week,
I spoke at the International House conference in Milan, Italy
about how different pronunciation activity types match up with different objectives.
Finally, at the end of the month PronPack had a display table at the English UK
South West conference in Somerset,
England. At
this event, I spoke about how to boost the attention given to pronunciation
when teaching with coursebooks. It’s been an exhilarating month!
Mark Hancock presenting online pronunciation teaching course with T Veigga ELT
Coursebooks are big on schwa. Is it because schwa is said to
be the most frequent sound in the English language? Is it because it’s an
“issue” for all students, no matter what their L1? Whatever the reason,
students get a lot of exposure to it, and sooner or later, someone is bound to
ask something to the effect, “How exactly is it pronounced?”
Cue the teacher making little grunting noises and talking
about how relaxed the mouth must be to make this sound. At this point, we are
on thin ice. When a student asks how schwa differs from the the vowel in duck, the thin ice cracks. Because no
matter how clearly the teacher demonstrates his/her version of the two phonemes,
the difference seems to be barely perceivable to the student.
Student thinking, “Surely such a small difference can’t be
so important!”
Teacher thinking, “Aargh, get me out of here!”
Books sometimes present schwa as if it were just another
phoneme, equivalent to any other. Phonemic charts may encourage this
perception, with the occupants of each little cell seemingly equivalent to one
another, like chocolates in a chocolate box*. The chocolates are all the same
kind of thing, but just with slightly contrasting flavours. The schwa however
is not the same kind of thing – instead of contrasting
with other vowel phonemes, it may substitute
for them in unstressed syllables. It’s precise sound quality is not its
essential feature. When teaching it, we should focus on it’s role in
differentiating stressed and unstressed syllables rather than its exact sound
quality.
Attempting to demonstrate and drill the schwa sound is what takes us on to the thin ice mentioned above, because it is not sufficiently different from some other vowel sounds – the duck vowel in particular. Ironically, the distinction becomes even less clear the more we focus on it: all that attention causes us to place stress on the sound, which is precisely what it shouldn’t have. So to sum up: Don’t sweat the schwa!
* This is the reason why, in the PronPack Sound Chart, the schwa is given an exceptional position, to discourage the impression of equivalence with the other phonemes.
