Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. I'm joined again today by Robin Monce and Jordanka, and we're going to be continuing our conversation about teaching english pronunciation.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: For a global world.
[00:00:28] Speaker C: So we've been talking a lot about pronunciation. We focused a lot on teaching pronunciation, but I want to jump a bit into assessment and how we can assess pronunciation effectively and kind of the role of the teacher in that and how we can assess at different levels. So I guess just kind of an open question for all of you. To start with, how can we make sure that we're assessing pronunciation and helping learners understand what good outcomes look like and help them achieve them?
[00:00:56] Speaker D: I think, Monza, you're a much better place to talk about this because of the way you work with teachers. But for me, if you don't assess it, then they're not going to learn it.
[00:01:04] Speaker E: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:01:06] Speaker D: So there needs to be mechanisms of assessment. And for me, my approach that I ascribe to is very much within the framework of assessment for learning. So you teach, you assess, you feedback, then you move on to next steps, recommendations, remedial work as well, or extension work. So that would be the very broad framework that I would be expecting to see as a successful one.
[00:01:33] Speaker E: Yeah, exactly. And I think it's always a good starting point to have a diagnostic. So why not recording your students on the first day, the first days with a text they are quite familiar with, or that they could prepare in advance and see where you see you can help them improve their pronunciation. So with this diagnostic, you can start working towards a more formative kind of assessment from then on, targeting those difficult or more important aspects of pronunciation. As we discussed the consonants, the clusters, and then finally the accent, the nuclear accent.
So this step by step assessment and with a very clear. With very clear goals, but always trying to be informative, not just ticking, but trying to be formative, insisting on the most difficult ones, and then at the end of the term, maybe recording them again and have them realize how much they've improved. This is wonderful. You see the progress.
You feel very proud as a teacher, but also as a learner, seeing your.
[00:02:59] Speaker D: Progress and for different learners. Again, I remember when we were working on the position paper, we were looking at different learners and how you assess different learners, especially students with dyslexia. So they might not necessarily feel very comfortable reading, but having a conversation with them. So there are lots of different alternatives and different ways of doing it. It could be a conversation between two students. It doesn't necessarily need to be a student sitting in front of a teacher with a checklist.
[00:03:26] Speaker E: Oh, yes, of course.
[00:03:27] Speaker D: So you can choose how you structure that.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: It was interesting for me because my students spotted that I was keen on them improving their pronunciation.
And I think I must have gone for five or six years like that. And then finally some students came up and they said, you know, we appreciate what you're doing, but I don't know if you realize that we don't do much more because there's no mark, of course. Goodness gracious. And then, you know, you overcome the sort of initial deception and irritation and you think they're right. I mean, they're driven by Marx. Why shouldn't they be? If they don't get this university degree, they don't get a job. So it's obvious. So I thought, I need to assess them in a way that is acceptable to the university. In those days, in my university, that meant they had to be recorded or you had to have a tribunal of three teachers for every single student that was assessed.
And I go, there's no way I can ask my colleagues to come and sit through 63rd year students.
And so I said, so we will record them. And that was quite fun at the beginning because we didn't have digital recording. So I was going home with a bag full of.
And you had to say to them, leave the cassette on side a. At the point that you want me to listen to, you also had to say. And say your name twice.
[00:04:54] Speaker C: Excellent.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: At the beginning, because they would get friends to do it if you didn't.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: And they took to this. They loved it.
And the interest was massive. And I would measure, you know, if I set a piece of written work, I would get perhaps 80%, 80% of students handing that back in. When I set a recording, I get well into the high nineties handing that in.
And the other thing was to see their reaction to being assessed, because it was formative assessment. We would take something we'd already done. I would say, take that bit and record it for me and hand it in by next Friday and so on. And as I was handing it back, they would be going straight to it. I got that one wrong. I knew I got that one wrong.
[00:05:37] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: And you go, wow, what more do I want? And then came the confession.
[00:05:44] Speaker C: Oh, no.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: And they say, you know, that we cheat.
And I go, you cheat? And they say, yeah, well, you know that we do this in groups down in the cafe.
And I go, do you? And what do you do? Well, one of us does it and the other ones say what they got wrong, so we scrub it and the one that got it wrong does it again. And when they're finally happy, that's the bit that you get. So really it's nothing. Us individually, it's. It's us. So I did some more work.
[00:06:14] Speaker E: Great.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Checked on what they were doing in the cafe and they would, like, take a line and do it seven or eight times before they were happy with it. Now you try and get students in class to imitate your model seven or eight times. They're not going to do it. It's stunningly boring. And yet on their own thinking they were cheating, they were doing exactly what I needed them to do. They're making attempts, they're modifying the attempts and they're getting peer feedback on the correction of those attempts, which is also testing what the peers are thinking is correct or is not correct. This is wonderful, massively positive teaching situation and my job is just to listen to it and say, yes, that's. Or the other thing that I always said to them, you will never be marked on what is not the declared focus of the activity.
So forget everything else and focus on what we've agreed is the point of this exercise.
[00:07:08] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: And then you'd hand the marks back. And that was the other revealing moment.
I gave this piece of work back to a student and I was just a bit further down the room and she said, robin, it's not mine. And I went back and I said, it's yours. That's your name. She said, oh, yes, it's my name. Why did you think it wasn't yours? She said, I've got seven out of ten. I never get seven out of ten.
And then I started looking at the written work or grammar exercises, that there was no relationship between the marks in pronunciation marked work and written marked work.
So there's two bits of brain happening here and one was never fed.
[00:07:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: And by assessing their pronunciation work, I'm feeding it and I'm stimulating it and they're getting really interested.
[00:08:01] Speaker C: And of course, with it being such a core part connected to everything else.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: As you said earlier, other things are benefiting.
[00:08:06] Speaker C: Other things are benefiting and getting better.
[00:08:08] Speaker F: Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:08:09] Speaker C: I love that.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: So this. It's not an option and it's not something.
[00:08:12] Speaker D: It's not an option.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: It's absolutely essential because it's part of the learning process and it's part of.
[00:08:18] Speaker D: That sense of we were talking about it, identity as a non native speaker, that level of confidence yeah, the more you do it, the better you become at it goes with anything.
[00:08:32] Speaker C: So I suppose one follow up question then is, how can we help students understand what good pronunciation is? Like, how can we help them approach and achieve that outcome?
[00:08:46] Speaker D: It's an interesting one. I mean, we've talked about accommodation. We've talked about that self awareness. We've talked about know how you can become more intelligible to your, to your listeners. But also we talked about receptive accommodation and productive accommodation. So we could touch on those potentially.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: For me, I think that one of the things for getting students to actually grasp that good pronunciation is not automatically what a native speaker would do is to show them people, in the case, which is so often where you share the same mother tongue as the students, show them people from that same mother tongue who are using English on a daily basis and who are massively successful, and then get them to listen to those people, because those people will be videoed in some place. I mean, TikTok and everything. You can get videos. And I will get my students to actually think of someone that they admired, who was Spanish born and had learned English and used English professionally and was hugely successful. I'd say, okay, you've chosen your person. Go and find a video and bring that video to class, and let's listen to them. And they were bringing people like top sports people or people from the world of banking. The chief executive officer of the Banco Santander.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Oh, of course.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: They came in and said, oh, my God.
I mean, she's obviously spanish when she speaks.
[00:10:19] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: And I said, do you understand what she's saying? Of course we do. Do you think other people understand what she's saying? They have to. She's the chief executive officer. I mean, she has to speak to the world about banking.
[00:10:31] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: I say, okay, so does she have a good accent or a bad accent?
And initially they all go, well, she's a terrorist, but she's. And now the seed has been sown.
[00:10:44] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: What do we mean? Therefore, if we say someone has a good accent, and then there's other bits of stuff, research that you can feed gently in. But a colleague who was working for the British Council in Tokyo gave a paper in Aya Tefl at Harrogate, and it was about how people felt about major world leaders intelligibility in English. And this was done on the back of the translation of transcripts from Davos from English into Japanese. And the two women who were working on the translation of the transcripts struggled desperately with some world leaders.
I mean, the whole of Davos is in English. So there's these two japanese translators. They're struggling desperately with some world leaders and have no problems with many other world leaders.
[00:11:37] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: So then we get to listen to some world leaders in this Harrogate session, and we decide who's, like, got a good accent and who hasn't.
And because we're sitting in Harrogate at Ayatefl, the native speaker, world leaders came out as having good accents.
They were the ones that the japanese translators struggled desperately with.
[00:12:00] Speaker C: Oh, that's so interesting.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: And the world leader that they most struggled with was David Cameron.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: Okay, wow.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Now, you throw that into a conversation with your students and that you've at least totally unsettled their preset idea of what is a good accent.
And with a little bit more tact, you perhaps can lead them to understand that a good accent is the accent which is understood comfortably by your interlocutors in that place at that moment in time.
And that very same accent that worked for you there and then may not be the best accent in another place with another group of interlocutors, of course.
[00:12:44] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: So it's not even a fixed thing, which is, oh, God, the world's permanently shifting under my feet. Okay, I'm sorry. It is.
And pronunciation is no different.
There's so many things in life where we think, I can't just do that there because I did it here and it was fine. You shift your cultural norms, you shift your body language as you move around the world and things like that. We always come out of Spain thinking, better not stand too close to people when I get into Britain. Okay. A good accent is the one that is able to shift as well. Good pronunciation is able to adapt itself to whoever you're talking to, wherever you are.
[00:13:28] Speaker C: And I suppose it relates to what we were saying last episode about the importance of exposure to different accents and the ability to make mistakes. And if you have those different accents baked into a course or to your teaching approach, where they get that exposure to different accents, they'll then have that flexibility and that ability to apply it differently in different contexts.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: And this person who has that flexibility has good pronunciation. Yes. Yes. And the person who's stuck with, as a speaker, one single accent, one single way and stuck in their ears with one single way of understanding, then you don't have good pronunciation. Whatever your accent.
[00:14:15] Speaker D: Listening to all this and also the whole conversation we've had today, it's incredible because pronunciation helps or educates you. Educate is the wrong word here prepares you for so many life skills as well, doesn't it? You become more open minded, more self aware, more aware of the other people you're talking to, what you just talked about. So it's an incredible life skill as well.
[00:14:43] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:14:43] Speaker D: So by putting pronunciation back on the table, you are actually emphasizing a lot more that goes beyond the classroom.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in the center there, as I was suggesting before, with. It's the sort of center of the universe with language skills and language knowledge.
I'm not biased in the least.
[00:15:05] Speaker D: No.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: But if we go out beyond the four skills in grammar and vocabulary, there is a bigger universe out there to do with how you interact with people from different backgrounds, different cultures, and in our case, different accents. And it's your attitude to variation and to difference, your tolerance of difference. Some very nice work done by a researcher called Julia Scales. And with her colleagues in the United States, she did some work on how people perceive different accents. Very interesting work, actually, because a lot of the students who were at the university where she worked, they said that they would like to sound like native speakers. Well, that's hardly surprising. They've made the huge economic and physical effort of going to study in the United States. So there's a clear, clear native speaker orientation.
She then said, okay, listen to these people and just point out which ones are native speakers. There was a massive failure to identify the native speakers amongst the blind listening tests.
[00:16:05] Speaker C: Oh, that's so interesting.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Then they were asked, you know, who do you find hardest? Because we're quite an international campus, who do you find hardest to understand in English? And they would write down their experience. And asian Englishes were highlighted as being particularly difficult to understand.
And then they were played recordings again, and they were asked, who's the most intelligible of the people?
And the chinese english girl on the recording was picked out as the most intelligible, whereas the formal declaration was, the asian Englishes are the hardest.
[00:16:37] Speaker F: Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: So it's all.
It's all pretty interesting.
[00:16:42] Speaker D: Perception versus reality. So interesting. And that goes back to that bias, I suppose, when. Yes, when you see, you know, a foreign face you pick up on, then you think, okay, that this is going to be difficult. I need to really prick my ears now, and I really need to pay attention.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Yeah, but this. I mean, the great thing about this work by Julia Scales was that the end. She said, we need to be listening to different accents. Initially, as I suggested, as just part of the course, you're not focusing on them, but there's a point where you need to start focusing on them and getting used to things that might happen to English when it's spoken by people from different l one backgrounds. And she said, we need to be doing this a to get used to seeing what things might happen, and that helps us to understand them better the next time and b to increase our tolerance of difference.
Because it's a world that's flipping backwards and forwards between wanting to be tolerant of difference and more so in these last few years than ever before, to a world of going into radical refusal to accept difference and the reinstatement of uniqueness. And this is right and everything else is wrong. It's becoming so polarized. And I think pronunciation teaching, as you were saying, can take us way beyond the actual act of teaching pronunciation and into things like acceptance of difference, tolerance of variation and so on. And it's a big world you step into.
[00:18:05] Speaker D: It's really, that's exactly what I, what I meant earlier, that it stretches you beyond, beyond the classroom. It opens your mind in a very, I'd like to think in a very positive way.
[00:18:16] Speaker E: Fosters communication and understanding between people.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: It's the ultimate thing, actually.
[00:18:24] Speaker E: Exactly.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: So much ignorance from not knowing and being scared of thanks for listening to.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: This episode of talking ElT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, don't forget to like and subscribe. Or if you want to take a deep dive into pronunciation teaching, try our book, teaching english pronunciation for a global world by Robin Walker and Gemma Archer. Just follow the link in the description.
[00:18:57] Speaker C: Thanks to.
