Pronunciation

Introduction Part of learning English is learning to pronounce the words clearly and correctly, since the student’s first contact with this second language. Of course, when adults learn a new language, they often bring their own “accent”; for example, people whose mother tongue is Spanish pronounce every syllable of the words and they also roll the “r”. This can not only sound “funny” --in fact, research has shown that a heavy accent can trigger a negative impression from native speakers-- , but, most important, it can interfere with intelligibility. Therefore, teaching pronunciation should be practiced in the classroom, not just with “listen and repeat” drills, but in a fun and interesting way, with informative topics, various activities including games and audio and, of course, a lot of pair work and group work, as part of the communicative approach. Having chosen Option B for this assignment, the two books that I will analyze will be Pronunciation Pairs, by Ann Baker and Sharon Goldstein, and Focus on Pronunciation, by Linda Lane. Both books are a comprehensive pronunciation course, Pronunciation Pairs focuses on upper basic and intermediate students and Focus on Pronunciation on intermediate and advanced students of English as a second or foreign language. They advocate distinct approaches in the classroom --although both were first published in the early 90s. General approach Pronunciation Pairs is divided in two sections, Section A explains the pronunciation of Vowels and Section B, Consonants. Section A is divided in 20 units and Section B, 46. Each unit is subdivided in 6 activities: Practice 1, Practice 2, Dialogue, Intonation/Word Stress, Conversation and Spelling. It also includes a mini introduction explaining with the help of a picture the position of the mouth and tongue in a very simple way in order to get the sound right. Practice 1 shows pictures of objects and their names, which students have to listen and repeat. Practice 2 consists of words with the same phonemes as in Practice 1, which students also have to listen and repeat. The Dialogue activity consists of listening to a conversation. The Intonation or Word Stress activity focuses on explaining pronunciation rules regarding the dialogue previously listened. For example, if the dialogue was about taking an order in a restaurant, the intonation activity will explain that alternative questions have a rising tone on the first choice and a falling tone on the last choice (Would you like tea or coffee'). In the Conversation activity, students will have to role play in groups a situation similar to the one in the Dialogue activity in order to practice the intonation rule of the unit. Regarding the previous example, the students would have to role play being at a restaurant and a waiter taking their order. Finally, the Spelling activity explains how the sound being pronounced is written. Focus on Pronunciation consists of VIII parts and III appendixes. Part I (Units 1-4) Getting an Overview, Part II (Units 5-18) The Vowels, Part III ( (Units 19-36) The Consonants, Part IV (Units 33-36) Putting Words Together, Part V (Units 37-41) Syllable Stress, Part VI (Units, 42-51) Rhythm, Part VII (Units 52-57) Intonation, Part VIII (Units 58-83) Supplementary Units. The units are divided in Introduction, Focus Words, Practice and Homework. The Introduction explains the position of the mouth compared to get the phoneme write and it also compares it with the position for a similar sound. Pictures are included. The Focus Words gives two of the most common words with that sound in order to pronounce them correctly. The Practice is divided into seven or less activities, including Listen, Listen and Practice, Hearing Differences, Meaning Differences, Using Focus Words. Finally, Homework consists of two or three simple tasks related to the unit that can be done at home –such as recording and listening yourself-- to practice what has been done in class as well as for self-correction. Both books have a traditional approach. Both books start explaining the position of the mouth and tongue and then continue with segmental techniques such as drilling minimal pairs and listening and circling the word you hear to practice the articulation of individual vowel and consonant sounds. For some authors such as Hansen (1995) segmental drills have lost favor in the current pedagogical climes of CLT (p. 289), however, improvement with segmentals can lead to a feeling of accomplishment and increase motivation. The difference in the teaching approach comes in the way of presenting the suprasegmental features. Pronunciation Pairs not only includes suprasegmental rules and segmental features in the same unit, but also meaningful activities to practice repetition and reinforcement, such as role playing a dialogue in groups using the right intonation and stress. Because suprasegmentals carry more meaning and are harder to learn, they require more focused, structured attention and more practice than the segmentals (Hall 1997, Celce-Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin 1996), but always keeping in mind that pronunciation taught in isolation does not carry over to improved pronunciation in actual communication (Morley 1991). Focus on Pronunciation activities are to be done practically individually and it has separate units especially for phonological issues, for suprasegmental rules on stress and intonation, which make learning tedious. It can be said that, while there is general agreement that practicing sounds and prosodic elements in structured drills is important and useful (Brinton 1988), more communicative activities using connected speech are crucial in helping to build automaticity and carryover. When it comes to bottom-up or top-down approaches, Focus on Pronunciation uses the top-down approach because it starts with an overview of the phonetic alphabet, the consonants, vowels, stress, rhythm and intonation (Part I). Then, it continues with units filled with segmental activities (Parts II and III), and then it focuses again on target points of prosodic features (Parts IV, V, VI, VII). On the other hand, Pronunciation Pairs uses the bottom-up approach because it starts with segments, trying to make the student realize by him/herself the sound and how to make it through drills and a dialogue and then explains the rules of intonation, rhythm and stress. According to the procedural options, Pronunciation Pairs uses an exercise-based approach, because it focuses on helping the students identify specific sound features and providing practice in perception and production. The assumption is that the students will make sense of the distinctions presented to them (for example through minimal pairs) either by inference or by imitation. However, Focus on Pronunciation clearly uses an explanation-based approach. The overview which it starts with shows that the author finds it a must to make the students aware of phonetic and phonological facts before practicing through drills and other activities so we can conclude that this book uses a teacher-centered approach, and this can result in a lot of Teacher Talking Time, while Pronunciation Pairs is more student-centered because they infer, they listen and repeat, they role-play a dialogue. Personal preferences I think both are successful books for the stages that they were written for. Pronunciation Pairs is for upper basic and intermediate students, who need more motivation than advanced students. Giving a student at that English level a book that starts with suprasegmental rules --such as Focus on Pronunciation-- can make learning pronunciation look more difficult than it really is. Pronunciation Pairs is very appealing to both teachers and students because it uses an engaging, highly visual approach for making sounds and sound processes learnable, even to beginning-level students. The explanations are simple and the book provides controlled, effective practice with the vowels, consonants, word stress and basic intonation of American English. In a note to the teacher, the authors of Pronunciation Pairs indicate that it “is designed to teach students to recognize and to produce English sounds. It also helps students learn to differentiate between sounds that they might often confuse. The basic premise is that pronunciation material should be meaningful and easy”. Once the intermediate-level student feels confident of his/her pronunciation but at the same time is aware that it needs improvement, Focus on Pronunciation allows the student to review the suprasegmental and segmental features of English as well as learn elements of English phonology that are difficult or unusual in comparison to other world languages. However, because of my pedagogic situation, I prefer Pronunciation Pairs. I teach students ages 14 and up, whose proficiency level in the English language is at the entering and developing levels (from Basic to Upper Intermediate). At the same time, the methodology used at the institute I work for promotes the bottom-up approach, where the students must first infer and then they are presented stress, intonation, rhythm in a very simple way, because these will be later studied thoroughly in the advanced-level courses. The type of person and teacher that I am must also be taken into consideration for my preference to Pronunciation Pairs (b) Which do you prefer' Why' Do you prefer one to another because of your pedagogic situation (Brinton’s fist variable) or because of the type of person and teacher that you are' (Brinton’s 3rd variable) Do you see problems in one of the approaches/methods' What sort of contexts (students, courses and institutions) are implied by the books/sections' Conclusions While there is no denying the importance of the segmentals, it often takes some time to convince students that the suprasegmentals, particularly linking and intonation, are equally important. Indeed, they are crucial to both students’ comprehension of others’ speech as well as to their own intelligibility. Even when students accept the importance of suprasegmentals, they are dismayed by what they perceive as a lack of rules or regularity associated with these elements. They discover, for example, that, unlike sounds, suprasegmentals can change according to meaning. These activities address students’ needs and desires to improve their listening proficiency and pronunciation in four ways. First, they expose students to hearing prosodic elements in connected speech in an entertaining and useful manner. Second, they help students learn how to listen to connected speech. Third, by listening then comparing what they hear with a script, they improve both their aural and visual modalities and, fourth, learn to listen for meaningful word groups and phrases instead of continuing the word-for-word listening many of them have learned. Developing and practicing new listening strategies in the classroom will lead to continued improvement in comprehending and speaking English outside the class. Bibliography Baker, A. and Goldstein, S. 1990. Pronunciation Pairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. and Goodwin, J. 1996. Teaching pronunciation: A reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, D. 1995. A study of the effect of the acculturation model on second language acquisition. Ed. Eckman, P. Second Language Acquisition: Theory and Pedagogy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lane, L. 1993. Focus on Pronunciation. Longman. Morley, J. 1991. The pronunciation component in teaching English to speakers of other languages. TESOL Quarterly.