Post by Dee Broughton on Jun 29, 2015 16:00:59 GMT 5
Every language teacher and materials designer needs a clear point of view about the value of pronunciation, phonology, accent, etc. In the past, efforts were focused on producing "native-like" pronunciation and accent, but, even then, the questions arose "which natives?" and "which accent". There was a lot of stigma attached to some accents, but this idea is changing. Did you know that 75% of the world's English language users are speakers who have other primary languages?
This week's reading is an article by Rebecca Dauer that reviews Jenkins work on the Lingua Franca Core. Jenkins offers a view of teaching pronunciation that strives for comfortable intelligibility. Her research is based on the features of pronunciation that appear to be essential to understanding between speakers who use English as a secondary language.
Read the article, Dauer, R. (2005). The Lingua Franca Core: A new model for Ppronunciation instruction?. TESOL Quarterly, 39(3), 543-550.
Then, take a look at these samples of data from Jenkins' research:
From
Jenkins, J. (2002). A sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for English as an international language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 87-90.
Examples of pronunciation-based miscommunication in interlanguage talk
We begin with five examples drawn from the author's field data. The majority of this data was collected over a period of three years in classroom and social settings, with the aim of establishing the extent to which miscommunication in ILT is caused primarily by problems at the phonological level. Over this period, I noted down every example of mis- and non-communication that occurred in my presence and, wherever feasible, discussed the cause(s) with the interlocutors involved. What emerged was a clear indication that although pronunciation was by no means the sole cause of ILT communication breakdown, it was by far the most frequent and the most difficult to resolve. The following five examples are typical of the errors which caused intelligibility problems for ILT interlocutors in the data, and exemplify the categories of phonological error which most often proved problematic: consonant sounds, tonic (or nuclear) stress, vowel length, and non¬ permissible (according to the rules of English syllable structure) simplification of consonant clusters.
[1] [a1 'pend] ='I failed'
In this example, an Ll Korean speaker of English had taken his driving test that morning. He entered the classroom after the lunc!I break, and announced that he had failed the test. His classmates (from a range of Lls), did not understand the significance of what he had said. and one followed the announcement with the enquiry 'Did you pass your test, Lee?' In this example, the typical Korean sound substitution of /p/ for Iff had rendered the speaker's pronunciation unintelligible for his non-Korean receivers. There are several other examples in the field data of this speaker's /p/-/f/ sound substitution causing problems for receivers. For example, 'wife' pronounced
'wipe'; 'finish' pronounced 'pinish'; 'coffee' pronounced 'copy'; 'father' pronounced 'pader'.
[2] I smoke more than you DO = 'I smoke more than you do:'
In this example, the speaker, an Ll Taiwanese speaker of English, and his Swiss-Italian interlocutor were discussing how many cigarettes a day they each smoked. The Swiss-Italian subject had just told the Taiwanese subject that she smoked around 20 a day. The latter replied that he smoked more than she did, but instead of putting tonic (nuclear) stress on the word 'you', where it would have indicated intonationally the contrast he was making lexically, he put it on the last item in the tone unit, that is 'you'. After three repetitions she still did not understand.
[3] Shakespeare's [bo:sple1s] = 'Shakespeare's birthplace'
In this case, a Japanese speaker was giving a short presentation to a mixed-11 class. He announced the tide of his talk as what sounded most like 'Shakespeare's bathplace' (although the /8/ was pronounced /s/). During the presentation he described Stratford-upon-Avon, talked about Shakespeare's early years, his marriage to Anne Hathaway, his acting career, and his plays. When the student had finished speaking and offered his audience the opportunity to ask questions, the first was an enquiry about the connection between the content of the talk and a bath. Indeed, the majority of the group admitted to having thought the talk had concerned a bath, although they had not been able to identify a connection. The problem here was the substitution of /3I/ with /o:/, a substitution which frequently caused intelligibility problems in my data, and one which had previously been noted by others such as Schwartz (1980). On the other hand, the replacement of /8/ with /s/ was not at all problematic-and this was a phenomenon which recurred regularly in the data.
[4] Have you got a blue VUN? = 'Have you got a blue one?'
Here we have an example of a combination of phonological errors which caused the most serious problems in my data: misplaced tonic (nuclear) stress along with a consonant substitution within the wrongly stressed word. An Ll Hungarian student of English was talking with three other students, respectively from Guatemala, (French) Switzerland, and Brazil. They were using coloured pens to make posters for the classroom wall. At one point the Hungarian asked his fellow students if any of them had a blue pen. However, he not only placed tonic stress on the final item in the tone unit, but he also substituted the /w/ of 'one' with a /v/. The other students asked several times 'What is vun?' and only understood his meaning when the speaker located the pen he needed, and held it up, saying 'Blue vun like TillS'. It could be argued that the problem in this example was also lexical: the listeners may have assumed that 'vun' was a word unfamiliar to them. However, the same problem arises in my data when tonic stress is misplaced on words that are both familiar to listeners and contain no segmental errors. It seems, then, that any lexical difficulties of the kind encountered in example 4 are compounded by misplaced tonic stress.
[5] [d5 la1zliz of 'sk] = 'Don't rise the fees of school.'
In this final example, another Ll Japanese speaker of English was giving a short presentation to her mixed-Ll class. She had been discussing education in the EC and, in particular, its high cost for international students such as herself and concluded her talk with the words 'don't rise the fees of school'. However, only the other Japanese students in the group understood her meaning, while the others remained completely baffled even after she had repeated the sentence four times. Eventually we 'translated' it word for word and the meaning was immediately clear despite the two lexicogrammatical errors ('rise' for 'raise'; 'fees of school' for 'school fees'). In this example, the several pronunication errors all involve vowel length and consonant substitution. Both these error types are frequent causes of unintelligible pronunciation in my empirical data.
The problem of contextual cues
At this point, the reader may wish to argue that where contextual or cotextual information is available, it is likely to clarify meaning where pronunciation has failed to do so. However, in interlanguage talk this appears not to be the case. In NS-NS interaction and in interaction where one or more participants are fluent bilinguals, receivers regularly (though not always) make use of contextual and cotextual information as aids to the clarification of meaning. On the other hand, when the receiver and speaker are both NNSs, the receiver tends to focus on the acoustic signal and direct his or her effort to decoding what has been heard. Where this does not tally with visual and other extralinguistic cues, or with the cotext then, time and again in my ILT data, the receiver adjusts the context and/or cotext to bring them into line with the acoustic information rather than vice versa.
This week's reading is an article by Rebecca Dauer that reviews Jenkins work on the Lingua Franca Core. Jenkins offers a view of teaching pronunciation that strives for comfortable intelligibility. Her research is based on the features of pronunciation that appear to be essential to understanding between speakers who use English as a secondary language.
Read the article, Dauer, R. (2005). The Lingua Franca Core: A new model for Ppronunciation instruction?. TESOL Quarterly, 39(3), 543-550.
Then, take a look at these samples of data from Jenkins' research:
From
Jenkins, J. (2002). A sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for English as an international language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 87-90.
Examples of pronunciation-based miscommunication in interlanguage talk
We begin with five examples drawn from the author's field data. The majority of this data was collected over a period of three years in classroom and social settings, with the aim of establishing the extent to which miscommunication in ILT is caused primarily by problems at the phonological level. Over this period, I noted down every example of mis- and non-communication that occurred in my presence and, wherever feasible, discussed the cause(s) with the interlocutors involved. What emerged was a clear indication that although pronunciation was by no means the sole cause of ILT communication breakdown, it was by far the most frequent and the most difficult to resolve. The following five examples are typical of the errors which caused intelligibility problems for ILT interlocutors in the data, and exemplify the categories of phonological error which most often proved problematic: consonant sounds, tonic (or nuclear) stress, vowel length, and non¬ permissible (according to the rules of English syllable structure) simplification of consonant clusters.
[1] [a1 'pend] ='I failed'
In this example, an Ll Korean speaker of English had taken his driving test that morning. He entered the classroom after the lunc!I break, and announced that he had failed the test. His classmates (from a range of Lls), did not understand the significance of what he had said. and one followed the announcement with the enquiry 'Did you pass your test, Lee?' In this example, the typical Korean sound substitution of /p/ for Iff had rendered the speaker's pronunciation unintelligible for his non-Korean receivers. There are several other examples in the field data of this speaker's /p/-/f/ sound substitution causing problems for receivers. For example, 'wife' pronounced
'wipe'; 'finish' pronounced 'pinish'; 'coffee' pronounced 'copy'; 'father' pronounced 'pader'.
[2] I smoke more than you DO = 'I smoke more than you do:'
In this example, the speaker, an Ll Taiwanese speaker of English, and his Swiss-Italian interlocutor were discussing how many cigarettes a day they each smoked. The Swiss-Italian subject had just told the Taiwanese subject that she smoked around 20 a day. The latter replied that he smoked more than she did, but instead of putting tonic (nuclear) stress on the word 'you', where it would have indicated intonationally the contrast he was making lexically, he put it on the last item in the tone unit, that is 'you'. After three repetitions she still did not understand.
[3] Shakespeare's [bo:sple1s] = 'Shakespeare's birthplace'
In this case, a Japanese speaker was giving a short presentation to a mixed-11 class. He announced the tide of his talk as what sounded most like 'Shakespeare's bathplace' (although the /8/ was pronounced /s/). During the presentation he described Stratford-upon-Avon, talked about Shakespeare's early years, his marriage to Anne Hathaway, his acting career, and his plays. When the student had finished speaking and offered his audience the opportunity to ask questions, the first was an enquiry about the connection between the content of the talk and a bath. Indeed, the majority of the group admitted to having thought the talk had concerned a bath, although they had not been able to identify a connection. The problem here was the substitution of /3I/ with /o:/, a substitution which frequently caused intelligibility problems in my data, and one which had previously been noted by others such as Schwartz (1980). On the other hand, the replacement of /8/ with /s/ was not at all problematic-and this was a phenomenon which recurred regularly in the data.
[4] Have you got a blue VUN? = 'Have you got a blue one?'
Here we have an example of a combination of phonological errors which caused the most serious problems in my data: misplaced tonic (nuclear) stress along with a consonant substitution within the wrongly stressed word. An Ll Hungarian student of English was talking with three other students, respectively from Guatemala, (French) Switzerland, and Brazil. They were using coloured pens to make posters for the classroom wall. At one point the Hungarian asked his fellow students if any of them had a blue pen. However, he not only placed tonic stress on the final item in the tone unit, but he also substituted the /w/ of 'one' with a /v/. The other students asked several times 'What is vun?' and only understood his meaning when the speaker located the pen he needed, and held it up, saying 'Blue vun like TillS'. It could be argued that the problem in this example was also lexical: the listeners may have assumed that 'vun' was a word unfamiliar to them. However, the same problem arises in my data when tonic stress is misplaced on words that are both familiar to listeners and contain no segmental errors. It seems, then, that any lexical difficulties of the kind encountered in example 4 are compounded by misplaced tonic stress.
[5] [d5 la1zliz of 'sk] = 'Don't rise the fees of school.'
In this final example, another Ll Japanese speaker of English was giving a short presentation to her mixed-Ll class. She had been discussing education in the EC and, in particular, its high cost for international students such as herself and concluded her talk with the words 'don't rise the fees of school'. However, only the other Japanese students in the group understood her meaning, while the others remained completely baffled even after she had repeated the sentence four times. Eventually we 'translated' it word for word and the meaning was immediately clear despite the two lexicogrammatical errors ('rise' for 'raise'; 'fees of school' for 'school fees'). In this example, the several pronunication errors all involve vowel length and consonant substitution. Both these error types are frequent causes of unintelligible pronunciation in my empirical data.
The problem of contextual cues
At this point, the reader may wish to argue that where contextual or cotextual information is available, it is likely to clarify meaning where pronunciation has failed to do so. However, in interlanguage talk this appears not to be the case. In NS-NS interaction and in interaction where one or more participants are fluent bilinguals, receivers regularly (though not always) make use of contextual and cotextual information as aids to the clarification of meaning. On the other hand, when the receiver and speaker are both NNSs, the receiver tends to focus on the acoustic signal and direct his or her effort to decoding what has been heard. Where this does not tally with visual and other extralinguistic cues, or with the cotext then, time and again in my ILT data, the receiver adjusts the context and/or cotext to bring them into line with the acoustic information rather than vice versa.