Point to ponder

Let us consider what the impact of pronunciation errors could be.

Imagine a visitor from a foreign country staying with a family in an English-speaking country. Which of the following errors is likely to be treated most negatively by the listener:

• At what hour will dinner be ready? (lexical error)

• When has the dinner ready? (grammar)

• When will be dinner ready?

• When will dinner be ready? (error of stress)

What does it mean to teach pronunciation?

When we work on learners’ awareness of aspects of pronunciation on the one hand, and on their active production on the other, we have found a certain basic awareness on teacher’s part essential. In a practical sense, it can be based on a basic awareness in five areas of pronunciation:

• an awareness of what happens when sounds are produced;

• an awareness of what happens to sounds in rapid speech and when they contact with one another;

• an awareness of what it is that makes a stressed syllable stressed;

• an awareness of the relationships between tonic prominence placement and meaning;

• an awareness of the basic intonation patterns of English and how they relate to meaning.

So, the three most important elements of pronunciation for ELT are:

• Stress - which words, or which parts of a word, you say loudest and longest.

• Intonation – the way your voice goes up and down as you speak, especially at the end of what you say.

• Sounds – as in separate sounds and in contact.

Sounds

The smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two words is called phoneme. For example:

• in English, the words pan and ban differ only in their initial sound: pan begins with /p/ and ban with /b/.

• ban and bin differ only in their vowels: /æ/ and /ı/.

Therefore, /p/, /b/, /æ/ and /ı/ are phonemes of English. The number of phonemes varies from one language to another. English is often considered to have 44 phonemes: 24 consonants and 20 vowels.

(Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, p. 272)

The phonemic transcription is written between oblique lines /laık ðıs/. The attraction of the system is that we have one written symbol for each sound of spoken English, without the complications of standard English spelling. This is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as it is used for standard British and standard American English.

A familiarity with this alphabet can be helpful at least in four ways:

• It shows what separate sounds are involved in standard English. This kind of knowledge increases confidence.

• You may discover that your own pronunciation differs form the standard in some places. Anyway, differences between the teacher’s English and standard English should not be a threat as long as you can show that you know what is going on.

• Any good dictionary will give a pronunciation guide. This is important, because we all meet words in our reading which we do not know how to pronounce.

Some people argue that students have enough problems without learning a strange new alphabet, and that teaching such an alphabet is too academic for an ELT class. Others say that learning this alphabet will help students become independent learners, able to develop the skills based on their own increased awareness. While you make up your mind what will best suit your students, here are two techniques which do employ the IPA.

• When training students to use a dictionary, it is worth spending time showing them how the alphabet works and giving them some practice in working out unfamiliar pronunciations. You can then respond to further enquiries as they arise, and students who want to develop this skill will have the chance to do so.

• Isolate certain sounds in English which cause trouble for your students. Do they, perhaps, often confuse /æ/ and /e/, so that the words rat and red are pronounced identically? Put these two symbols on the wall with typical words under each one. When the mistake occurs at a time suitable for immediate correction, you merely point to one list or the other. After a while, you can take the example words away and just use the symbols.