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: From a global world.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: So could you, um, could you tell me about some of the challenges you experience when it comes to sort of pronunciation, um, with, with your, with your accent background and your language background when it comes to pronunciation in English? What are potentially some of the difficulties?
[00:00:43] Speaker C: I guess I really have to make an effort to hear the difference between asara and Asera. The one with the h at the end and the one with no. And there are too many sarahs in this country.
So every time I'm listening very, the moment I know it's a Sarah, I'm listening very attentively to hear which one is it?
[00:01:02] Speaker D: And in the end. Oh, sorry. And in the end, you never remember which one was, because for me, the translation is just Sara. Sara, you know, and then you have to concentrate on the difference because we.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Currently have, like, a head of marketing.
[00:01:20] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Who is Sarah? And then a head of publishing. Who is Sarah?
[00:01:25] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:01:26] Speaker D: Sara.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Okay. Sara.
[00:01:29] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:01:30] Speaker C: That is Sarah. Sarah.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it was.
I think William the conqueror has a lot to answer for. He does. The introduction of French, that really screwed up the pronunciation of English, all those long vowel sounds, you know?
[00:01:49] Speaker D: Yeah. But the voiced endings are quite troubling because, you know, they are voiced and you want to make them voiced, and, I mean, I don't. Yeah. Now I know that probably they are not as important, and there are other things to have in mind.
[00:02:09] Speaker C: Well, they are, because there is a. There's a difference in meaning, potentially.
[00:02:13] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:02:13] Speaker C: We could touch on some of those things. And I know it's the length of the vowel as well, that they particular example, which makes it even more complicated because you have to think of and then your voice vowel that's devoiced.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: One of the things was this idea that the lingua franca core is a simplification.
In some ways it is. There are fewer things to go, but there is nothing simple about learning different vowel duration. If you come from languages where vowels have a single duration, it is so, so complicated. And you can talk about actually six durations of english vowels.
[00:02:48] Speaker D: Six?
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:02:50] Speaker D: Oh, that's news for me, because we.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Would classify them as long and short vowels.
[00:02:57] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: But each of those can have three different lengths.
[00:03:01] Speaker D: Oh, I see.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: So you can have a long, long vowel, a normal length long vowel, and a short, long vowel, depending on the consonant or lack of consonant afterwards. So a long vowel with no consonant in an open syllable is its longest expression, and then a long vowel, if I remember rightly, with a nasal or a voiced consonant, is, let's say, a mid length long vowel and a long vowel with a voiceless consonant afterwards is a short long vowel. And short long vowels are as long as some of the long short vowels because the same way I can do three different endings for long vowels, you can do different endings, a voiced or voiceless ending for short vowels, and that will lengthen or shorten the short vowel. So you can have a short short vowel and a mid length short vowel. So we're talking at least you can't have an open syllable with a short vowel. You can't have a short vowel and then no consonant afterwards.
So that would knock one of those out of contention. But you're still talking about five potential vowel lengths for people coming from a language with only one vowel length. This is total, not a nightmare. So anyone who's out there thinking, well, let's do this lingua franca core thing, because it's much simpler. Sorry, it's not.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: No, no.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Some bits are.
Other bits are massively difficult for most learners to pick up on.
[00:04:31] Speaker C: Shall we talk about this a little bit? Because.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: Because it is an interesting one. Just to recognize that the lingua franca core is there. And it does make, you know, it's there for a reason, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's easier.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: It's a different dance.
[00:04:46] Speaker C: It's a different dance.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: I sometimes said to people, you know, I would show people doing ballroom dancing, and then I put up an image of people doing breakdancing.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Oh, I love that.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: This is really, really difficult. It's ballroom dancing. People spend their lives becoming brilliant at this in order to compete and win medals. I said, this is also hugely difficult. And the people who are ballroom dancing couldn't even begin to compete in break dancing.
So when we go from pronunciation for international intelligibility as opposed to pronunciation in order to achieve native speakingness in your accent, you're not going from hugely difficult to massively simple. You are changing from one style of speaking to another style, and both styles create problems for you as a learner. And the vowel length thing is a mega problem.
[00:05:42] Speaker C: It still is a thing, yes. For me, yes. All those years. And the other one is aspiration, because her inke, we don't aspire in bulgarian, so same very often.
I need to be careful. And it's that consciously stopping the book example that you were giving, you can do it, but you have to stop yourself and think about it.
And my favorite one is owl. I still can't say owl properly. The animal or the bird.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Yes, you can. Yeah.
[00:06:13] Speaker C: Because I hadn't understood anything else had to stop, so if I didn't, it would come out completely differently. Because of the dark hair that you've got.
[00:06:23] Speaker D: Yeah. It's that consciousness always working.
[00:06:28] Speaker C: Always working.
[00:06:28] Speaker D: Yes, I think. And it's cognitively tiring.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:06:32] Speaker D: You know, it's like, isn't it? It's like you're trying to sound the best you can and remember. Well, now that I know all those vowel lens, my consciousness be mental.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: Do you go into them in the book?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yes, we do.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Oh, good, good.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: We have an activity on.
[00:06:54] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is very exhausting. You are double thinking. You are trying to make it right, and you're thinking of exceptions at the same time. And when you want to follow your train of thought, sometimes you get lost. You stop and say, of course. Oh, I wanted to say that, but I wanted to pronounce it like that, but it just came out wrong. Sometimes you feel like that as well.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: This is one of the reasons why we.
Pronunciation has been largely marginalized.
It's tacked on. Yeah, sorry. If you are struggling with your pronunciation as a speaker, the burden, the cognitive burden is so great as you refocus on the pronunciation that you can't be in the bit of creating original content, which is what normal speech is about. It's all original content, this mega conflict, and the brain can't deal with it, and the victim is the content.
So you then look stupid because of what comes out of your mouth, and you feel stupid because you know that what you've said isn't what you are capable of saying, but something distracted you. You got distracted by the pronunciation, and it's. Again, after more than 40 years in Spain, there are words that I head towards the word and I go find something else because it's going to ruin what you're saying. So there's a bit of me monitoring which words I don't want to pronounce.
[00:08:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I can relate to that.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: It's so interesting, you know, I'm gonna dig myself my own grave if I say that word. So you say some other word, and then you think that wasn't the word because the one you avoided, you know, is the one you wanted to say. So pronunciation isn't something you can tack on. It so underlies performance in a second language.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: And also we in the paper, and also, I'm sure you touch on it. In the book, we talked about how pronunciation really facilitates the development of all the other skills. And that's something that I'm sure we can all relate to as learners of another language, how being confident or knowing that you can make a mistake when you speak can really help you speak, write, and even read much better. So the importance of pronunciation for the development of the other skills is really critical.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: The one, I mean, the one that for me was you're always looking for, well, perhaps me, because of my original science background. I'm looking for harmony and I'm looking for order.
So it doesn't take very long before you spot that they're slow speaking because of pronunciation problems. So let's sort that out. There's a clear link between fluency and good or not good pronunciation. Fine, no problem. Listening soon also rears its head and you go, yeah, it's obvious if they don't know it's pronounced like that, they can't hear it in the speech stream. So I actually, I do need to do some pronunciation work before I let them listen. Otherwise, they don't have a chance.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: And then I'm thinking, hey, you know, some of these mistakes, the spelling mistakes my students are making, it's pronunciation based, and it's coming out in their writing. I remember I got this bunch of essays in from my students, and they were argumentative about the good and bad of tourism. And so there was this paragraph that students, one after another, would start with the word festival.
What? Well, it's basic tourism, vocabulary. A festival. Yes, but what's it doing at the beginning of a paragraph? So I said to them, you know, a lot of you guys began your paragraphs with festival, and they said, yeah, that's how you begin so much of what you say in class. Me? And they said, yeah, yeah. You say, first of all, I want to tell you about grammar.
And they go, wow. So that's writing affected by poor pronunciation. So now I've got three of the skills, and I'm thinking, wouldn't it be funny because we knew about grammar, links between grammar, defining, non defining clauses with pauses and things like that. So grammar's connected into pronunciation and vocabulary. If you can't pronounce a word, you won't use it, for example. So there's only one missing now, and it's reading.
And there is Catherine Walter with Michael Swan at Ayahtepel. And Catherine's reporting on her research into reading in English as l two.
And it was really interesting talk, but she ended it with what was an apparently throwaway statement. She said, okay, final thing, if you followed me so far and you're interested in improving your students reading in English, as they're l two, improve their pronunciation.
And I'm editor of the Prawnsig journal at that point, speak out. And I go, whoa. Ran down to the front. Hello, Catherine. You won't remember me. We do know each other. We have met. But that last statement is an article that I want from you for journal. Speak out. And she said, fine. What's my word length? This. What's my deadline? This. In came the article, faultless. Yeah, busy people are brilliant because they meet deadlines, and it's all perfect anyway.
And it's this superb article that shows how if you can't pronounce English, especially at lower levels of reading, if you can't pronounce the words, you can't process them.
The words go into your short term memory, and they're sent around the words you are reading on the page, they're sent around the phonological loop, and you hear them aloud in your head, and they're sent several times around the phonological loop. While a working memory works out what to do with them and ties them into previous words and words that might come and also connects through to your lexicon in your long term memory to make sure you know the word.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: And if you can't pronounce it, if.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: You can't pronounce it, it decays on its way around the phonological loop and doesn't get back into the central executive of the working memory. It's lost. The word on the page has got lost in the phonological loop because you couldn't pronounce it.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Okay, that's fantastic.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: So you get students, and I was watching this, I was aware of it, but didn't know how to deal with it. In class, you're watching students, and you can see that after five minutes, their finger's gone back. Their finger. These are adult students. Their finger has gone back to a second line or something like that. And you go, this student's having problems reading.
So I would say to the students, you're finding this reading difficult. Yeah. And I said, come down Friday, 01:00 which is when I open up the self access center, I'll give you some more reading. And I would send them home with extensive reading to do, thinking I was solving the problem. Now I'm compounding the problem.
They couldn't read because they couldn't pronounce.
And with this article that Catherine wrote, I suddenly go, it's there.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: That's the answer.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: I've got grammar, vocabulary and the four skills. And what is the cement that holds them together in the middle, not on the margins? The cement is pronunciation.
And if your pronunciation of English is poor, then everything else will continually fall apart.
[00:14:28] Speaker C: It's incredible, because when I was learning English more actively, especially more difficult words, I would write them. But also my teacher, an amazing person, she taught me to always say it. So when you write, write it, say it, then you write it again, then you say it. And that really worked. I understand why listening to you about reading, what do you think about teaching phonics? Because phonics is very well established in the UK, so for mother tongue, English speaking children mostly works fine.
Not always, we know that, but what do you think about it in the context of the second language?
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Yeah, well, initially it seemed to me like, here we go again. Here's another wave of, this is what you have to do. Here's another fashion. How long will it last? And I was a bit resistant, but lots of primary school teachers also asked me the same question, because they were being pushed very strongly into phonics. And eventually we set up actually a weekend in Madrid, didn't we?
[00:15:29] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: And we had people over from the UK talking to us about phonics. And as I was going through the weekend, I realized that I wasn't in a place to help primary school teachers especially, but that phonics was way under exploited.
That rather than showing students a whole new set of symbols from the IPA, we are far more effective if we show them that however chaotic english sound spelling relationships might appear, there are a massive number of actual regularities.
And that if you start by learning the regularities, then as you're reading, you have a sound in your head through a phonics approach that you can apply to the letter or the digraph on the page. So you become a better reader because you can pronounce the words in a way that actually gets it around the phonological. So I'm actually a big fan of phonics in the sense of it's something you can very much take and use as a tool, and it shouldn't be restricted to primary adults. Benefit massively being given the code.
[00:16:36] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: If you see s and followed by h, it's sh every time. Guys, just get out there and just relax.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: And I. You don't need. I'm thinking, my God, if you've come from Mandarin Chinese and you're having to learn a roman Alphabet and then your teacher throws in a whole lot of symbols, many of which reappear in your roman Alphabet. But you have to do something different things. This is terrible. You do not need this burden.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: No.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: So phonics, I think, is a far more useful classroom technique, but not just for primary school kids. It could be used anywhere with any set of students.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: Absolutely. And we've seen in another piece of work that we did as part of the export panels, actually, that it was particularly successful in secondary for teaching english children French.
So the teacher was implementing lots of phonics rules and the phonics framework and that delivered really well.
Yes.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that was really interesting.
[00:17:40] Speaker D: It starts making sense then, because up to then it's so random. So there are some rules. Yeah. When you start applying those rules, you feel like, oh yeah, there are some rules I can apply, some I can feel comfortable and confident when reading, and this really helps. And in Spain, there are many schools who are starting to apply phonics and you can see a whole difference when they get into primary. The change is outstanding compared to schools who do not use the phonics system.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: That's fascinating.
Thanks for listening to 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 at Gemma Archer. Just follow the link in the description. Thanks.
