Teahing_Pronunciation

TEACHING PRONUNCIATION INTRODUCTION Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (1996) consider that a learner’s command of suprasegmental features of a language are more critical to communicative competence than a command of segmental ones, since the suprasegmentals carry more overall meaning load than the segmentals do. They believe that learners who use incorrect rhythm patterns or who do not connect words together are at best frustrating to the native-speaking listener. Moreover, if these learners use improper intonation contours, they may be perceived as abrupt or even rude, and if the stress and rhythm patterns are too non-nativelike, the speakers who produce them may not be understood at all. Due to the influence of non-segmental features of the language over communication, two of them were chosen to be discussed in this essay: stress and intonation. STRESS English is a stress-timed language. This means that syllables may last different amounts of time, but it is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time, on average, between consecutive stressed syllables. Stress-timing is strongly related to vowel reduction processes. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, that is to say, every syllable is perceived as taking up roughly the same amount of time, though the absolute length of time depends on the prosody. Syllable-timed languages tend to give syllables approximately equal stress, and do not generally have reduced vowels. Stress most often occurs on any of the last three syllables of a word, with some rare exceptions at the fourth last or earlier syllables. Spanish speakers learning English usually transfer this stress regularity to English. They do not differentiate stressed from unstressed syllables in an English word because length, pitch and loudness -the main characteristics of stress- are a difficult matter for beginners. Therefore, in some cases, they do not use loudness or length to differentiate the stressed syllable or they do not reduce vowels in unstressed syllables. Besides students lack conceptual understanding and conscious awareness of the important role stress plays for native speakers of English. WORD STRESS Stress is present at the word level and at the sentence level. Every word said in isolation has a stress. Word stress has a fixed distribution; it is a lexical feature of the word and consequently word stress is related to the lexicon. English stress is a distinctive feature in a word. If stress changes, meaning might change. It seems that one of the ways in which we store words in our mental lexicon is according to its stress pattern. Thus, we find it difficult to interpret a word pronounced with the wrong stress pattern. In processing this word we begin to look up possible words under this wrong stress pattern which will fit the context, and we might arrive at the wrong interpretation or we might not find an appropriate word and we may start wondering about the stress pattern. However, the first choice for interpreting the word is the stress pattern produced. WORD STRESS: PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES Initially, students need to understand that a basic characteristic of any English word containing more than one syllable is stress-pattern. They also need to understand that incorrect placement of stress can cause misunderstanding, even though every single sound is correctly pronounced. Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (1996) consider that, in order to achieve these aims, the first step a teacher must follow is to clarify, first, how native speakers highlight a stressed syllable (length, volume, pitch); secondly, how they produced unstressed syllables (often with vowel reduction) and thirdly, what the three main levels of stress are (strongly stressed, slightly stressed, unstressed). The next step to take by a teacher is to examine the primary dilemma faced by a student- namely, hearing and predicting where stress falls in words. Although word stress in English is not as predictable as in Spanish, nor does English indicate irregularly placed stress patterns through stress or accent marks in the spelling, which is the case of Spanish; stress placement in English is mostly a rule-governed phenomenon and explicit teaching of word stress patterns should be a part of the curriculum. With my elementary fifteen year-old students, the first course of action I would take is to explain to them how important is stress in a language. To clarify this, I would use examples from Spanish, such as sábana ('sheet') and sabana ('savannah'), as well as límite ('boundary'), limite ('[that] he/she limits') and limité ('I limited'), or also líquido, liquido and liquidó; to make them conscious how a word meaning changes depending on where we put the stress. I would explain that the same happens with some English words and I would introduce some examples such as record (noun) and record (verb), permit (noun) and permit (verb) , present (noun) and present (verb). Then I would tell them that there are several systems of notation for stress marking, but that in class we are going to use “bubbles” ( ) because we can show word stress more precisely using them. I would provide them with examples of words they already know.  Telephone    Expensive In order to practise stress patterns, I would give students a list of known words and I would ask them to stress these words using bubbles. Then I would play the CD for them to listen and check how they performed and I would give feedback if necessary. After that I would ask them to say those words loudly. I would also introduce a game. Cards with different words written on them would be spread face down on the teacher’s desk. Students will be divided into groups of four and each member of the group should take turns to participate. The student in turn chooses a card, says the word and if s/he gives the appropriate stress to it, his/her group gets a point. The group with more points is the winner. Since it is also important to devote time for ear training, listening activities become a must. As Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (1996) suggest, a teacher should make sure that students can distinguish between stressed and unstressed syllables. So a number of tasks should be introduced with this aim. For this purpose, the following ones might be of great use: a) I would ask them to tell if what they hear follow the same or a different stress pattern. For example, 1- LA la/LA la; 2- la LA/LA la; etc. b) I would give them an activity as the one that follows. I would read the words in each column and students should decide which syllable is the most prominent one. 1 2 3 Eraser Banana 1 2 3 president bicycle 1 2 3 4 satisfaction regulation 1 2 3 4 dictionary elevator c) I would introduce this activity which requires students’ careful listening to a number of words for deciding under which pattern they should write each of them.  Eg. HOSPITAL        Eg. Ability   Eg. photographic Eg. example SENTENCE STRESS Every word said in isolation has a stress; however when words are put together in a sentence, only some words are stressed. Sentence stress emphasizes the portion of the utterance that is more important for the speaker or that the speaker wants the listener to concentrate on. Stress in a sentence has no fixed distribution. It is related to semantics. The words which are likely to be more prominent and to carry a stress in connected speech are those which are most important for meaning, i.e. content words or lexical words, such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Grammatical or function words, such as articles, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliaries and conjunctions, tend to be unstressed. This general rule applies to «normal» default stressing. It does not apply when contrastive or emphatic meaning is intended. SENTENCE STRESS: PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES. To start with, I would lead students to do some controlled practice. For this, I would aim at training their ear with some listening tasks such as the ones that follow. a) GIRLS The GIRLS The GIRLS Students listen and underline the words on which emphasis is put. PLAY are have PLAYing PLAYED TENNIS. TENNIS. TENNIS. b) Students listen to the first stanza of the song: ‘Waving Flag’ by K’aan and David Bisbal, which they surely know, and they sing it twice or three times. Then, they will mark the words stressed in each verse. ‘Give me ‘freedom ‘Give me ‘fire ‘Give me ‘reason ‘Take me ‘higher ‘See the ‘champions ‘Take the ‘field now ‘You’ll be ‘fighters ‘Make us ‘feel ‘proud c) I would give them cards with two sentences written on each one for them to discuss in pairs about which words they would put the stress on. Then each pair would say those sentences aloud and I would encourage the rest of the class to say if they agree or not with their partner and if not, to tell how they would stress that utterance. Students swap cards and practice the sentences aloud. This goes on until all groups have the chance to read all sentences. INTONATION Intonation is often defined as the melody of speech, the changes in the pitch of the voice during the articulation of an utterance. The overall behaviour of the pitch is referred to as tone. Thus, a falling tone is one which descends from a higher to a lower pitch, whereas a rising tone is a movement from a lower pitch to a higher one. These tonal events can be better appreciated in one-syllable utterances where the meaning is made clear not by grammatical means or additional lexis, but by the direction of the pitch movement at the end of the utterance. Both teachers and material designers have, in fact, highlighted the need to concentrate more on rhythm and intonation than any other aspect of pronunciation because of their importance to communicate meaning (Gilbert, 1987 in Morley, 1993). Intonation helps to express emotions and attitude as we speak, such as excitement, pleasure, annoyance, etc. It also helps the listener to recognise the grammar and syntactic structure of what is being said and it paves the way to produce the effect of prominence of syllables that need to be perceived as stressed. Therefore it can be said that if a speaker uses intonation in a given situation in an inappropriate way, there is a risk that s/he can be misunderstood by the listener (Roach, 2000). When Spanish speakers transfer the intonation patterns of their mother tongue into English, which is a stress-timed language, the result can be barely comprehensible to native English speakers. This is because the meaning or information usually conveyed in English by the combination of stress, pitch and rhythm in a sentence is flattened or evened out by the Spanish learner. Dalton and Seidlhofer (1994) have also remarked that features of intonation such as prominence, tones and key "are particularly important in discourse ... but at the same time they are particularly difficult to teach”. INTONATION: PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES With my elementary fifteen year-old students, I would not deep into intonation patterns nor would I include activities where students should mark them. It is important that students are aware of the strong link between intonation and attitude so they would set to work in these two tasks. The first one is for learners to recognise the effect of intonation changes. I say the word 'bananas' - firstly with an 'interested' intonation (varied tone); then 'uninterested' (flat). Students identify the two and describe the difference. We, then, brainstorm attitudes, such as 'enthusiastic', 'bored', 'surprised', 'relieved'. I say 'bananas' for these. Students then do the same in pairs, guessing each other's attitude. Then I would ask them to ‘greet’ everybody with a particular attitude. At the end, the class identifies each person's attitude. I would also work with intonation of Wh-questions (falling) and Yes/No questions (rising). For this, I would introduce a conversation (Appendix 1). After listening to this conversation twice, students should try to recognise if intonation rises or falls in the questions. Then they should imitate the speakers’ pronunciation, rhythm, stress and intonation to practise these questions out loud. Afterwards, in groups of four, students write questions to make an interview to the headmaster or different teachers at school and then they get prepared to perform as reporters by practising the pronunciation and intonation of those questions loudly in groups of four. They record the interview and these recordings will later be analysed with the whole class to provide feedback. Finally, I would use the dialogue introducing each unit of students’ textbook. After dealing with meaning, I would play the CD in order to analyse what characters denote with the tone they use when speaking. Then, I would make them imitate these characters not saying the expressions, but humming. After that, I would ask them to practise the conversation orally trying to show each character’s intention or feeling. This activity can be performed throughout the year, as we deal with the units of the textbook. CONCLUSION On one hand, the effects of stress at the segmental and lexical level show the importance of stress not only for what it contributes to the correct pronunciation of English at the segmental and suprasegmental level, but for its effects on intelligibility due to its lexical and syntactic function. On the other hand, speech without intonational features is no more than a machine output. Intonation is a paralinguistic device in vocal communication. It reveals many facets of the communication process taking into consideration all factors present in the discourse context. Therefore, it is an indispensable part of speech. As a conclusion, I would dare say that practising English pronunciation in terms of stressing and unstressing should be a rewarding task and that a proficiency in stress and intonation is a requirement for non-native learners of English for a better communicative discourse with native or non-native speakers of English. In my opinion, there is no way out for us as teachers of English. These suprasegmental features need to be included as compulsory contents in the syllabus designed for the teaching of English as a second/foreign language and some of the weekly class time should be devoted to the teaching of stress and intonation, which, in terms of phonetic characteristics, are tightly linked together; as it cannot be said that this part of the sound corresponds to stress and this one corresponds to intonation because what we call stress depends on pitch movement. In other words, these two contents need not to be taught in isolation, but in an integrative way. References  Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Goodwin, J. (1996). Teaching pronunciation: A reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dalton, Ch & Seidlhofer, B (1994). Pronunciation. Oxford University Press. Roach, P. (2000). English phonetics and phonology: a practical course Cambridge University Press. Morley, J (1993) (Ed.), Current perspectives on pronunciation. Washington, C: TESOL.  