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?

Create a speaking avatar and add your voice

Voki is a wonderful little tool that allows you to make your own avatar that speaks your messages. It appeals to me for these reasons:

• it’s free
• it’s incredibly easy to use – so intuitive – absolutely no training or reading is necessary
• it’s great fun
• my students really like it
• it has many cool uses
• you can embed it in your blog or website or e-mail it to someone

Here’s one of my Voki avatars:

I typed my message and selected the voice and accent from the drop-down menus. You sometimes have to type phonetically – For the avatar to pronounce ‘Voki’, I had to type ‘vocky’.

I usually try and choose the hair, face shape, clothing options that most resemble me. I can’t seem to find an option for the few bits of hair I have on the sides of my bald pate – guess they might come in the next version

Cool voice options:

• you can type what you want the avatar to say, as I did above (the text-to-speech is pretty good)
• you can record your own message that your avatar will speak and lip-sync to
• you can send a phone message to Voki that your avatar will use
• you can browse an upload an MP3 file from your computer

All very easy. All very cool and fun. I also like moving the cursor around the screen and watching my avatar’s eyes follow it – small things like that amuse me.

Classroom uses

1. Setting up

a. Groundwork
Explore with your students the concept of avatars. Should they look like yourself or should you let your creative juices take over? Introduce the James Cameron movie into the discussion. You could do one of my Listen A Minute.com lesson on avatars.

b. Purpose
Discuss with your students what they could use their avatar(s) for. You could create a reading exercise and write a short piece on your thoughts on and uses of avatars. This could be a model for students’ writing.

2. The Voki website and creating an avatar

a. Exploit the web page
Quite often we send our students to websites and expect them to know all of the vocabulary. There’s a lot we could do to make use of the language on a page for learning purposes. The Voki homepage is a great source of “modern” and “techy” vocab, which I guess is fairly high-frequency (?) among younger people.

Examples on the Voki homepage: customize, social networks, participate, personalize, advertising, profile, innovative, creativity, groundbreaking, upload, privacy policy, terms of service…

Encourage students to explore on their own by clicking on the links that show the video or go to the forum… This can give lower level learners the confidence to explore more on the Net.

b. Describing people
Students can choose from quite an array of options for their avatar. This gives the teacher a lot of very useful vocabulary to work with. It has all the facial features, hairstyles, skin colours, uniforms and even a whole section of bling (that’s ‘accessories’ for those my age and older).

c. Nationalities
Another useful opportunity for vocabulary practice. A drop-down menu provides you with the accent for your Voki – you can choose from Basque to Czech to Galician to Polish to Turkish and lots more in between (including US and UK English).

3. The avatar

a. Character development
Once students have their avatar, they write their own profile for it and develop its character. Students can write questions to each other’s avatars or comment on them.

b. Question the avatars
Students write questions for each other’s avatars.

c. Comparisons
Students write comparisons between themselves and their avatar.

d. Grammar practice
Students write about their avatar. The writing fits the grammar being taught by the teacher (what the avatar did yesterday, what it’s going to do in the future, likes and dislikes…).

e. Family and friends
Students create a family and friends for their avatar. These can be additional Vokis or those they create for a written activity.

4. Avatar communication

a. Ice-breaker
Use the avatar to introduce yourself to your students or for students to introduce themselves to others.

b. E-mail
Get students to record a Voki and send the message to you. It could accompany homework with a short message about their work, a request, an apology for being late…

c. Class wiki / website
Students record Vokis to welcome visitors to their blog / wiki / website.

d. Projects
i. Make an online “class wall” of Vokis – all students introduce themselves.
ii. Next time you do a class project, get students to present it all with Vokis.
iii. Pass the Voki. The teacher records a Voki message and e-mails it to the first student. He or she records what he/she hears and sends it to student 2. Repeat the process until the final student Vokis the teacher. The class see if the final Voki is the same as the first.
iv. Voki soap opera – The class creates a soap opera based on Vokis.

Resources

40 (and counting) more links to cool stuff on Voki

Plus…

Please tell us how you use Voki by posting a comment. Thank you