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)

There are many answers to this question, but in my experience, one consistent element I find across all non-native foreign accents and pronunciation is that each syllable is pronounced with the same stress.

I'll give an example:

A native speaker will generally stress content words (for example: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). However, it is very uncommon for a native to stress a function word (auxiliary verbs, articles, demonstratives). Consider this sentence:

Jack could have been taking the train to London.

A native speaker will stress only the content words, like so:

Jack could have been taking the train to London.

The other words are function words (even the -ing in taking), so they are pronounced with a weak vowel (called the schwa). This weak vowel is not strong, and sounds very short and unclear. Furthermore, these function words will "change" there pronunciation in fast speech. It will sound more like this:

Jack kədəvbən takən thə train tə London.

So "could have been" kind of becomes one word blended together, "kədəvbən." Step by step:

1. could --> /kəd/
2. have --> /əv/ (the h sound is deleted)
3. been --> /bən/

Some speakers might even speak faster and pronounce have as just a vowel /ə/. They might also change the /t/ in to so it assimilates to the sound before it (the /n/ in train) For example:

Jack kədəbən takən thə train nə London.

So if you want to sound foreign, pronounce every vowel with full strength and volume, but if you want to sound more native-like, put stress on the content words and then make the other words in the sentence weaker.

Just take some time to listen to native speakers talking and try to pay attention to how they pronounce content words and function words. You will hear a difference, I promise.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill