ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Setsuko Toyama

Julian Edge

Judy Gilbert

Curtis Kelly

Panelists: Marc | Setsuko | Peter
Guest panelists: Julian Edge | Judy Gilbert | Curtis Kelly
Date: November 2000

Topic: "What are ways to introduce pronunciation exercises in lessons?"

Julian Edge

This is a tough one. I'd like to broaden my response a little to include ‘how to introduce exercises so that they deal with pronunciation.’ Two techniques of mine depend on getting students to play-act a little.

1. Ask the students to say the next item in the exercise as though they are very happy about it (or rather annoyed, or quite embarrassed, or as if talking to their parents, or the headteacher - choose your own adjectives and situations). You can take this further if the students are game for it, in that they add their own emotion to the exercise item and you (or the other students) have to guess what that emotion was. If this leads to over-acting, I'd rather have that than the usual neutral drone of exercises being done. And if this approach works for you and your students, it also helps establish direct connections between situations, emotions and stress/intonation that can otherwise be hard for students to make.

2. OK, let me be honest with you, I've never had much success with this one, but I don't understand why not! It works so well for me as a language learner, and I can't be SO peculiar, can I? Anyway, it goes like this. If I want to pronounce something really well in French, I think of the kind of voice that English actors put on when they are pretending to be French (what we call a "stage-French" accent). I think of how the English stereotype of the French speaker stands and moves, and I do that. Without getting into the potentially offensive possibilities of this, I play the English stage stereotype of whatever nationality I am trying to sound like. I tried this once in a beginner's Italian class (I don't speak any Italian at all), and the teacher told me (initially in Italian) that this class was for beginners and I should go to the next class up. So, what do you think? Is it just me? Or might there be some fun (and progress) in telling students to, "Say this one like a typical Englishman," or, "Say this one like an American." Don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to argue that it's our job to make speakers of international English sound like Brits or US Americans, I'm just saying that there might be a technique there for helping some students engage a little more fully with their work on their pronunciation.

No easy task! Best wishes, Julian.

Judy Gilbert

In an ideal English curriculum, all students would have a class dedicated to pronunciation. So much for the ideal. In real life, teachers typically have to squeeze pronunciation into their regular class by sheer cunning.

And because time is so limited, rather severe decisions have to be made about what's really important, leaving everything else for some later time. This prioritizing is rather in the nature of Emergency Room triage, but I think it's the only practical approach.

What should the priority items be? With the requirement that each topic must meet a standard of both crucial utility, and also teachability, following is one approach I have to teaching pronunciation.

CONCEPT. Final sounds (stops/continuants)
The Japanese language doesn't allow many final consonants and, unfortunately, final consonants are often crucial for grammatical meaning in English. So, on a triage basis, I would just focus on the ends of words and resolutely ignore other mistakes. Otherwise you will find yourself back into absorbing all available time with minimal pair drills. The really crucial sounds are /d/ or /t/, /s/ or /z/ and /l/. (But don't spend time on the voicing distinction - there isn’t enough benefit for the cost in time, if time is really limited.) Considering the time constraints, the most useful phonological concept about sound distinctions is the difference between stops and continuant. Students must learn to recognize the distinction because of its significance for listening comprehension. These sound cues go by very fast in normal spoken English - mostly because auxiliary verbs are generally said as contractions. If students can learn to focus on these particular final sounds, they are on the way to getting the general principle of hearing and using final consonants.

Examples of grammar cues:
Tense: He's gone. / He'd gone. I'll cut it./ I'd cut it. We care. / We cared.
Singular/Plural: book/books (or third person singular)
Question Words: Where? / What?

Presenting the Concept 1. Say the word "bus" 2. Continue the final sound as you march back and forth, until you run out of air. 3. Ask students to try it with you. 4. Say the word "but," throwing your palm up in a Stop! gesture (don't release the air, but hold your tongue in the stop position). The air can't get out because it's stopped by the tongue pressed all around the toothridge. 5. Have students try alternating /s/ and /t/ sounds until they can feel the contrast. 6. Put this on the board: English stops: P  T  K B  D  G English continuants: All other sounds (Affricates like the first sound in "chip" and "judge" are combinations of stops and continuants. /tS/ and /dZ/, but this is an unimportant detail unless some student asks)

In the regular class, any time you see a word that begins with a vowel, look to see the final sound of the word before. Use this pair of words to practice linking. A major advantage of practicing sounds in a linking position is that difficult final sounds become initial sounds and are likely to be easier for students to say.

Ask students to practice final continuants by saying the word before and slowing down the link, as in "an n n egg" or "tell l l all the news", or "burger r r and fries". For stop sounds, the words must be said together, as in "Stopall that noise!" or "Thankyou."

Curtis Kelly

I don't have much to say about pronunciation. It is not my field, but the topic brings two interesting things to mind; one I learned from a structuralist (as in audiolingual approach), and one I learned from a student.

First, although approach to ESL developed by the structuralists has pretty much gone by the wayside, they still deserve our respect for contributing most of what we know about teaching pronunciation, such as "minimal pairs."

One of my early teachers, Shigeo Imamura was quite the structuralist. He had even worked under Bloomfield, who was to structuralism what Chomskey was to transformational grammar. One thing Imamura said about pronunciation still sticks in my mind. He said that poor pronunciation is not really a speaking problem, but rather, a hearing problem. Until the learner gains the ability to aurally identify the phoneme, no amount of practice in mouth mechanics will make any difference.

Second, we must keep in mind that, in the classroom, student pronunciation is as much a social issue as an educational one. More than once I have called on a Japanese student in class who would answer in katakana English ("Za boy Izu ahto sukooru."), and then come up to me afterwards and speak in perfect English. For our students, katakana English is a kind of pidgin, or at least a register, and they purposely use this pronunciation form to avoid alienating themselves from their peers, or failing in public. In the first case, it shines better on the student to use this horrid but socially acceptable register than to seem to be trying to look superior. In the second, in order to preserve his or her self-esteem, the student would rather risk failure from a lack of compliance than failure from a lack of ability.

Panelists: Marc | Setsuko | Peter
Guest panelists: Julian Edge | Judy Gilbert | Curtis Kelly

Julian Edge, Aston Univerisity

Author of Essentials of English Language Teaching

Judy Gilbert, Freelance ELT Author

Author of Clear Speech

Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University

Author of Writing from Within

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