This was the subject of my Master’s dissertation, which I finished in 2003. To be more accurate, my focus was on communicative pronunciation and how 14 best-selling elementary level course books almost completely ignored it. Seven years on, the same is happening with today’s courses.
Yesterday, I came across an article by Adrian Underhill who argued similar sentiments. He said:
“… pronunciation teaching has been neglected and that … In spite of the development of interesting teaching materials … it remains the poor relation of language teaching, poorly related to the rest of what happens in the language classroom.”
Underhill compares how pronunciation has been left behind, compared with other skills:
“While much has changed in the last few decades in how we teach grammar, vocabulary, collocation, context and meaning I suggest that pronunciation is still rooted in an essentially behaviourist paradigm of listen, identify, discriminate and repeat.”
His most striking comment for me was this:
“Teachers do their best to integrate pronunciation but for many it remains a supplement to the main diet of most lessons, often relegated in lessons and course books to ‘pron slots’.”
The research in my dissertation (51 criteria applied to the 327 pronunciation activities in the 14 course books) showed the coursebooks did relegate pronunciation to “pron slots”. More worrying for me is that the way the coursebooks covered pronunciation ran counter to their back-cover blurbs that they present “communicative pronunciation”. This was not evident in any of my research.
A brief summary of my findings shows:
Key indicators supportive of this are that in most activities there was…
- a minimal regard for communication and communicative competence
- a massive segmental to suprasegmental imbalance (80.43% to 16.21%)
- an extensive use of listen-and-repeat and other mechanical techniques and absolutely nothing on analyzing discourse
- a more or less total disregard for discourse competence and intonation – no activities contextually based on the listening activities in the books
- an isolated and fragmented nature of pronunciation
- a lack of comprehensible input in listening activities
- a non-communicative design and presentation method
How this manifests itself in course books:
A few very short activities per unit that are based on sounds, word stress and a formulaic sentence stress. Rarely are any of these related to anything else on the page.
What should happen:
The above, plus elision, juncture, intrusiveness, etc, weak forms, intonation, and most importantly (?) the function of intonation in discourse and the reason for taking intonational choices.
My recommendations for change:
- pronunciation needs to be integrated with the listening activities in coursebooks rather than being standalone, isolated activities
- activities on intonation focusing on making intonational choices with confidence and success
- moving from the overuse of minimal-pairs to working on sounds in communicative contexts
- a greater focus on observing rapidly spoken speech
- focus less on prescribed patterns in sterile contexts and more on real patterns in real speech
- move from word-by-word citational forms to tone units
- less mechanical recitation to increased awareness of what constitutes the linguistic blur of streamed speech (elision, juncture, etc.)
- from reciting syllables to counting syllables, from making a sound longer to recognizing its saliency of length, and from guessing to recognizing rises and falls in intonation
- from alphabetized transcription devices to ones involving greater sensory involvement, especially phonemic charts
True? How can we rectify this?
Tags: course books, intonation, phonology, pronunciation, teaching materials
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Aniya, Shelly S Terrell, James Edward Charles, Christina Ridgley, Noor and others. Noor said: RT @TheEngTeacher: Pronunciation – The Skill Course Books Left Behind http://bit.ly/bjaL80 via @seanbanville [...]
How true, Sean. I totally agree with you and I’m glad you raised a point that I feel quite stongly about myself.
The problem is that the majority of EFL teachers “go with the book” and the idea that “most of the listening and speaking done by our sts is with non-native speakers anyway, so there’s not much point in teaching pron”. Although this is the reality it would still be tremendously useful to teach all pron in an integrative way, as you suggested above. As a trainer I hardly ever see teachers dig into the connected speech features of a listening text to enabale them to decode meaning more easily. And, Oh god, how useful this would be. I really think this is essential based on my own language learning exprience. While studying English myself at uni, i had a strong urge to find what the typical communicative patterns sound like, and I would train my “English facial sound muscles” – as I call them as often as possible.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that teachers tend to rely on coursebooks, which do not integrate the features you highlighted above enough, as far as I see. But then even the teachers themselves want to “sound as English as possible”, non-native teachers that is. The reason why the majority of non-natives are reluctant to teach pron, however, is that they are not happy with their own pron. And secondly, there is no material they could rely on in coursbooks to compensate this. Sound like a vicious circle we got into.
How can we rectify this? Can we convince publishers that integrating lots more pron work in coursebooks IS essential? Let’t blog about this more, then. That could be a first step
Erika
I agree about putting pron together with listening, and in fact a couple of recent books about listening put quite a lot of empahsis on that. The rest I will have to think about more carefully. In the meantime, just questions.
Do you think the ideas of Jennifer Jenkins of pron for EIL impacts on your ideas at all?
Is there any evidence that analysis of suprasegmental features leads to progress? I thought they’d decided, for example, that analysing intonation is a waste of time if you aren’t musical. And isn’t that kind of analysis exactly what people are saying we should get away from with grammar?
Hi Erika – It’s an interesting point you make about non-native speakers worrying about teaching pronunciation. I would imagine a fair few native speakers might also worry about regional accents (which we all have). There used to be a standard that was used to “sound as English as possible” – The Queen’s English or the American equivalent. Thankfully we are over the notion we must all speak like the Queen.
I think focusing on what learners sound like is the problem – it focuses on sounds and citational forms of isolated words. I think we need to focus on suprasegmentals – what happens in the stream of speech. The articulatory shortcuts we use when joining or shortening words are probably the same with any accent, as is the length and placement of intonational stress. But how to deal with this in course books?
Personally, I think it’s not only coursebooks that are deficient in the treatment of pronunciation. It’s industry wide. Given that many academics believe phonology is the most important skill learners need, there is surprisingly little attention on it in training courses.
Could it be that it’s so difficult to understand, interpret and thus teach in relation to grammar, vocabulary, writing, etc. I think so. I found it easy to understand grammar (the tense system, its functions and uses, etc.) and vocabulary (word form, collocation, etc.) but have never been as comfortable with phonology, even after reading one of my fave ELT books a dozen times (Adrian Underhill’s Sound Foundations) and absorbing and teaching from cover to cover David Brazil’s course on discourse intonation for advanced learners. I found it very hard to “teach”.
Nevertheless, course books do need to try harder, at least to give a context to the pronunciation activities sparingly placed on their pages, and at the very least provide exercises or activities related to the listening. I suppose the reason they don’t is real estate – the competition against the other skills for page space.
But, there is a lot we can do ourselves. One way of focusing students’ attention on things like elision, juncture, short forms, etc. is to record passages yourself using the sound editor Audacity and then copy and paste segments of sounds back to back. This allows the students to listen non-stop to areas you want them to focus on.
Thanks Alex for this comment.
I thought many of Jenkins’ ideas were the equivalent to George Orwell’s newspeak – the stripping down of the language to the minimum required to be universally understood. On the face of it, a fantastic, logical idea
But one that ain’t gonna happen. There are other points Jenkins made that course books really do need to adopt, such as lessening the importance on the teaching of phonemes most native speakers do their best to avoid – particularly the two ‘th’ sounds, which most of us like to replace with a /d/ or /v/ sound. For me, Jenkins’ greatest argument is that American and British English standards of pron are no longer the standards, although a lot of my students want a British or American accent.
All of my books and journals are in Japan, but I remember papers showing an awareness of suprasegmentals improved listening ability and intelligibility.
I’m not so sure about the link between intonation and musicality. In Brazil’s analysis, there are only five tones we use in the stream of speech. The students who took my 12-week course using his book had few problems recognizing the tones. My problem was “teaching” the students to sue them. Brazil attributes each tone with a specific reason for using them, based on information already shared by speaker and interlocutor, information presented for the first time, etc. Brazil posited this kind of intonation aids intelligibility and hence communication.
I think student analysis of or focusing on what happens in the stream of speech, at word boundaries and the reasons for intonational choices is a great form of consciousness raising. Once students increase their comprehension of thus, they are on their way to becoming better listeners.
As a coursebook writer myself, I can promise you that pronunciation got a whole lot of love and attention in my speaking and listening strands:
http://www.boostskillsseries.com/speaking/speaking_03.php (see activities on second page of unit, but pronunciation also often included as particular skills guiding a whole unit as well)
http://www.boostskillsseries.com/listening/listening_03.php (see third page of unit, but again, often a whole unit is predicated on a skill that has pronunciation as its focus)
I did blog about this issue of pronunciation recently, but given you don’t seem to be able to access it from where you are, I’ll leave that one off the list!
Good work focusing on this, Sean – it really did need to be addressed by coursebook writers and publishers.
Cheers,
- Jason
Hi Sean, Jason and Alex,
Just a few thoughts before I have to leave for my lesson. (Sorry this IS going to be v. brief.)
When I said that non-natives would like “to sound as English as posible”, i didn’t really mean to use either British, American or Australian accent. In my experience what they don’t really use, but would like to are features of connected speech, primarily. As they themselves don’t use them, and don’t even realise what difference it makes in terms of meaning as well, especially if combined with the sentence stress (see difference b/w ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ ‘ vs I will see to it, do not worry.’) So these are for example the type of activities that I really miss from current coursebooks. This was, however, an example related to the speaking skill.
To give you a quick example of an awareness raising and well as sensiting activity for features of connected speeh. here’s what I would like to see in coursebooks integrated with the listening texts.
Say the listening text is about language tests. Now the computer wrote down this text, but made some mistakes. Sts have to repeat the sentences to themselves by reading them out loud (i.e. practising con. speech) and correct the following sentece so that it makes sense:
“This exam was desing detest how well you can use English in real life situation.”
I’m pretty sure that you could immediately solve it. Now if you think about the processes that are involved in correcting the above error, they are exactly the skills that are essential in decoding meaning of a listening text.
Another great example for this type (see Pronuciation Games, Computer Dictation): “Alaska if she wants to come to the party.” Sure you would come to the same solution no matter where you are from, even as a native English teacher.
Sorry for not having time to give an example of intrepreting intonation in discourse, which is another neglected feature of phonology. May come back to this another day
Got to rush,
Erika
Hi again Erika,
We are agreed on the need for coursebooks to focus on connected speech and discourse intonation. My dissertation research (2003) found no coursebook dealing with these and I haven’t seen a course book since that attempts to. I’m surprised they don’t address connected speech as it is such fun to teach and students love the awareness activities and the happiness of suddenly hearing the shortcuts and sounds that had hitherto eluded them. The success of hearing “I’ll ask her” instead of “Alaska” can be one of the really great moments of learning English, perhaps greater than any grammatical or lexical realization. This is what really leads to better listening ability, not the formulaic stress patterns (which can change depending on the discoursal context) and citational forms of words which are predominant in all (not most) course books.
As I mentioned below, I think Discourse Intonation is a much trickier kettle of fish and one course books prefer to avoid.
Thanks again and best wishes
Hi Sean,
Have you looked at the face2face series? Some features of connected speech are addressed there, such as consonant to vowel linking, intrusive linking, elision and intonation. And they are related to the listening in the unit. But it is approached as ‘receptive pronunciation’, in other words to help with listening primarily rather than speaking. I do like the fact in those books that students are taught from the beginning of the elementary book what a native-speaker saying ‘do you’ would really sound like – /ʤə/ – rahter than teaching the citation form and then several years down the line teling them that actually nobody really speaks like that.
Johanna
Thanks Johanna – Will try and get a look at face2face. It sounds like it might be the best available in its treatment of pronunciation. I suppose the next step is to match the receptive skills with productive ones. I like the fact the book deems receptive pronunciation to be important – that’s quite refreshing – after all, listening and pronunciation are intertwined
It’s also great the book focuses on how native speakers actually sound with the /ʤə/.
Let’s hope there are more such course books to come.