Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. This is our final episode on the topic of teaching english pronunciation for a global world, and I'm joined by Robin Moncey and your danker to wrap up the conversation. We've had a really interesting conversation, I think, around some of the practical ways of teaching pronunciation, some of the theory behind it. And before we wrap up, I just want to jump into the issue of technology and how technology can be used to support pronunciation, because we've had obviously a very big shift in technology over the last couple of decades, and I imagine that's changed things a lot. So looking at the state of technology today, how can technology support our pronunciation teaching?
[00:00:58] Speaker B: I think it would be difficult to have this conversation without mentioning AI as well.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: And what, yes, I'm expecting that to.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Come up, all the elements that AI is throwing in. So starting with today, anything is possible. AI, we are relying, and we will be relying on it as providers of learning materials to help with pronunciation, to listen to a speaker and then give feedback. Feedback. There are lots of big questions, lots of ethical questions, of course, that come with it. So what are the algorithms trained on? Is it native speaker accents?
Do you have large enough corpora for the non native speaker accent? So, you know, bias and all of those elements that we've touched on. But if it's done well, I think it's definitely promising a lot, because in the comfort of your home, you can play with things and you can get very supportive, very forward looking, very positive feedback.
So AI is definitely still unchartered. Waters. I'm yet to see a good pronunciation solution or pronunciation tool, but I'm sure it's coming. We're already using AI extensively for speaking. Some assessors, some assessment exam providers are using AI algorithms for assessing speaking for proficiency. So high stakes exams.
So AI will be a game changer and probably very soon, much sooner than we think.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Okay, that is really interesting, but, yeah, it sounds like there's still some challenges that go along with that as well.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: There are challenges, but they're very much fitting the parameters of what we've talked about, so they're not unknown quantities. It's, as always, the importance of the relationship, the collaboration between the technology people, the people who know how to train those algorithms, collaborating with people who understand education and researchers. And I think that's if those two.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: Come together, we need to give the algorithm the right data.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: And yeah, the technology is stunning, but it does need feeding.
So it's important, especially institutions with the prestige that Oxford University press has. They are the people that have to go in and say, guys, you're missing all of these accents.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: You're missing all of this data.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:22] Speaker C: So the algorithm looks pretty stunning, but can you give it some more food?
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:03:28] Speaker C: It's getting a lot of meat, but.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: No vegetables, and also emphasizing in the feedback what we're seeing with some algorithms, rather than what's possible, what's important, because sometimes it's very easy to give feedback on certain things.
It's very easy to deduce and very easy to serve, but actually, they don't make a big difference. So creating algorithms that will be focusing and feeding back on those elements that we've touched on that really make a.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Difference, rather than going back to square one and taking all the stuff we've gotten rid of and putting it into the.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: Because it's easy. I mean, the weak vowel. That's a very easy one to teach, to monitor, to report on where some of the other elements might be a little bit more difficult.
[00:04:12] Speaker C: But, you know, if we come back in and go back into the classroom, when I first became aware, they need to assess my students and the university said, you have to have a recording. You have to store the recording for three years, and then it can be thrown away in order to guarantee impartiality.
That was a bit of a burden, going home with my carrier bag full of cassettes and finding the right place on the cassette. Today, it's gone. That burden doesn't exist.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Of course, your students just get on.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Their phone and they just do it.
[00:04:44] Speaker C: Do the recording, and they email it to. I mean, in the end, I had a class account. They weren't emailing it to my private email, but they were emailing it to my class account, and I. I would go in from home without carrying anything home. I just go in, mark the stuff. And so that's a massive improvement, because it means that really, we, number one, can very comfortably, very easily assess a piece of live performance, which wasn't so easy for me back in 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
Also, you can access the world, because if we're saying our students, from the very beginning, need to be exposed to different accents, there's no way that even with tons of money around, that the publishers can provide all of the accents those students need to listen to. Because according to where you are, you'll need to listen to certain accents and not to others.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:41] Speaker C: So how do we do this? Well, we just go on the Internet.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: And just get them and get them.
[00:05:45] Speaker C: And pull them off and let students listen to them. And so technology is totally a game changer.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: A lot of possibilities.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: Pronunciation. And then three weeks ago, my wife broke her wrist and she couldn't type. So we started messing around with the computer. And of course, it's got all of these speech recognition facilities. Yeah, I was watching, I was thinking that. That's funny. All right. And I went off to mine and I thought, I'm gonna give a really, really, I'll give the computer a bad timing. So I put on a very strong Newcastle accent. It was really good. Yeah, it got me perfectly.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: Oh, that's so funny.
[00:06:24] Speaker C: I go, wow, that, that was a pretty heavy duty in your castle accent, but it had no problem. So I go, okay, so now I'm gonna do an a one, a two spanish speaker of english accent.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:35] Speaker C: And I really laid it on. Yeah, it didn't have too many problems.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:41] Speaker C: And then I said, okay, so I'll do some of my own work. I'll dictate. And I started dictating quite quickly as a native speaker, it had problems.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Oh, that's so interesting.
[00:06:53] Speaker C: Because it was all full of weak forms. Yeah. And elisions and coalescences. And I go, oh, wow.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I see.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: So telling.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: When we, during our town halls, you can, you can watch the transcriber as well.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: And it is, it is interesting because it does pick up, it's nothing dealing just well enough with native speakers. But I have to say my car recognizes my voice now. And I'm very excited because previously it didn't. Okay, so, you know, I know those various devices that you speak into.
I think technology has developed incredibly over the last three, four years. It picks up accents, foreign accents. Really well.
[00:07:34] Speaker D: Yeah. And it's really helpful in the class, isn't it? I mean, when they have to prepare for this assessment, for this pronunciation assessment, they can use all those tools. They can insist on whatever they think they are weaker. And you have your own diagnostic there. If the tool is picking you up, you're doing great. If not, you have to work some more on those specific areas. I think now it's so much easier to have access to different accents and to have access to tools that can help you improve. And in general, social media is full of information. So if you're interested in anything, you will get videos and recordings from that one topic. And in that way, you're going to be much better in pronunciation, vocabulary, and expressions. Like, my sons watch a lot of basketball videos from the NBA, and they are developing great american accents, you see.
So I think it's wonderful to have all this access to technology, and I agree with you with the artificial intelligence needed to be fed with the good.
What we think are good idea. Well, we are calling, of course, with these ideas of not only thinking of the native accent standard, what we've always been told was a good accent, but also with all this plethora of accents that we have being intelligible by themselves.
[00:09:24] Speaker C: I mean, there are some really good sites. There's one called the speech accent archive.
I think that's Iowa University.
Anyway, they have recordings that people have sent in voluntarily, and they have a cutoff point in terms of quality of recording. So the recordings are a decent quality. And they have an interactive world map. And you can go and click on the map, and you get someone speaking from that part of the world, and they speak a standards paragraph, which is a slightly weird paragraph about going and buying fresh snow peas and things like that. So it's obviously done to get them to use all the possible sounds and combinations. And I started taking that in. I'd project the image from my laptop onto the screen and say to the students, tell me where to go. You know, you can't all come out and play. You can do that at home, but tell me where to go. Which was very interesting because they said, is there any. Anyone from Asturias, which is albate of Spain? I go, yeah. And they said, oh, there's someone from Oviedo, which is the city where the school of tourism was. And I said, yeah, play the person from Oviedo. And I said, but you know how people from Oviedo speak English? Yeah, but we want to hear them. Yeah. Always a starting point, year in, year out. And then they would travel around the world, play someone from Brazil, and they would listen to this person from Brazil pronouncing the standard paragraph, and they would spot things which even, you know, everyone spots what they spot, and they. Oh, God, that was really interesting. So it was fascinating, but it was only possible thanks to technology.
It was this window on the world that suddenly it gave me. Because there is an issue with students learning English in a classroom where everybody else has the same first language. And it's a major issue that the minute they get together and start talking, they are dragged involuntarily back towards the first language pronunciation. So they move away from what we would call good English pronunciation towards a very spanish english pronunciation in order to succeed with a communicative task.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: Yes. With each other.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: Yes. And therefore they become ultimately less internationally intelligible in order to achieve success in the communication task. So that issue is partially resolved by getting them to go out and explore the world through technology and through, as.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: You were saying, through social media.
If they're interested in something, I don't think they necessarily think that's a non native speaker. They're interested in the topic, in seeing. So English becomes that international English becomes a bit of commodity, doesn't it? It's there to facilitate that interaction, which is why I think the generation that's current, the younger generation, we grew up in probably slightly different environment, we didn't have access to all of that. So for us, we had to fight through that identity bias. Native speaker, probably. I'd like to think teenagers and people in their twenties have a very different attitude towards all of that. I really hope so, probably.
[00:12:27] Speaker D: I think so. When I see my kids and their friends, they are not that obsessed the way I was at that time, for example, of sounding good or professional or correct. They communicate, as you said, they try to find information from wherever because they are interested in the topic. Not really. If the person who's speaking speaks one way or another, they're interested in the topic and they find the information anywhere. I mean, they don't really care where it comes from. So all those different accents pop up and slang and informal conversations that I didn't have access to, for example. So I think you can learn a lot.
[00:13:24] Speaker C: I mean, another nice thing about technology with pronunciation is that it allows you to hold a sample for as long as you wish to. And you can even go on, because you mentioned this thing about do something at the beginning of the course and do something later and see if you see the. Do the same thing again later and notice your progress. But you can build up lovely portfolios, because a portfolio in the past, an artist would go with this great big thing, you know, that was heavy to carry around, and you could sit on a bus next to someone because it invaded their space. Digital portfolio is on a pen or it's on the cloud. And so students can all their recording work that you will have given assessment for will be in their digital portfolio. But also you can send them out and say, you know, go and find someone you really admire who is, who has the same first language as you do, and who uses English regularly in their professional life, and download two or three video clips two or three minutes long, put them into your portfolio with your comments on how you feel about the way they pronounce English. And so you can build up not just an assessment portfolio, but a portfolio of samples, of aspirational samples. Here is somebody that I would like to be able to speak English like, and it's obvious that they're Bulgarian or it's obvious that they're Spanish, but I don't care. I just want to be like this person because this person is my God.
And that would go into the portfolio and things like that. And you can build up a beautiful portfolio over time which could be shown or exposed to friends in class, to peers, but also if it's younger students in secondary, allowing parents to see.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Yeah, of course.
[00:15:11] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:15:12] Speaker C: Brilliant around has done this year with their pronunciation in English. Look at all of this. I'm really happy about this.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: And showing progress to parents. Parents are always desperate.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: They always want the feedback.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:23] Speaker C: So bringing them into the equation and things.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: And we didn't have the opportunity to talk about parents. But, you know, parents come with certain expectations. A lot of the native speaker expectation comes from parents as well. So that will definitely lead towards a shift in the person who pays, who orders the music, I suppose.
Definitely. And what you're talking about in terms of portfolios reminded me very much in the way assessment is thinking about ways of going forward, especially for young learners. We don't necessarily want them to sit down for two, 3 hours taking a test, but portfolios is a very interesting opportunity across the board, not just for pronunciation. A collection of your best work and show us your improvements, show us your thinking process.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: Okay. So, yeah, it sounds like things have changed a lot recently, but I kind of want to look forward a little bit and look at how things are going to continue changing. And we've already touched a bit on artificial intelligence, some of the challenges it might pose and some of the ways it might actually support pronunciation teaching. So we could go into that a bit. But I would also alongside that, like to hear about some of the ways you hope things might change, where you hope things might go in future.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: I was on holiday last week abroad, and as I was saying in an earlier episode, none of us speaks very good germane. So Google have recently launched an app where you point it at a sign or at a piece of writing and it translates for you, so you don't need to do anything anymore. So will people be studying a foreign language? I really hope so. I really hope so.
So that's, you know, that's by the side. So there are all these interesting questions. What is the place of learning a foreign language? What is your aspiration as a learner of that language, how far do you want to be? But I. With thinking about social media, thinking about how the younger generation interacts with the rest of the world, I really hope that many of the things that we touched on today are going to be a thing of the past. I really think that. I really hope so. I really hope that culturally, hopefully politically as well, we'll move in a direction where an accent will be a conversation of the past, and those elements of bias will influence positively on identity rather than detract. And to remove that sense of deficiency that probably you and I and you took, points deficit linguistics can relate to. So I hope I'm still a very big optimist in terms of globalization. The role of education more broadly, not just pronunciation, is the central pillar. But looking forward, I'm thinking the world is continuing to open up, whether we like it or not. And hopefully by teaching pronunciation the way we've talked about it today will be one small contributing factor, but an important one.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:18:34] Speaker C: My hope, because you said hope.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:37] Speaker C: You're not asking me to predict.
My hope is for a major reevaluation of the value of non native speaker teachers, especially in the area of pronunciation.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:18:52] Speaker C: And we, in some other conversation mentioned this. You know, if really, really good pronunciation is the Everest of language learning, who do you want to take you to the summit of Everest, given that it's a long, arduous, and potentially dangerous journey? Do you want someone from a town like Namche Bazaar at the foot of Everest who happened to be born in that town? Or do you want someone, for example, from New Zealand, who's been twice on the summit of Everest and knows every step of the way intimately.
And the non native speaker teacher has absolutely made the journey with demonstrable success that they want the students to do. So. Who should be guiding them? Who's the better guide?
This is the sort of thing that needs working on. And obviously, directors of studies in private language schools, but also people in institutions need helping to see that the non native speaker has so many things to contribute to the journey that the students have to make. And then parents also need bringing in and showing the same thing. We need a sort of little education program. But if you ask me what I hope will happen, I hope that non native speaker teachers will be given the credit that they deserve and that their vital role in teaching the pronunciation of English and the skills and experience that they bring to that task, that they need recognizing for what they are. And we need to see an end to this of only native speaker teachers. In this language school, we need to see an end to that.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Definitely. Definitely. And I think we will. It sounds like we're moving in that direction. I hope so. Yeah.
[00:20:42] Speaker D: Well, all those hopes are wonderful. I can only agree with you both and hope that pronunciation gets to be seen as this glue that Robin was saying and not at something a bit bothering to teach, a bit difficult to teach. Oh, it's added in the CFR. Okay, let's do it. But something that will really give us the help and the tool to be able to be intelligible, to be able to communicate, which is like the last goal, the main objective.
So just take it as something that's really softening the whole process and helping all the learners to communicate effectively.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Absolutely. Because, yeah, it really is that important and that central. Getting that recognition and we are getting that recognition. It feels like. It feels like everything is. I like all those predictions and it feels. They all feel, they all feel flaws.
I like those hopes and aspirations, but they also all feel plausible. They all feel like something which, which I could see happening. So I think that's great.
All right, well, I think we've run out of time. I think we could keep talking about this for hours if we wanted to. Such a big subject.
But thank you all for joining us.
It's been really great. I've learned a lot. I hope you've enjoyed it. And thank you, everyone, for watching. Before we sign off, I just want to take one last moment to mention Robin's book again.
So this is.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: And Gemma.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: And Gemma, sorry, Robin. Robin and Gemma Archer. So this is teaching english pronunciation for a global world. It goes into way more detail, loads of great professional development tips, lots of practical advice about teaching pronunciation. So if you've enjoyed this conversation and you want to go into more of a deep dive and get more information that you can use in the classroom right away, this is the book for you. We'll pop a link down in the description to both the ebook and the print book.
But yes, thank you again for joining us. It's been absolutely great. And yes, thanks, everyone, for watching. That brings us to the end of our series on pronunciation. And I just want to say a big thank you to Robin Monce and Jordanka for joining us. If you want to learn more about the big issues in language teaching, don't forget to like and subscribe. In the meantime, if you want to take a deep dive into pronunciation teaching, you can get our book, teaching english pronunciation for a global World by Robin Walker and Gemma Archer. Just follow the link in the description. Thanks for joining us.
