Teaching Pronunciation

1. Teaching Pronunciation Fernando Trujillo Sáez

2. What is Pronunciation? • The Production of Significant Sound. • Significant because • it is used as part of a code of a particular language • it is used to achieve meaning in contexts of use. • Auditory Phonetics = The perception of the sound. • Articulatory Phonetics = The production of the sound.

3. Is there a correct pronunciation? • “insisting on “correct” pronunciation may not always be desirable. And it may not be feasible, either.” (8) • “The relevant question to ask is not: what is correct in relation to a native-speaker norm (RP or otherwise), but: what is appropriate and necessary to be able to communicate in specific situations?”(12) • “The task of pronunciation teaching, as in the teaching of any other aspect of language, is to establish models for guidance, not norms for imitation.” (6) • Dalton, Christiane & Barbara Seidlhofer (1994): Pronunciation. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

4. Selection • Size of unit • Sound segments • Prosodic units • Focus of attention • L1 interference • L2 communicative value: frequency and functional importance.

5. Presentation • Exposure Procedures: • Communicative tasks with no explicit teaching of pronunciation. • Exercise Procedures: • Identification of sound features. • Practice in perception and production. • Explanation Procedures: • Sensitizing and Awareness-raising activities about phonetic and phonological facts.

6. Teachability and Learnability • There is an inverse relationship between communicative importance and teachability. • Sound segments = [+easy to teach, - communicatively important] • Intonation = [-easy to teach, + communicatively important]

7. Sounds • Ear training and Awareness building • Before learners can be asked to produce the sounds of a new language, they need to learn to perceive them. • So, one of the first objectives of PT is to help learners perceive the differences between the significant sounds of English. • Important: We tend to hear the sounds of a new language through the filter of our first language.

8. Sounds • Communicating vs. Noticing • Foreign Language Learning = • Comprehensible input + Comprehensible output ( + Language Awareness) • The need of reconciling a narrow focus on sounds with the communicative objectives of learner involvement and meaningful interaction.

9. Sounds • Innocence vs. Sophistication • The younger the learners, the more able they are to learn pronunciation by mimicry. • The older the learners, the more sophisticated the instruction that can be used (and the higher the standard of achievement per hour of instruction).

10. Intonation • Paradox: • A decisive element for communication but • A continuous problem for pronunciation teaching. • Topics: • Prominence: a combination of loudness, length, paralinguistic features and, above all, pitch movement. • New and Given information (fall-rise for given info & fall for new info). • Floor (high for keeping it and low for yielding it). • Subliminal activities: Sensitizing and Awareness-raising.

11. Stress • Two aspects: • Word-stress patterns = important for intelligibility. • Prominence = important for communication. • Procedures: • The impossibility of providing rules. • The contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables (foregrounding and backgrounding).

12. Connected Speech • Three processes of connected speech: • Assimilation: the changes of a sound provoked by the surrounding sounds. • Elision: The leaving out of a sound or sounds in speech. • Linking: the insertion of a sound in order to make a smooth transition from one sound to another. • Modelling and mimicry.