Long time, no post! It has been a busy few weeks, and then I contracted the Cold of Doom that made me wish I had some HiberNol. I've finally managed to get over it, but my voice is still not 100%.

Anyway...

A few recent conversations have made me think more about the teaching of pronunciation. I read an Arteaga (2000) article back in grad school that claims pronunciation instruction has been relegated to "stepchild status" (p. 340; this is actually my all-time favorite scholarly quotation regarding pronunciation teaching). There are a lot of theories as to why pronunciation instruction sort of takes a back seat, but I think multilingual classrooms make pronunciation instruction difficult to tackle. For example, why teach the p/b distinction when only half your class has trouble discriminating between those sounds? In this regard, I prefer teaching a class of students that are all from the same language group--sure, I might have more difficulty keeping them from using their first language, but I know any pronunciation lessons won't be irrelevant to a large cross section of the class. Still, my classes are usually very linguistically diverse, so I have to focus on things like word stress and other suprasegmentals that usually pose problems to many language groups coming to English.
 
But pronunciation teaching of individual sounds is still important as I will illustrate in the following situations I have encountered, some recent and some not so recent. How can the errors in following dialogues be explained? (Hint: phonotactics or Best's (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model).

Dialogue 1
"I like playing board games."
"Oh, me, too. I really like Mona Bowly."
"Mona Bowly? What game is that?"
"You don't know Mona Bowly? It's an American game. It's very bobular. Everybody knows it."

Dialogue 2
"My motto is, 'It's my life.' Do you know 'It's my life'? Actually, it is from a famous American musician called Joan Bone Jobi. Do you know Joan Bone Jobi?"

Dialogue 3
"People will understand you if you say, 'He don't know,' but it isn't correct."
"How they understand me if it not correct?"
"It has more to do with status. Do you know the word 'status'?"
"Yes. Uh huh." (nodding from the whole class).
"Okay, what is it?"
"You walk up and down them."

Dialogue 4
"Mecca, it's an important city for Muslims. Do you know the Hajj?"
"Of course. I know about the Hajj."
"As you know, Billy Graham goes to Mecca. If you are Muslim, you must go to Mecca one time in your life."

(click Read More at the bottom to see the answer)

I'm always working on ways to help more students with pronunciation. Sometimes it's hard even finding the right thing to teach about. Unless you're teaching English in China or Korea where everyone is from the same language group, it's difficult to find something that applies to all groups equally. Let's look at some examples:

• the difference between /p/ and /b/ will give trouble to Arabic speakers, but not Korean or Spanish speakers.
• Korean and Japanese speakers with have trouble with "th" sounds, but Arabic speakers generally will not.
• some vowels will be easier for one group, but not another 
  

So what do you teach? One thing I've noticed is that sentence stress and rhythm is generally a problem for all learners. So what do we do?

In my experience, it's great to make students aware that English is a stress-timed language, not syllable-timed. 

Basically, in English, a sentence becomes longer when there are more stressed words in it. For example, these all take approximately the same time to say: 
cows eat green grass quickly
the cows eat the green grass quickly
the cows have eaten the grass quickly
the cows have been eating the grass quickly
the cows could have been eating the grass quickly

You see, it's the important words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that receive stress. The other parts of the sentence, the articles (the), the auxiliary verbs (been, have), modals (could), and verb endings (-ing, -en) are important for grammar but not for the basic meaning of the sentence.

When I show my students this, sometimes they don't believe me, but then I tell them to go out and listen to native speakers talk. They always come back saying, "you're right! That is how they say it!"

If you're learning English, try to pay attention to what people say and how they say it. Listen to what words they stress and what words they don't.

I'd like to also talk about strong vowels and weak vowels in English, which is very closely related to English being stress-timed, but I think that's enough for now.

If you have any questions, please post a comment on this blog post.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!


-Bill