Is it that hard?!

Have you ever been in a situation in which you had to teach your student an English sound and he/she just couldn't make it?! Let's take as an example the one of the funniest Friends episode:

Yeah, I'm quite sure most of you have! :)

And these are the moments in which we find ourselves thinking if it is worth to insist on teaching pronunciation. The fact is that we just can't blame the complexity of the English phonemic system... Ok, it IS complex, BUT one has to take into consideration some other elements: the sex of the learner, the age of the speaker, the problems such learner might have in the speech organs, etc.

Sex may not be so decisive as to whether or not a person is able to produce this or that sound, though some researchers defend that firmly. The age influence is precisely the most focused point of discussion about pronunciation acquisition (take a look at Lund's paper about that) and most people believe that the sooner a person studies pronunciation (not only that, but a foreign language itself) the more successful he/she is going to be. And even more warning, we have the fact that our student might have problems concerning the speech organs, such a problem being the reason why he/she can't produce some sounds.

Besides all that has been discussed so far, we have to consider that some students just don't have listening accurancy sufficient to perceive some sounds. If we don't provide our students with an apropriate audio input (and this I mean all sort of it: music, movies, dialogues, etc) they won't develop the capacity of properly acquiring the sounds we teach.

Hence, you must be the first one to insist on pronunciation. Do it so that your students follow you!

Minimal is maximal

Hi there, dear visitors. This post is about minimal pair drills. Yes, those "boring" and "silly" exercises! That's what people say (at least most of them). However, I have dealt with them (applying this technique in class) for quite a while and noticed they are not like that at all.

We know how difficult it is to have our students pronounce the English sounds correctly. They mispronounce them repeatedly because they just can't realize, most of the times, the difference they have comparing to their mother tong as well as if compared to other similar sounds in English. And that's exactly when it comes to be pretty useful for us to adopt minimal pair drills.

As soon as one gets to practice, hearing and pronouncing, two words that only differ by just one sound (minimal pairs), the distance between these sounds gets highlighted by their peculiarities (points of articulation, manner of articulation, intensity). In addition, the words which compound the minimal pairs provide the phonemes being analyzed with a context, by their meanings themselves or through the sentences they may come in.

In this concern, exercises like

berry x very (a great confusion to Spanish speakers)

rice x lice (which may be challenging to Japanese people)

pen x pan (a "karma" to Brazilians)

can be of great help, as the problematic sounds are precisely contrasted and adequately contextualized by words, which would be funny in exemples like

He's a berry nice fellow

I'm starving. I want to eat some lice.

I'll use the new pen to cook.

As to students' first language interference, minimal pair drills help achieve the necessary accuracy of the sounds in focus so that these can be efficiently distinguished from the learner's native ones.

Phonemic chart

Hey, everybody, I have just found this awesome chart of the English phonology phonemes and I would like to share that with you. Super interactive, it highlights the sound we choose by pronouncing it and giving a word which has this sound. Check it out:

One Stop English Phonemic Chart

My Fair King

I have just watched the so famous Academy Award best picture winner: The King's Speech, and I was amazed by the astonishing work Tom Hooper directed as far as it made me remember My Fair Lady so much. As a matter of fact, it is as brilliant as this last one.

The movie is about King George VI (played by Colin Firth), who has to overcome his stammering in order to pronounce his speechs, specially by the time England gets involved in the Second World War.

The movie starts when King George VI, then Duke of York, has to read a message from his father, King George V, at the closing ceremony of the British Empire Exibition. In this occasion he does not succeed in his task and begin to stammer dreadfully. Because of such a problem he tried some doctors to help him overcome his problem (one of them even makes him put some marbles into his mouth and try to read a book passage – reminds you of anything?) but with no success at all. At least until his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonhan Carter), persuades him to see Lionel Logue (amazingly interpreted by Geoffrey Rush).

Lionel (Higgins?!) then starts to work on muscle relaxation and breath control, while simultaneously probing the psychological roots of his stammer (which had its roots on the treatment he had been trough when he was a kid).

But what I really liked in this movie, besides the funny (but effective) techniques used by Lionel, was the psichological matter about the King's problem. I mean, it was not just a matter of "mechanic problems", as he and his wife thought.

This can be quite a good reminder to us (teachers) that our students, when not getting to pronounce properly, may have anatomical or, even worse, psichological troubles relating to that. Therefore, we must be very cautious about the way we teach phonology to our students and about what we ask from them.

Finally (and beautifully), the movie is also about friendship. In addition to the extreme sensibility Lionel has as to the King, he is also a very good friend.

Harry Potter and the American accent

Talking about L1 interference, let us take a look at four of the characters of the Harry Potter movie series (BBC  English speakers) trying to pronounce some sentences in the American way:

L1 interference – a challenge

The interference generated by the learner's native language phonological system is such a challenge for teachers of English "phono" to overcome. As far as we use our mother tongue most of the time, it is predictable that we will surely face problems of dealing with the target language phonological system. And this is quite comprehensive because one needs to rely on something (in this case, some phonogical reference) when constructing what is called interlanguage. It is something we (teachers) face very frequently: we struggle to make our students' pronunciations sound better and better and even though some of them still cannot achieve what we hope for. Jus like in this case:

Nevertheless, the problem might consist precisely on trying to get rid of this influence. How come?! Well.. it should be clear that one (as a majority) cannot, and should not, lose his accent. It is his identity, his heritage, with/through which he is going to express himself. According to studies enlightened by interlanguage, there is this in-between language stage which consists of the linguistic system that has been constructed by the input of the L2 while preserving some features of the L1. Thus, taking in consideration that interlanguage IS built up by both L2 AND L1 interferences, instead of denying our L1 phonological system, we should use it to help us. For instance, we can use the lisp condition as a technique for those who cannot realize the correct place of articulation of the 'th' sound (see How to pronounce the 'th' sound). In this way, by using "old things" in a new way, I believe it is possible to create a new-learning enviroment.

How to pronounce the 'th' sound

One of the most difficult sounds for us (teachers) to teach our students is the th sounds. As far as it does not exist in our phonology system it is really hard for them to produce properly, which takes time and constant practice. One technique I use with my students and which serves them quite well is to compare the th sounds with the lisp. In fact, the online Cambridge dictionary brings the entry lisp as being a verb meaning "to pronounce 's' and 'z' sounds like 'th'."

A cinematic homage

My Fair Lady (1964), adapted from the Broadway musical,  is one of the best movies of the Oscar Academy and had won 8 statuetts, including Best Picture and Directing (by George Cukor). It is about an expert in phonetics, Professor Higgins (Rex Harrison), who accepts the challenge of transforming a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Dolittle (Audrey Hepburn), into a sofisticated Victorian lady. For this to happen, he has to change her accent, besides and above all the other features she has. Therefore, the movie gets really funny when we get to see the efforts of Professor Higgins to teach what seems to be impossible when it comes to Eliza (who has no moods whatsoever). Let us see one scene which shows two of her problems: substitution of "ei" for "ai" and lack of the aspirated "h":

That is why I like and recomend this movie so much. In addition to being really hilarious, it provides us with something we (teachers) may find in our classes: of course not a cockney person (who knows!), but certainly students who deal with dire difficulties about the pronunciation of the English languge.

A Glossary of "phono" terms

I was searching for something on the Internet (I don't remember exactly where) and I found this very good glossary full of terms related to English "phono". Written by Peter Roach, it consists of a little encyclopedia about our beloved subject, in which the entries are very easy to find either because they are alphabetically disposed or (best of all) because it brings the alphabet itself (except the letters "Y" and "Z") for one to click on the letter which corresponds to the first one of the entry he is looking for.

This is it. Here is the link. Enjoy it!

A glimpse of 24 English accents

This guy is amazing. When I first saw this video I was like "WOW", how can he do that!?. What I like most about it is the variety contained in the British English variation. I mean, even though we get to "learn" a variation, there are some others within it. It just shows us that we should not be prejudiced about this or that English because, in the end, all of them are just parts of something bigger.