Stephen van Vlack Sookmyung Women s University Graduate School of TESOL English Pronunciation Spring 2014 Week 9 Answers Walker (2010), Chapter 3 1. Of the ten concerns expressed in the chapter, which one do you think is the most potentially damaging to the ELF approach and why? How would you effectively deal with the students /parents concerns? -An ELF approach will lower standards -An ELF approach will make errors acceptable. -The LFC is a reduced version of native-speaker pronunciation. -ELF means variation, but mutual intelligibility means a common standard. -If you take away native-speaker accents, you leave learners without a model. -You cannot teach an accent that nobody has. -It is wrong to impose an ELF approach on students. -A bad accent gives a bad impression. -Most teachers prefer a native-speaker accent. -Most learners say they want to sound like a native speaker. As we discussed in class, there are lot of English teachers who are very concerned about this ELF approach and think of it negatively. They have been teaching for many years striving themselves to acquire a native-like accent and have been very strongly pushing their students to do the same thing. For these people they see this ELF approach as a devaluation of their own norms and perceive it as an attack on themselves and their own beliefs and practices. This is actually quite a shame because this ELF approach was developed to help English teachers and particularly non-native speaking English teachers. Walker (2010) Introduces 10 concerns which people, mostly teachers, mostly have in relation to an ELF approach to pronunciation. Since we are trying to make the shift from a native speaker driven or modeled approach to an ELF approach is important that we are familiar with these concerns, for it is highly likely that students and parents will have at least some of these concerns. We need to be able to confront them as they arise to ensure our learners than what we are doing is really in their best interest. Let s deal with each concern one by one. -An ELF approach will lower standards The basic idea here is that since the lingua franca core represents a slightly reduced array of concerns as compared to an average or typical native speaker driven pronunciation program people think the standards are lower, but really the basic standards are the same. The basic standards for all pronunciation courses or programs revolve around intelligibility. This basically means that our learners have to produce English in a way that is intelligible to others. The difference here is that the intelligibility revolves around the others involving not necessarily some type of native speaker, but any speaker of English regardless of their linguistic background. This in and of itself is really not much of a shift at all. Both approaches share the same basic standard. We may even go further to include comprehensibility as an important standard in ELF, but it is not a standard in these native speaker driven pronunciation programs. There s an important distinction between intelligibility and comprehensibility. Intelligibility simply means that one produces sounds in a way that are somehow decodable to someone else. This means that the other party can identify what the sounds are. Comprehensibility revolves more around meaning. Someone could be intelligible but not necessarily comprehensible. Comprehensibility is not just how you produce sounds but also that how you actually use these sounds to produce meaningful utterances. As I m sure we are aware, there are large amount of different strategies, techniques, and practices that one may use to heighten their comprehensibility. Comprehensibility is also different in that it focuses on not only what the speaker does but also with the listener does. For someone to be comprehensible or even intelligible one needs to actually make certain
adjustments. These adjustments are coming not only from the speaker but also from the listener. The listener needs to be in the right mindset to understand what that person is saying. The ELF approach, as we will see next week with the idea of accommodation, has comprehensibility as its basic standard, not just intelligibility. Bearing this in mind it then seems that the basic standards for this ELF approach are actually higher than for a standard native speaker driven approach. It is important to realize that the ELF approach does not stop at just the basics. The main goal may be to make people comprehensible but most learners would like to be more than just comprehensible and most teachers would like their learners to be more than just comprehensible. This means once we help our students move up to this basic level we also help them move up to more, fine-tuning their production so that they can be increasingly proud of the English that they use. -An ELF approach will make errors acceptable This is a somewhat ridiculous concern in that errors themselves are very much subjective. What one person perceives as an error may not be interpreted as an error by a different person who is using a somewhat different model. This is the danger of using any given model too strictly and underscores the difference between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to language teaching. Basically a native speaker driven model for pronunciation entails a prescriptive approach. In this prescriptive approach the teacher emphasizes what is right and what is wrong based on some specific (often a pure fantasy) model of how a tiny subset of people are thought to use that language. This doesn t really work for any language and certainly works even less for a global language like English. The ELF approach does accept a higher level of variability, but this is not unconstrained variability. As discussed above there are still norms and standards that one needs to meet. The idea of intelligibility is a strong model for how one should produce the sounds of features of a particular language, in this case English. Teachers certainly know when their students are being intelligible or indeed comprehensible. Moreover most students, even low-level students are aware of their own intelligibility. This means that there is such a thing as errors in an ELF approach, but the errors will be approached in a fundamentally different way than in more traditional approaches. Certainly not all language is acceptable in an ELF approach but more variability certainly is acceptable and actually is welcomed. On the topic of variability it is important to realize that variability is not only an inherent part of language but it is what gives language its great strength and power. It is also something that is actually unavoidable. This means that in this ELF approach we want to make people aware of variability, both their own and that of others so that they can extend these basic personalized ideas out to language in general. As a conclusion, your left approaches do not lead to language which is less understood and that s the most important aspect of acceptability in any language. -The LFC is a reduced version of native speaker pronunciation The lingua franca core, although it does focus attention on particular aspects of pronunciation, is most certainly not a reduced version of native speaker pronunciation because it is, in and of itself, a fully working system. The system may be marginally simplified, but the important point to remember is that the simplifications do not in any way lead to less intelligibility or comprehensibility. In fact, these simplifications are designed to enhance both intelligibility (in particular in relation to vowels and clusters) and comprehensibility. This is in of itself shows the inherent efficacy of the LFC within the ELF approach. -ELF means variability, but mutual intelligibility means a common standard As discussed above, the ELF approach does allow for more variability, but this does not mean that there are not particular standards. Again, as discussed above the standards for ELF come from English and are tempered than in a meaningful way by comprehensive ability within the framework of the English language. We are looking at English we are looking not at one particular instance of English but rather at the collective nature of the entity and that in and of itself is not only exciting but has a lot more validity than taking anyone example of this massive entity to represent the whole.
-If you take away native speaker accents, you leave learners without a model In the ELF approach the model is there. The model is the entity of English itself as represented by all the speakers of English. -You cannot teach an accent that nobody has The argument against this concern is that the standard dialects of English, which are often cited as the models for pronunciation teaching, are very often spoken by very small numbers of people. Once we realize this and then consider the reality of variability we realized that even when we are using native speaker models, there really is no particular speaker of any of those. These native speaker prestige accents are really idealized versions of how people think of a speaker should speak. The reality is that no one actually speaks that way and that all native speakers somehow perceive of their own production as being standard. The idea of a standard form of a language is as vague as the idea of a lingua franca core. -It is wrong to impose an ELF approach on students One of the key differences between the ELF approach and these native speaker driven approaches is the idea of imposition or forcing students to adopt certain attributes. The whole idea of the ELF approach is that the students themselves decide how they would like to speak the target language, of course with guidance and help from the instructor. This can be strongly contrasted with these native speaker driven approaches in which these native speaker accents are foisted upon students and are often used as weapons against students, as we discussed in class. It is impossible for an ELF approach to be used as a weapon against anyone because as the students themselves who decide how they would like to progress in their linguistic development and where they would like to take their own accent. In the ELF approached the teacher provides a variety of different samples and encourages students to find their own particular voice in relation to these different samples. There is no imposition of any type of accent as we find in these more traditional approaches. -A bad accent gives a bad impression This concern brings us to very important idea that one s accent is not just a neutral attribute. It is from one s pronunciation that others make a wide range of decisions about that person. From one s accent in their L1 we often feel that we can determine someone s socioeconomic background, their level of education, the region they came from, gender, ethnicity even, to name a few. These same sociolinguistic judgments apply to all the languages which one speaks. Therefore, our students speaking English will also be judged based on the type of English they produce and pronunciation is the outward façade of our language. Bearing this in mind we can then start to understand terms like a bad accent. In a very naïve way, language learners may think that native speakers perceive of non-native English as being bad, but this is sadly not the case. As shown in Walker (2010), most native speakers perceive of other native speaker dialects/accents as being somehow worse than most non-native speaker accents. Part of this comes from a very simple realization that most native speakers of English fully expect non-native speakers to have some sort of accent and for a non-native speaker to not have an accent. Other native speaker accents were often perceived as being highly strange (and not always in a positive way). So, if your students are worried about how native speakers are going to perceive them then, they really don t have to worry. It is certainly true that a Korean accent, for example, is not bad. It is perfectly normal. The other part of this and we address this issue in the class, is the basic idea but the whole problem with judging our accents as necessarily good or bad means that we are judging ourselves from the outside, and this is an extremely important idea. It seems that when South Koreans think about their own English they don t think about their own English from an internal perspective. They are always judging themselves from the perspective of how they believe a native speaker may judge them. This is probably a reflection of how English was actually brought into South Korea by the South Koreans themselves - as an elitist tool. What is even more interesting is that most South Koreans have no idea how native speakers of English would actually judge them and they end up judging themselves way too harshly.
This ties back to how people perceive of their own mistakes. Many of my students in South Korea are absolutely terrified with the idea of making a mistake, even a single mistake in English, yet these same people make thousands of mistakes when they use Korean without ever noticing or worrying at all about it. They don t worry about Korean because they are using a highly personalized, internal assessment tool for judging their Korean production. When using Korean people are focusing on, for the most part, what they do and their ultimate successes and do not pay that much attention to the particulars of how they do it. For English, it seems, it is the exact opposite. This is an external kind of assessment that is imposed from the outside. This is extremely interesting in the particular case of South Korea because Korea was never actually a colony of any English speaking country and English was therefore not imposed on Korea from outsiders but rather was used as a weapon by other South Koreans who were the only people at the time who had access to English beyond the classroom. The bottom line is that we have the help our students, and South Korean society in general, to stop believing that a non-native accent for English is somehow bad. -Most teachers prefer a native speaker accent This is very interesting concern because in believing this (that a native speaker accent for English is somehow better) teachers in South Korea are devaluing themselves. I think this is a very good example of the type of contradictions we often find in language learning, and in my experience particularly in English language learning. Teachers may claim that they prefer native speaker accent because this is what they are somehow used to (at least used to claiming), but at the same time most teachers are also going to resist the same basic idea (or least they should). This is where awareness is so important. If we can make teachers aware of this ELF approach as a viable approach they may abandon this ridiculous idea that a native speaker accent is somehow better. Education is a very conservative area of science and ideas gain acceptance quite slowly. But that in and of itself is not any reason to not try to extend ideas, particularly ones that we know are valid to have a positive effect. We should also be aware that this basic belief that a native speaker accent is somehow superior can also be extremely problematic. People can use this false belief to justify sweeping educational reforms (as exemplified by the introduction of early English education in South Korea) as well as a wide range of ridiculous practices, educational and otherwise (as most infamously represented by the case of tongue lengthening operations). -Most learners say they want to sound like a native speaker Most learners say they want to sound like native speakers simply because this is what they ve heard from their society and from their teachers. These are not their own ideas and they are not ideas that they really feel strongly about. Once more, these are ideas that actually hurt them as language learners. The vast majority of these students do not have integrative motivation, nor does society want them to have integrative motivation. Bearing this in mind it seems than to be a very strong contradiction for people to not want to integrate into a native speaker society but at the same time want to sound like a native speaker. The big question is and why people want to sound like native speakers? The answer would be, again, basically that this is what society tells them is somehow valuable. South Korea seems to be somewhat extreme in this belief, which again is an example of South Koreans taking assessment schemes from elsewhere and then self-imposing them on themselves (seemingly almost like a punishment for simply being what you are - South Korean). Is no wonder that people are simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by English in the South Korean context. 2. Of the six benefits mentioned which do you believe is the most important for the students? In addition to the 10 concerns discussed above, Walker (2010) also introduces six benefits of the ELF approach to English pronunciation. They are: -A lighter workload -Increased progress and achievability -Accent addition instead of accent reduction
-Identity through accent -Mother tongue as friend -Non-native speakers as instructors As with the 10 concerns above, a lot of these end up impacting each other. From the student s point of view I think the most important of these benefits is the idea of identity through accident. By encouraging students to integrate their knowledge, background, and pre-existing skill sets, we are helping to form a more beneficial link between Korean and English. Language is an extremely important part of our identity. Language provides not only the outward manifestation of who we are to the world, but also encapsulates and organizes our ideas about the world. It is inevitable at some stage in the learning process that there will be L1 interferences on the target language. This is absolutely natural and does not present a problem. It is important for students to understand this and, also to understand the important role that Korean, in the case of South Koreans obviously, plays in the learning of English. To deny students their background, their thought processes, and their identity is almost criminal. 3. Of the six benefits mentioned which do you think is the most important for teachers? Among the six different benefits mentioned in Walker (2010), probably the one that most affects teachers themselves as the benefit related to non-native speakers as instructors. There s a lot of research supporting the belief that non-natives speakers make better potential teachers than native speakers of the target language. Particularly in the South Korean context, where native English speaking teachers and native Korean speaking teachers are often pitted against each other, it seems that it is high time that there was a serious discussion of these issues. Of course there has been some of the area pronunciation seems to be a real holdout and the South Korean government is making a concerted effort, not to necessarily inform people or change the situation, but bring in a large amount of native English-speaking teachers and this sadly probably exacerbates the negative situation in that it reinforces believes regarding native speaker superiority in the area pronunciation not only for other teachers but for students themselves.