Stephen Van Vlack

Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women’s University

Division of English - TESL

Teaching Pronunciation (영어발음지도)

Spring 2016

Week 2 – General Issues in the Teaching of Pronunciation

Answers

Rogerson-Ravell (2011) Chapter 1 Phonology and Pronunciation Learning and Teaching

1. What can we tell about a person from their voice (from the way they pronounce)?

As I will be mentioning over and over again in this course, sound is the way into the brain, especially in relation to language. Our ability to recognize and process sounds is a pivotal part of our cognitive processing. For those of us who hear, our world is constantly inundated with sounds, both the linguistic and extra-linguistic. Importantly, all sounds have meaning. They are all interpretable whether we are fully aware of it or not. And these interpretations can, again, be both linguistic and extra-linguistic. For example, we can interpret the sounds someone makes and link them to linguistic signs (phonemes and words). This sis called decoding. But listening to those same sounds we also interpret them beyond just what they might have to do with language. We make a wide arrange of judgments based on how those sounds are made.

This applies to a language in general as well as the speech of individuals. The somewhat disturbing truth is that people make very strong judgments based on the way one speaks (produces sounds). This, of course, is related to all aspects of pronunciation including voice quality. Since people are going to judge us regardless, just as we judge others, it is important to understand how this works.

Rogerson-Ravell (2011) list three main areas in which the way one speaks affects the opinion of others about them. The first of these is personal or physical attributes such as age, gender, and size. From one’s pronunciation one can also tell with what region they can be associated, as well as social memberships. Social memberships are tricky and include ethnicity, socio economic class, education levels, and even profession. This is an important concept for us as we are going to approach this idea from the perspective that the pronunciation one uses is potentially changeable and consciously so. In essence, we are all actors to various degrees. But as mentioned above this is tricky because in pronouncing in a different language we need to be aware of cross-cultural differences. Attributes have different meanings across cultures. So, for example the attributes that make someone seem educated in Korean may indicate the opposite in English or another language. Finally, the way we pronounce provides information about our emotional state (provided one can interpret this). Emotional states link closely to meaning. An example would be the way that New Yorkers signal sarcasm (a robust attribute of discourse among New Yorkers). Other Americans and certainly Korean students simply do not get this often leading to stark communication breakdowns.

Pronunciation, taking this as an all-encompassing term, revolves around the perceptions of others coupled with our own wishes of how we would like to be perceived. Finding this balance can be a challenging and every changing task.

2. What are the different goals and objectives associated with pronunciation? How do these relate to models?

From a teaching perspective, teachers of pronunciation need to diagnose and prioritize problems students face. You will be doing this or experiencing this in the Portfolio Project, but in relation to what? In dealing with pronunciation this means focusing on two systems: phonetics, which involves how sounds are produced, and phonology, which centers on the patterns sounds make in a given language (dialect, idiolect, etc.). We need to be able to deal with both of these because sounds change (in predictable ways, some believe) when present in different patterns. Also the way the sounds behave in patterns varies from one dialect to another. Even the patterns themselves may change. Thus, in thinking about teaching pronunciation and managing our own pronunciation we need to think about these systems in relation to goals.

The primary goal people set for themselves in being able to speak a language is that of intelligibility. Intelligibility is the ability to produce sounds and sound patterns that are able to be understood by other speakers of that language. Basically, it is limited to how one is able to deal with the phonetics and phonology of a language. But in ‘dealing’ with these aspects norms must be considered. This is because the others one is trying to communicate with is using their own set of norms to understand. If the norms don’t match then there are problems with intelligibility. In short one needs their speech sounds and patterns to be targeted to a certain set of shared norms in order to be intelligible to others. It makes sense then to try to learn the norms of the speech community and children generally pick up the norms of the society around them.

For EFL learners, since English is an exogenous language in their environments, a norm is not present and must be chosen. This norm is picked either by the teacher, the learner, or both as effected by societal norms and with some sort of compromise. It is worth mentioning that usually just one norm is picked, presumably to simplify the learning process. This norm is usually a more standardized form and for most people the world over the primary choice of a norm has traditionally been RP. In places with a strong American influence this norm is SNAA (Standard North American English). But of course there is also a more modern alternative with is Amalgum English or ELF (Lingua Franca Core). This is a basically what is believed to be a new norm derived from the sound and speech patterns generated by all the speakers of English the world over. RP and NAAA are norms focusing on native speaker communities. ELF is a norm but one which focuses on how all speakers of English produce sounds and patterns.

Since the choice of norm in English is often perceived as a political choice and has been likened by some researchers such as Pennycook to neo-colonialsm, the EFL model provides in theory a norm that is both practical and politically correct. But we will delve more into this soon.

Walker (2010) Chapter 1: English: changing roles, changing goals

3. What is the new role for English in the modern world?

The role of English in the modern world is obviously quite complex in that English is used by virtually every society for a wide range of different purposes. The simplest way of defining this role is to simply say that English is now functioning primarily as a lingua franca. A lingua franca is basically a language that is used for communication among people who also speak to a range of other different languages, which do not necessarily overlap. The basic idea is that English seems to be the one language in the world today that almost all people have in common. I think this is an effective way of trying to get our students to conceptualize English. English is something they have, it is part of them, and it is powerful because it is something that they share with a huge number of people outside in the world. In this respect English is or should be extremely empowering. This view of English as a lingua franca, however, has not made strong impressions on the teaching of English as yet. People need to learn English to be able to speak with pretty much everyone else in the world, regardless of linguistic background, for purposes both formal and informal. Native speakers of English are really no more important in the world of English than anyone else (Although you will find some native speakers who contest this).

In the end, we have to prepare our students for dealing with the world itself through English. One of the things about language and language teaching that is often thrown to the wayside is the basic idea that language is about the people who speak it. Based on this, global English is about everyone in the world, with all their similarities and differences. Enabling people to use the tools that we have in common the most powerful of which right now is the English language. Levis (2005) introduces some new contexts and paradigms for the teaching of pronunciation that are worth investigating.

4. How do the different Englishes vary as regards pronunciation?

Different Englishes vary regarding their pronunciation according to the other languages which the speakers of English have. A good source for this is Kirkpatrick (2007). Since the speakers of English basically speak all most all other languages in the world, or at least a large number of them, then the amount of potential diversity in the pronunciations of English will be immense. Of course, there are also more elements of English that all speakers are going to need to adhere to to be deemed intelligible by all other speakers of English. To be an effective speaker of English in the future one needs to carefully consider their own linguistic background and how that linguistic background affects their intelligibility. This is the major difference between the non-native speakers of English and the native speakers of English. The non-native speakers of English, as part of the processes of bilingual development, certainly take their own language production seriously and through very careful consideration and are geared to measure the effects of their production on others. They are guarded and often second-guess themselves. Most native speakers of English (being mono-lingual) are actually clueless in this regard for the most part. As mentioned above many of the native speakers of English coming from core English-speaking countries are blissfully monolingual. To make matters worse they also carry around with them the false belief that whatever version of English they speak is somehow correct and this is certainly almost never true. To reiterate, to function in the global environment one needs to carefully weigh out the effects of what they are saying and try to adhere to a few general principles of what we may term Englishness in order to be intelligible to the vast range of other speakers of English.

Walker (2010) extending the seminal work of Jenkins (2000) draws our attention to what he refers to as the lingua franca core regarding pronunciation. This lingua franca course seems to be the confluence of the most important elements of English among this huge range of English speakers all over the world. As people learn English from a global perspective they tend to focus on these elements as ways of making themselves more intelligible to others in this global community. Surprisingly, the four main concerns in this list are almost all segmental. This goes against the traditional perspective presented in Celce-Murcia, Brinton, Goodwin, and Griner (2010), which looks at English from a basically monolingual, inner circle perspective. From this perspective we are informed that the supra-segmentals seemed to be more important as they carry lots of meaning. It seems, however, that from the global perspective there is just way too much variability and how supra-segmentals play out to warrant a close focus on their particular usage patterns at least from an intelligibility perspective. The ELF approach focuses on four main elements listed below.

An approximation of RP/GA consonants

An appropriate treatment of consonant clusters

Length (tense-lax) differences between vowels

Sentence stress

5. How does a lingua franca approach to English pronunciation change the way we set our goals?

When discussing the teaching of pronunciation from this lingua franca approach is important to first establish goals. It should be clear that the major goals were going to set from this ELF perspective are going to necessarily be different than those which we may set from the major alternative perspective that of the monolingual, inner circle. Walker (2010) identifies three major goals, but the last one, teachability, seems misplaced here. While the first two goals are ones centered on the learners the last one is completely teacher centered and is more of a practice than a goal.

Mutual Intelligibility

The first these major goals is mutual intelligibility. This itself is not anything particularly new and of course all pronunciation programs probably share intelligibility as the primary major goal. The difference here, however, is that we are not focusing on intelligibility for a particular minor subset of an inner core community, but rather all the English speakers in the world. This requires us to really rethink the particular types of language we would like our students to be able to produce. It is also very important to realize that being intelligible to one community will not necessarily make one intelligible to everyone else. We see this every day. Native speakers from one community or another are simply not understood as soon as they leave the community. This is something we want to avoid for our students. Our goal is to make our students intelligible to as large a group as possible. This means, to a large extent, simplifying what it is we actually need them to do.

Identity

The next major goal we have is that of identity and this is something which is totally overlooked in the other (monlingual) perspectives of language teaching and of course pronunciation teaching in particular. The way we speak, our accent, is our linguistic face exposed to the world. From our accent people determine basically who we are, where we came from, what we are made of, etc. Our accent reveals our identity. Requiring a student to mimic the speech of a different community and forsake that of their own is extremely negative. It shows a strong devaluation of one’s existing identity and that is never a good thing, especially when this force is being applied from the outside. It’s even worse when someone from within your own society is asking you to devalue your own background. In a way it’s quite traitorous. It’s also completely unnecessary. In our particular case here in which we are dealing with English and Korean for the most part there is no reason why English and Korean cannot peacefully coexist. There does not have to be this either or conflict which most people feel. And we’ll be perfectly honest because I feel it as well: even the English teachers in this country feel a certain amount of animosity towards native speakers of English from the inner circle. This probably comes because we feel undervalued in relation to them. The happy news is that this is changing but it’s not simply going to change in and of itself we need good people with in our society which can guide this change and make this change work in a positive way. Ultimately Korean speakers should be proud of the accents that they employ to use English because this accent reveals so much about them. Likewise, speakers themselves should be free to choose the type of accent they would like to use. Some will choose accents that are more Koreanized while others will have ones that are less Koreanized. We each need to find the accent for each of the different languages we speak that reveal what we would like to reveal to the world around us. It is important that students realize this important role that accent place informing our identity.