Stephen van Vlack Sookmyung Women s University Graduate School of TESOL English Pronunciation Spring 2014

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1 Week 10 Answers Celce-Murcia et al. (2010), Chapter 7 Stephen van Vlack Sookmyung Women s University Graduate School of TESOL English Pronunciation Spring 2014 This chapter gives us a rather standard, run-of-the-mill approach to teaching pronunciation following the old P-P-P model. It also, thankfully, provides some case studies of actual pronunciation teaching/practice from a variety of different contexts. It is from these that we can get a better feel for some of the different ways to approach the teaching of pronunciation. 1. Of the concerns presented in the beginning (pp ) of Celce-Murcia et al. (2010), which do you think is the most important? Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) discuss 5 major concerns that one must seriously consider before the teaching actually begins. All these concerns belong to the pre-teaching or planning phase and none of these should come as a big surprise to any of you. The five concerns mentioned are: -Setting realistic goals (short-term or/and long-term) -Addressing the teaching situation (now or for the future?) -The learner (insofar as this is actually possible) -The teaching context (limitations) -Defining a core curriculum (age and/or goals) These are concerns centered around the planning of a course or curriculum which we have talked about to some extent in relation to the pronunciation tutor project. Obviously, these are not ordered specifically and we may be somewhat familiar with them from our previous discussions and work on the project, but they still bear some reflection. When considering realistic goals of course the most important thing is to think first about intelligibility and then comprehensibility (as they were defined in the class). This does not however mean that we focus on intelligibility with no thoughts of comprehensibility until someone has reached some sort of magic threshold level of intelligibility. While intelligibility is easier for students in that is much more limited and constrained, and for that reason may be a better place to set our initial goals, it is also important to realize that intelligibility and comprehensibility go together. It is equally important to know that practice for intelligibility may not necessarily have any kind of positive affect on comprehensibility. On the other hand, however, practicing for comprehensibility will also have a positive effect on intelligibility. For this reason it seems important not to delay practice for comprehensibility to some magical threshold level simply to leave it for another teacher to try to deal with, as is often the case. The basic point I m trying to make here is it is very important we do not delay a practice for comprehensibility. When thinking about goals it is also important to think not only about the immediate short-term goals but also long-term goals and we have discussed this in relation to this lingua franca core and teaching pronunciation from this global perspective. It is this ELF perspective itself that helps us shed light on what realistic long-term goals may be for our students. It is going to be impossible to set the short-term goals without knowing where we are going for the long term.

2 Also helping students become aware of their long-term goals will help students deal with things in the short term. It is important also to try to use these long-term goals as motivational tools to get students to do things more in the short term. Moving on to settings, Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) described three basic settings in which someone would be teaching, these are EFL, ESL and ELF. Traditionally, and it is certainly true that this book is strongly embedded within a very traditional mindset of this is clearly a reflected here, a lot is made of differences between the ESL and the EFL setting And usually the ESL setting is seen as something of a weakness. Teachers in EFL generally lament their situation and wish that they were in an ESL setting, and students feel the same way. This EFL setting is seen as being a very negative thing on these comparisons, but it s important to realize these comparisons are based on the whole idea of native speaker superiority, which we know is simply not true. It is also important to realize the differences between ESL settings and EFL settings are not absolute. The main difference is often cited as the amount of input that students are able to get outside the classroom and I think that today this is much more dependent on technology than on societal norms. A Korean student living in South Korea who is really interested in English and makes even a small effort will be able to have access to a huge amount of tremendously varied and rich authentic English input. Likewise a Korean student living in an ESL setting like Canada may not have very much access to English because in the end they still have to make that effort. Interestingly, because of communication technology and the tremendously high valorization of English within South Korea, Koreans are exposed incidentally to rather large amounts of English and I think his incidental exposure is not something that we want to take lightly. The greatest effect of this incidental exposure is a large amount of incidental knowledge about English which can be reflected in the intuitions and feelings which students about English structures as they are employed by others. I am always surprised at how accurate my Korean students intuitions are about English structure and usage patterns. The same intuitions, however, do not mean that they can actually produce the language in the same way but they do provide every good platform from which we can extend out from simply knowing whether something feels right to actually producing something that is right and pronunciation due to the rather close nature of the system is a very good place to try to start this. One more simple comment on the idea of setting is that when we are looking at these three different settings the one setting that applies in all locations whether ESL or EFL is that of ELF. The ELF setting applies everywhere where one may find English speakers (whether native or non-native. So we have ELF settings within core English speaking countries and also in the outer circle and expanding circle. It seems only natural that we not only pay attention to our teaching setting (the setting in which the instruction is occurring), but more importantly to the setting in which the students are going to end up using English and that setting will always be an ELF setting. The third concern discussed in (Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) is that of the learners and I m not sure that we can never really get to know our learners because they are always (we can certainly hope) in a state of change. Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) decide to use contrastive analysis as one of the major ways of getting to know our learners. I m not sure this is the best idea. By using contrastive analysis as a very important planning tool we end up making very strong assumptions about our students which sadly may not be true. Language production (and this includes pronunciation) is a very complicated phenomenon and a large amount of studies on errors has shown that L1 interference is only a partial cause of the errors that students make. Regarding the teaching context Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) site a whole series of concerns all of

3 which imposed limitations which can t really control. We simply react to these limitations and try to deal with them. One thing they do not mention regarding the teaching context which I think is maybe the most important concern, is that of students expectations. All students, even the youngest ones, come into our class with expectations. We can t simply ignore those expectations but rather have to find out what they are and deal with them. At some point we are going to need to meet these expectations halfway but part of our job as teachers is also to help define and redefine students expectations into things that are not only more realistic and better from pedagogical point of view. We know that students approaching English pronunciation have often very strange and contradictory expectations and this is something that we really need to deal with and unlike the other concerns related to the teaching contexts mentioned in Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) students expectations are things that we can actually positively affect. The last concern we want to look at is that of the core curriculum. As explained in Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) other things related to age and level, maybe even goals which will help us to find and define a core curriculum for our students. One of the things we need to be careful about is linking this core curriculum to goals. 2. Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) presented six different stages for the teaching of pronunciation. Do you agree with all their stages? Is there anything you would eliminate or add to their plan? The approach as reflected in the stages discussed in Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) is somewhat underwhelming due to its old fashioned design. 1. Finding out about learners 2. Find input samples 3. Use chosen input to illustrate points 4. Choral repetition 5. Practice similar language less controlled 6. Record learner s speech for feedback Basically this is the P-P-P (Present-Practice-Produce) model. It is not very exciting. We could replace this with a T-T-T (Task-Teach-Task) model as advocated by Thornbury (1999) and many others. This latter T-T-T model seems to be quite positive in that it allows us to develop intelligibility at the same time as comprehensibility. We need to find tasks that students may expect to actually use in the real world. This makes the practice of pronunciation not only more interesting also more effective and then we are dealing with both of these major concerns simultaneously. Another possible concern about this basic plan proposed by Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) is just a very large amount of top down and overt teaching related to pronunciation that they include is not only inherent in the stages but also in the case studies presented in the chapter. This is a really very old and also possibly detrimental approach to the teaching of pronunciation. This is detrimental in that it assumes that our students are simply a blank slate. Annoyingly, they begin the chapter by talking about accent addition as opposed to accent reduction following the basic trends that are emerging as a result of multi-competence and ELF approaches, but it is clear that they haven t really integrated this clearly in their model at all. The basic idea here is that as each different pronunciation element is dealt with students start from the very beginning as if they knew absolutely nothing about pronunciation at all. This, in a way is even more insulting to the students L1 then telling them their L1-affected accent is faulty. In this model the L1 is simply ignored as if students were languageless individuals. English is then supposed to develop totally separately and from nothing. This seems not only insulting to the

4 students background and experience but is also making the process much more difficult than it needs to be. It is by looking at this carefully that we can maybe get a feel for what the original intention of the researcher behind the positing of accent addition meant. Accent addition really entails using the L1 or whatever linguistic devices the students already have to helping them achieve greater gains faster with him the target language. This means not only teaching from this top-down blank slate type of perspective but also using their implicit knowledge and forging ahead with practice (and meaningful practice) much earlier in this cycle that they have created. Then there is the issue of choral repetition. Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) have reserved an entire level in their plan for this type of practice. While I agree that coral repetition can be useful, especially for certain students and for certain types of practice (suprasegmentals), it is not going to work for every student and it is not something that we want to do for an extended period of time, simply because it s not meaningful. Additionally, it is very easy for some students to slip through the cracks during this choral repetition type of practice and actually not engage in any type of practice. Lastly, looking at the idea of videotaping, obviously this is a good idea and for reasons that I think we must all understand at this point. I m just wondering why they have left this to the very end of the cycle. It seemed his students would be able to benefit from this on the belief that they are not blank slates, much earlier. It bears repeating in relation to this that a specific sequence or cleanly cut steps for teaching is in and of itself somewhat ridiculous in that there are no such stages certainly to learning which means there probably shouldn t be set fixed stages for how we actually want to teach. Different concerns within the greater area of pronunciation need to be dealt with differently by both the facilitator (the teacher) and the students. Different types of practice can and should be required. Regarding overtness or awareness of what the students are actually doing on the part of the students, this again is something that should be treated in a more variable way. 3. Which of the case studies presented in Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) do you believe was carried out the most effectively? Of the six case studies presented in Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) certainly the one that pertains most closely to what we are doing with our pronunciation tutor project is that of the one-on-one tutoring in Japan. For this reason, of course not this reason alone, this was one of my favorites presented here. I thought that the tutor did a good job of trying to use pronunciation in a more communicative way which is certainly fitting based on the speaker s level. Essentially the tutor used an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) or task-based approach in this situation and both of these call for the use of a student s needs analysis. This needs analysis is then used as a guide for what will be done in the tutoring sessions. What was not great about this, however, was that the needs analysis did not include points for pronunciation that we can necessarily see, but was rather just focused on communicative needs which in of itself is not so bad, but some focus on pronunciation in the needs analysis may be helpful. The most problematic part of this particular case study, as with all the others, is simply that the native speaker ideal is still highly prevalent. The tutor presumably was using herself or himself as a model with no thought whatsoever as to the different environments in which this student/tutee would actually be using the target language. Another one that I liked was the case study involving the immigrants in the United States. I like this for the simple reason that the students themselves were used as the creators of their own

5 input. There was a lot more collaboration between the designer or the leader and the students themselves in the different sections and this is something that we may want to emulate in our own pronunciation tutor project. Additionally I think that this is a very good model for us in that it shows us how we can deal with pronunciation without using a lot of text. Within South Korea, and this may be more strongly seen in an extremely literate society like South Korea, teachers tend to favor text-based approaches for teaching virtually everything. But of course language is different and virtually spoken language is different in so far spoken language is supposed to exist in the absence of texts and written language. Certainly textual information can help but at some point our students need to be able to produce spoken language without having a text in front of them. This is a very important point that is not at all addressed in a lot of the literature that we have looked at so far. To develop speaking skills and certainly pronunciation people need to focus on the sound and texts can limit the students ability to focus on what we would like them to because their attention will naturally and more automatically go to the text itself, this is after all where they feel comfortable. It is important that we make an effort to get them to practice some speaking without specific aides from texts and certainly this applies to the IPA is well. 4. Which of the case studies presented in Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) do you find the worst carried out? Among the different case studies presented here it may be difficult to find one that is actually the absolute worst, but probably the one in which these TA were being trained for accent production in the United States is quite bad. It is bad, for one, because they are assuming that ESL situations are not at the same time English as lingua franca situations. It seemed that they were really devaluing the student s own English skills so I felt the whole program was actually very demeaning to the students who have made remarkable achievements not only academically but linguistically as well. Suddenly having them try to mimic certain native speaker events of English seems to ignore the fact that many of the students in the class may not be native speakers of English or maybe native speakers of English who speak very different dialects, somewhat akin to the trainees themselves. The other thing I did like about this was the very top down traditional way in which things were approached. Students were expected to learn more or less fixed forms and be able to employ those in the classroom but of course we know the classrooms never really worked that way. So all in all I thought this one was really quite bad. As a general comment about all of these different case studies, the one thing that really jumped out at me and surprised me in a somewhat negative way was a tremendous over reliance on contrastive analysis in addition to a very strong overreliance on a simple diagnostic test. Having conducted our own diagnostic ourselves for the pronunciation tutor project I am sure everyone is aware of the extreme limitations that any one test is going to have in relation to a phenomenon as complicated as pronunciation of a language. Yes, such tests are necessary but we want to be very careful how we interpret them and make sure that our interpretations are constantly changing based on new evidence. We also want to make sure that we view the language our students produce in patterns rather than specific instances. To treat everyone a certain way based on a contrastive analysis and then to use a simple diagnostic as a foolproof way of designing a program could lead to certain problems for sure.