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Friday, March 21, 2008
Intelligibility
Dear all,
I am attaching below a rather lengthy discussion on 'intelligibility', an issue which we have recently discussed in class. I hope you find it interesting.
Have a nice weekend.
P.S. Please remember to forward your two discussion questions prior to our class on Monday.
Ulker
----- Original Message -----
From: ttedsig@yahoogroups.com
To: ttedsig@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 5:29 PM
Subject: [ttedsig] Digest Number 966
IATEFL TTEd SIG
Messages In This Digest (13 Messages)
1a. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Jason Renshaw
1b. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dennis Newson
1c. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: john attard
1d. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Scott Thornbury
1e. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: john attard
1f. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Jason Renshaw
1g. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dennis Newson
1h. Intelligibility as a moving target From: Jocelyn Hardman
1i. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Scott Thornbury
1j. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dennis Newson
1k. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dindy Drury
1l. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Russ Taylor
2. English pronunciation or Englishes pronunciations? From: Costas Gabrielatos
Messages
1a.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Jason Renshaw" englishraven2003@yahoo.com.au englishraven2003
Sun Feb 3, 2008 10:37 am (PST)
I can't help but find myself in agreement with those who claim that in the end it comes down to actual interactions between people and context/situation to really make the final impact on pronunciation development.I well remember being drilled in Swedish pronunication throughout university, then going on a scholarship to actually live and study in Sweden. From classroom drills, I was suddenly sharing a dorm with 5 other Swedish students. One of the hardest distinctions to make in Swedish pronunciation is between the "u" and "y" vowels. I can remember over breakfast in the shared kitchen one morning asking one of the ladies I shared the dorm with, "varfor rynka du pannan sa dar?" (why are you frowning like that - literal translation "why wrinkle you the forehead like that"?). Unfortunately, my attempt at the "y" vowel came out as "u" - resulting in "runka" instead of "rynka". The whole small crowd around the breakfast table erupted into hysterics, and then kindly infomed me what "runka" meant. I can't (for decency's sake) give a literal translation here on a public board, but let's just say that what I had said (with a perfectly straight face) to the lady was "why are you engaging in a male act of sexual self satisfaction with your forehead?".Three years full time study and practice with the u/y sounds had not equipped me for that, but the experience itself certainly did. I think I had cleaned up my pronunciation of those two sounds within about - oh - 20 seconds!However, I do think there is a place for initial drilling and practice with pronunciation. Had I not had even the initial training in a classroom, I might have said "reinka" (as in why), which would have been incredibly unintelligible. My kind Swedish dorm-mates knew instinctively what I had meant to say - it was just the sheer humour of the eventual production that caused them to lose it right there in front of me. Classroom practice had got me close (and achieved some semblance of intelligibility in that case), but actual interaction and situation got me over the finish line.I think it even relates to spelling. My Korean wife, who is a great English speaker, and was drilled in spelling for many years at school, recently left me a note asking me to "please turn off the hitting at 10.30". In the middle of winter, I knew of course what she'd meant, and when I explained to her that I could turn off the heating at 10.30 if she could turn off the hitting at 10.29, then everything would be rosy!But I can see Scott's point. What if with my Swedish pronunciation, and with my wife's spelling, we'd both had the opportunity to interact more in our classrooms instead of drilling? Perhaps we could have uncovered and dealt these potentially embarrassing mistakes well before even getting to the real situation?- JasonJason Renshaw - Visiting LecturerKyungpook National University, Teachers' College, Department of English EducationDaegu City, Republic of Korea 702-701Managing Director: www.onlinEnglish.Net
1b.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dennis Newson" djn@dennisnewson.de dnewson2001
Sun Feb 3, 2008 10:52 am (PST)
Jason and list,Clearly personal motivation and social context are crucial when learners are attempting to speak understandably to those around them. But I can't shake off the conviction that because speech acts involve physical movement , of lungs and tongue and lips, somewhere along the line the learner will have to get down to the nitty-gritty of practising using his/her vocal apparatus to produce sounds that listeners can recognise. Is that wrong? And in your anecdote, Jason, was the shock of finding out that you weren't meaning what you meant to mean really enough to enable you to get the vowel quality correct?Dennis
1c.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "john attard" jattard1@yahoo.co.uk jattard1
Sun Feb 3, 2008 11:22 am (PST)
Exactly my point Dennis! After the laughter had died down, did the person note the reason why there was a potential breakdown of communication? Through such awareness, similar mistakes can be avoided in the future, and communication (and language learning) improved.John Attard
1d.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Scott Thornbury" sthornbury@wanadoo.es scott_thornbury
Sun Feb 3, 2008 1:32 pm (PST)
Jocelyn,I stand corrected! It's true, there is a "third way" between the phoneme drills, on the one hand, and the communication strategies on the other - and that's where Jenkins' phonological core comes in handy, because it identifies those areas of pronunciation that HAVE BEEN SHOWN to cause communication problems between speakers of English as an International Language (emphasis added deliberately, to rebuff unsupported claims of the type: "Examples of students having accuracy and fluency in written and spoken English, but fall at the pronunciation hurdle are legion") . On the whole, the areas that Jenkins identifies as being crucial do not include many phoneme distinctions, which would justify my saying to Dennis, for example, that trying to teach your zero beginner the difference between ship and sheep may be a massive waste of valuable time (forgive me, Dennis!).As for John's use of Jason's (Swedish vowels) story as justification for pre-emptive teaching (if this is a correct reading of his post) I am not convinced. Jason himself says that the pre-emptive drilling had little or no effect on his production of the phonemic distinction, compared to the immediate impact of communicative use. And, to be completey nit-picky, Jason's mispronunciation did not cause "communicative breakdown", potential or otherwise. His interlocutors knew exactly what he was trying to say, but were amused by the unwitting double-entendre. Just as my butcher knows that, when I ask for "una polla" (instead of "un pollo"), I am asking for a chicken, not the male generative organ. Proof, yet again, that it is pragmatics that impacts most on communication, not phonetics.
1e.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "john attard" jattard1@yahoo.co.uk jattard1
Sun Feb 3, 2008 2:25 pm (PST)
No, Scott, I did not mention pre-emptive teaching or drilling. I mentioned language awareness, which is more a repair issue. Also, in the case of the anecdote in question, it seems to me that you are suggesting that phonemes can never be a cause of communication breakdown Shall we say the same about the supersegmentals? and grammar? Why are we singling out individual sounds as irrelevant? The difference between 'hitting' and 'heating' is a clear problem of vowel length, reflected in the language user's spelling. This needs to be identified and worked upon.Are you saying that communication can be left to entirely to discourse and interaction?John Attard
1f.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Jason Renshaw" englishraven2003@yahoo.com.au englishraven2003
Sun Feb 3, 2008 6:53 pm (PST)
The "hitting" and "heating" one interests me, because in saying either word in my wife's regular spoken usage, I haven't particularly noticed any confusing mispronunciation of the words. It was only when I saw it spelled that I became aware that she had some misconception of the vowel length. It wasn't/isn't all that evident when she actually speaks.And more interesting still perhaps, once we realized the mistake, I instinctively got her to 'drill' the two words and sounds a few times, and she was happy to practice them to get them more correct. But thinking about it now, I think it is her new awareness that will increase her chances of clearly differentiating the two in future, rather than the drills we did. Those were the instinct of a teacher and a learner looking for the 'instant satisfaction' of the moment, which drills so readily provide. In the longer term, I think it will be 'real practice' (i.e., when in real natural communication she goes to say the words and has cause to pause and concentrate on saying them a little more clearly) that makes the difference.Could we even go so far as to say that a drill, getting the sounds right, provides a memory to the learner that he/she could and therefore now can get the sound right? Or did the drill somehow have that behaviorist effect on her mouth muscles to 'naturally' get it right next time? Or is it a complex mixture of both plus other factors?Mmmm.- Jason
1g.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dennis Newson" djn@dennisnewson.de dnewson2001
Sun Feb 3, 2008 9:59 pm (PST)
First, Scott - absolutely no need for any kind of apology. I take part is such public discussions not to win the argument, though I've nothing against winning, but to explore and extend my own understanding of the matter under discussion in the interests of those I may teach or influence in some way or other.May I shift the focus slightly to the practical tasks I'm logging in my blog - English from Zero Take 2 alluded to by Scott?Nina, from the beginning, has expressed concern about her pronunciation. She records herself and is embarrassed at what she hears. From the start I told her our aim would not be to get her sounding like me but to get her being comfortably intelligible by others.Distinguishing between 'ship' 'sheep' isn't on our syllabus in grand isolation, but being able to distinguish between /i:/ and /i/ and being able to make that and other distinctions surely has to be.She also has problems distinguishing between /i:/ /i/ and /ae/. Surely I have to attend to that otherwise she might join Jason and, without the forehead, say w nk instead of 'wink', for example. Shouldn't I try to help her avoid such a faux pas?How would you help the Ninas of the learning world, Scott?Dennis
1h.
Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Jocelyn Hardman" hardman14osu@yahoo.com
Sun Feb 3, 2008 10:13 pm (PST)
The anecdotes have been hilarious! Just to add one of my own, during a mock teaching test, a potential international teaching assistant wanted to highlight the disparity between faculty and student parking options on campus. What came out of his mouth was,"students have just a few places, but faculty f--k all over campus." Unfortunately, he did not have the ability to repair the pronunciation error. Since we were able to figure out what he'd wanted to say, I suppose Scott would say that he was intelligible (at least to ESL teachers and trainers). He failed the test, however, because he was considered to be potentially unintelligible to monolingual US undergraduates. Like grammatical accuracy, pronunciation accuracy is not simply acquired by immersion, and its attendant communication and interaction, or all immigrants would speak their L2s like natives. Formal educational intervention appears to effect changes in these areaswith adult learners of L2s, or we'd all be out of jobs.Since some adult L2 learners aspire to professions which depend on high levels of pronunciation accuracy, such as teaching (although innacuracies in air traffic control or espionage would lead to graver consequences), then we should know how to train them.And if our teaching methods repertoire consists solely of phoneme drills, then we are seriously creatively challenged.Jocelyn HardmanForeign/Second Language Education75 Arps Hall/1945 N. High St.The Ohio State UniversityColumbus, OH 43210 USA(W) 614-292-5005(H) 937-767-2200
1i.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Scott Thornbury" sthornbury@wanadoo.es scott_thornbury
Mon Feb 4, 2008 12:15 am (PST)
Interesting speculations, Jason, but I would query a couple of your conclusions:> Could we even go so far as to say that a drill, getting the sounds right, > provides a memory to the learner that he/she could and therefore now can > get the sound right? Or did the drill somehow have that behaviorist effect > on her mouth muscles to 'naturally' get it right next time? Or is it a > complex mixture of both plus other factors?1. "getting the sounds right" - there is not "right sound", especially where vowels are concerned. Ask any two "native speakers" to say ship and sheep and you will get a wide range of allophones, distributed all over the vowel quadrant. (And they will also vary according to their environment: the same speaker will pronounce the vowels in kill and keel slightly differently than in ship and sheep). In fact you may find that one speaker's ship is the same as another speaker's sheep. This, in fact, is a significant marker of the difference between the NZ and the Australian accent. (An Australian quiz show contestant in NZ answered a question, correctly, saying "Crobsy, Stills and Nash" but was heard to be saying "Steels" so was ruled incorrect. He took them to court, and won). So, no, there is no single correct representation of any single phoneme. What there IS, though, is a phonemic distinction - however native speakers pronounce ship and sheep, they will pronounce each word differently, so as to maintain a perceptible distance between them. The drill, therefore, may have served to raise awareness as to the fact that there is a distinction. It is then up to your wife (or the student) to find a satisfactory way of rendering that distinction, given the influence of their L1.2. Given the influence of their L1.... The evidence on the success of training adult learners to produce phonemic distinctions that don't exist in their L1 is fairly disappointing. The learner's neocortex becomes attuned to the phonemes of his/her L1 at a very young age, and thereafter loses its plasticity. As Nick Ellis writes "Transfer which requires restructuring of exisiting categories is especially difficult. This is the essence of 'perceptual magnet theory' ... in which the phonetic prototypes of one's native language act like magnets... distorting the perception of items in their vicinity to make them seem more similar to the prototype. What are examples of two separate phonemic categories, /r/ and /l/, for an L1 English languge speaker are all from the same phonemic category for an L1 Japanese speaker. And in adulthood the Japanese native cannot but perceive /r/ and /l/ as one and the same. The same form category is activated on each hearing and incremented in strength as a result... Under normal L1 circumstances, usage optimally tunes the language system to the input. A sad irony for an L2 speaker under such circumstances of transfer is that more input simply compounds their error; they dig themselves even deeper into the hole created and subsequently entrenched by their L1". (Selective Attention and Transfer Phenomena in L2 Acquisition... in Applied Linguistics 27/2, June 2006). So, we can raise our learners' awareness that there is a phoneme distinction in English that there isn't in their L1, but they will have trouble perceiving it in natural talk, and even more trouble producing it. Just as you can "raise my awareness" that there are sounds that a bat can hear that I can't. But it won't make me hear them.
1j.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dennis Newson" djn@dennisnewson.de dnewson2001
Mon Feb 4, 2008 1:08 am (PST)
A fascinating reply by Scott to Jason's speculations. The Nick Ellisquotation does rather make it sound, though, as if nothing much can be done for learners with the problems outlined.Scott also wrote:" It is then up to your wife (or the student) to find a satisfactory way ofrendering that distinction, given theinfluence of their L1. "Surely one of the ways is to find a teacher. How much can a learner do ontheir own?Dennis
1k.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dindy Drury" dindydrury@yahoo.co.uk dindydrury
Mon Feb 4, 2008 6:23 am (PST)
I really liked Scott's mention of ‘making students aware that there is a difference between two sounds', I believe this would make them mroe intelligible. No one seems to have mentioned the word 'context'? I love the anecdotes, but utterances are surely intelligible within a context ? (Sorry, but another spelling anecdote - In Kenya, where some languages also have an l / r problem, I once saw a wonderful notice at a garage "Petlor'....)In classrooms students are often not really in a 'context' such as they would be at say a conference, meeting etc. Thus drills seem 'useless' and 'boring' - to teachers too!One teacher here recently remarked and asked why the new course book had 'all these difficult listening texts with non native speakers' - because the listening tasks are not 'RP' but many of the actors/ readers have African or Asian accents - tho as I pointed out they are probably native speakers. I think many teachers are unaware that most of their students will need to communicate with other L2 speakers of English, not L1 speakers, and then which sounds do you choose to imitate? A selection of accents in listening tasks is surely at least an awareness raising factor for students. Not very erudite in reply to everyone else’s, but just some thoughts. Dindy
1l.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Russ Taylor" russssch@yahoo.co.uk russssch
Mon Feb 4, 2008 6:46 am (PST)
Dindy Drury <dindydrury@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: I think many teachers are unaware that most of their students will need to communicate with other L2 speakers of English, not L1 speakers, and then which sounds do you choose to imitate? A selection of accents in listening tasks is surely at least an awareness raising factor for students. Not very erudite in reply to everyone else’s, but just some thoughts. Dindy, I agree wholeheartedly with this thought about exposure to a wider range of accents, it's something I have been championing myself for a few years now where I am currently teaching in China. But where are the kids going to find them? They won't encounter them in their own listening lessons, that's for sure.When I taught business English I had to use a Cambridge University Press textbook, I forget the title now, and pretty much all of the dialogues had a range of different accents from all of the continents. Are there any other resources like that does anyone know?Where I teach in Shenyang, China, teachers and students still want to strive for RP British English or standard American accents. They'll never get them but they still have the idea from the education system that they should strive for them nonetheless. As a consequence, pron teaching tends to start with IPA symbols and thus associated 'proper' sounds before moving on as swiftly as possible to a demonstration of how each person's own foilbles, errors or whatever, when taken in context, might not effect intelligibilty to any great degree at all. Where it does then it needs pointing out obviously but I guess I tend to focus now much more on stress, intonation, nuances of vocal expression as regards variable meanings rather than drilling phonemes. /i:/ /i/ and /I/ all need to be covered but as Scott so rightly points out it's the difference between them in an individual's oral discourse that needs to be emphasised much more than getting it 'right'. However, drilling does have a limited but important stage I'd say at the beginning of oral English courses. It should neither be overlooked nor overemphasised.Russ Taylor
2.
English pronunciation or Englishes pronunciations?
Posted by: "Costas Gabrielatos" c.gabrielatos@lancaster.ac.uk cgabrielatos
Mon Feb 4, 2008 3:37 am (PST)
The discussion so far seems to be polarised between teaching `native norms' or `intelligibility' - the latter in light of using English as a lingua franca (ELF) or `international English' (EIL). However, as many contributors have already pointed out, there is no such thing as a single `native norm', and the possibility of unintelligibility between native speakers cannot be ruled out. What has not been mentioned so far is that ELF/EIL is more of an expectation (or agenda) than an established reality - or, at best, an observable emerging trend, which has so far had little linguistic research attention. So, in my view, it is premature to issue prescriptive phonological guidelines for what may, or may not, become ELF/EIL in the future. In fact, such practice could also be seen as linguistically imperialistic (Phillipson, 1992), as it treats local pronunciation as somehow `problematic' or `deviant' (while being 'benign' enough to also allow for native features).Perhaps, then, this discussion could also fruitfully address the issue of established and emerging Englishes; i.e. local (native) varieties of English, which "appropriate" (Canagarajah, 1999) BANA English norms and blend them with linguistic features of the native/local languages. Interestingly, such Englishes have been more consistently documented and analysed than the elusive `international' variety of English - although mostly in their written form. In terms of documentation, there are corpora of such Englishes, most notably by the ICE project at University College London. In terms of analysis, see for example the journal World Englishes, published since 1981, and the recent Handbook of World Englishes.Costas Gabrielatos
References
Canagarajah, A.S. (1999). Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kachru, B., Kachru, Y. & Nelson, C. (eds.) (2006). The Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Blackwell. (Book information: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=9781405111850)
Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Websites
ICE project: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/index.htm
World Englishes: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/aims.asp?ref=0883-2919&site
I am attaching below a rather lengthy discussion on 'intelligibility', an issue which we have recently discussed in class. I hope you find it interesting.
Have a nice weekend.
P.S. Please remember to forward your two discussion questions prior to our class on Monday.
Ulker
----- Original Message -----
From: ttedsig@yahoogroups.com
To: ttedsig@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 5:29 PM
Subject: [ttedsig] Digest Number 966
IATEFL TTEd SIG
Messages In This Digest (13 Messages)
1a. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Jason Renshaw
1b. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dennis Newson
1c. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: john attard
1d. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Scott Thornbury
1e. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: john attard
1f. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Jason Renshaw
1g. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dennis Newson
1h. Intelligibility as a moving target From: Jocelyn Hardman
1i. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Scott Thornbury
1j. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dennis Newson
1k. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Dindy Drury
1l. Re: Intelligibility as a moving target From: Russ Taylor
2. English pronunciation or Englishes pronunciations? From: Costas Gabrielatos
Messages
1a.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Jason Renshaw" englishraven2003@yahoo.com.au englishraven2003
Sun Feb 3, 2008 10:37 am (PST)
I can't help but find myself in agreement with those who claim that in the end it comes down to actual interactions between people and context/situation to really make the final impact on pronunciation development.I well remember being drilled in Swedish pronunication throughout university, then going on a scholarship to actually live and study in Sweden. From classroom drills, I was suddenly sharing a dorm with 5 other Swedish students. One of the hardest distinctions to make in Swedish pronunciation is between the "u" and "y" vowels. I can remember over breakfast in the shared kitchen one morning asking one of the ladies I shared the dorm with, "varfor rynka du pannan sa dar?" (why are you frowning like that - literal translation "why wrinkle you the forehead like that"?). Unfortunately, my attempt at the "y" vowel came out as "u" - resulting in "runka" instead of "rynka". The whole small crowd around the breakfast table erupted into hysterics, and then kindly infomed me what "runka" meant. I can't (for decency's sake) give a literal translation here on a public board, but let's just say that what I had said (with a perfectly straight face) to the lady was "why are you engaging in a male act of sexual self satisfaction with your forehead?".Three years full time study and practice with the u/y sounds had not equipped me for that, but the experience itself certainly did. I think I had cleaned up my pronunciation of those two sounds within about - oh - 20 seconds!However, I do think there is a place for initial drilling and practice with pronunciation. Had I not had even the initial training in a classroom, I might have said "reinka" (as in why), which would have been incredibly unintelligible. My kind Swedish dorm-mates knew instinctively what I had meant to say - it was just the sheer humour of the eventual production that caused them to lose it right there in front of me. Classroom practice had got me close (and achieved some semblance of intelligibility in that case), but actual interaction and situation got me over the finish line.I think it even relates to spelling. My Korean wife, who is a great English speaker, and was drilled in spelling for many years at school, recently left me a note asking me to "please turn off the hitting at 10.30". In the middle of winter, I knew of course what she'd meant, and when I explained to her that I could turn off the heating at 10.30 if she could turn off the hitting at 10.29, then everything would be rosy!But I can see Scott's point. What if with my Swedish pronunciation, and with my wife's spelling, we'd both had the opportunity to interact more in our classrooms instead of drilling? Perhaps we could have uncovered and dealt these potentially embarrassing mistakes well before even getting to the real situation?- JasonJason Renshaw - Visiting LecturerKyungpook National University, Teachers' College, Department of English EducationDaegu City, Republic of Korea 702-701Managing Director: www.onlinEnglish.Net
1b.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dennis Newson" djn@dennisnewson.de dnewson2001
Sun Feb 3, 2008 10:52 am (PST)
Jason and list,Clearly personal motivation and social context are crucial when learners are attempting to speak understandably to those around them. But I can't shake off the conviction that because speech acts involve physical movement , of lungs and tongue and lips, somewhere along the line the learner will have to get down to the nitty-gritty of practising using his/her vocal apparatus to produce sounds that listeners can recognise. Is that wrong? And in your anecdote, Jason, was the shock of finding out that you weren't meaning what you meant to mean really enough to enable you to get the vowel quality correct?Dennis
1c.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "john attard" jattard1@yahoo.co.uk jattard1
Sun Feb 3, 2008 11:22 am (PST)
Exactly my point Dennis! After the laughter had died down, did the person note the reason why there was a potential breakdown of communication? Through such awareness, similar mistakes can be avoided in the future, and communication (and language learning) improved.John Attard
1d.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Scott Thornbury" sthornbury@wanadoo.es scott_thornbury
Sun Feb 3, 2008 1:32 pm (PST)
Jocelyn,I stand corrected! It's true, there is a "third way" between the phoneme drills, on the one hand, and the communication strategies on the other - and that's where Jenkins' phonological core comes in handy, because it identifies those areas of pronunciation that HAVE BEEN SHOWN to cause communication problems between speakers of English as an International Language (emphasis added deliberately, to rebuff unsupported claims of the type: "Examples of students having accuracy and fluency in written and spoken English, but fall at the pronunciation hurdle are legion") . On the whole, the areas that Jenkins identifies as being crucial do not include many phoneme distinctions, which would justify my saying to Dennis, for example, that trying to teach your zero beginner the difference between ship and sheep may be a massive waste of valuable time (forgive me, Dennis!).As for John's use of Jason's (Swedish vowels) story as justification for pre-emptive teaching (if this is a correct reading of his post) I am not convinced. Jason himself says that the pre-emptive drilling had little or no effect on his production of the phonemic distinction, compared to the immediate impact of communicative use. And, to be completey nit-picky, Jason's mispronunciation did not cause "communicative breakdown", potential or otherwise. His interlocutors knew exactly what he was trying to say, but were amused by the unwitting double-entendre. Just as my butcher knows that, when I ask for "una polla" (instead of "un pollo"), I am asking for a chicken, not the male generative organ. Proof, yet again, that it is pragmatics that impacts most on communication, not phonetics.
1e.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "john attard" jattard1@yahoo.co.uk jattard1
Sun Feb 3, 2008 2:25 pm (PST)
No, Scott, I did not mention pre-emptive teaching or drilling. I mentioned language awareness, which is more a repair issue. Also, in the case of the anecdote in question, it seems to me that you are suggesting that phonemes can never be a cause of communication breakdown Shall we say the same about the supersegmentals? and grammar? Why are we singling out individual sounds as irrelevant? The difference between 'hitting' and 'heating' is a clear problem of vowel length, reflected in the language user's spelling. This needs to be identified and worked upon.Are you saying that communication can be left to entirely to discourse and interaction?John Attard
1f.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Jason Renshaw" englishraven2003@yahoo.com.au englishraven2003
Sun Feb 3, 2008 6:53 pm (PST)
The "hitting" and "heating" one interests me, because in saying either word in my wife's regular spoken usage, I haven't particularly noticed any confusing mispronunciation of the words. It was only when I saw it spelled that I became aware that she had some misconception of the vowel length. It wasn't/isn't all that evident when she actually speaks.And more interesting still perhaps, once we realized the mistake, I instinctively got her to 'drill' the two words and sounds a few times, and she was happy to practice them to get them more correct. But thinking about it now, I think it is her new awareness that will increase her chances of clearly differentiating the two in future, rather than the drills we did. Those were the instinct of a teacher and a learner looking for the 'instant satisfaction' of the moment, which drills so readily provide. In the longer term, I think it will be 'real practice' (i.e., when in real natural communication she goes to say the words and has cause to pause and concentrate on saying them a little more clearly) that makes the difference.Could we even go so far as to say that a drill, getting the sounds right, provides a memory to the learner that he/she could and therefore now can get the sound right? Or did the drill somehow have that behaviorist effect on her mouth muscles to 'naturally' get it right next time? Or is it a complex mixture of both plus other factors?Mmmm.- Jason
1g.
Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dennis Newson" djn@dennisnewson.de dnewson2001
Sun Feb 3, 2008 9:59 pm (PST)
First, Scott - absolutely no need for any kind of apology. I take part is such public discussions not to win the argument, though I've nothing against winning, but to explore and extend my own understanding of the matter under discussion in the interests of those I may teach or influence in some way or other.May I shift the focus slightly to the practical tasks I'm logging in my blog - English from Zero Take 2 alluded to by Scott?Nina, from the beginning, has expressed concern about her pronunciation. She records herself and is embarrassed at what she hears. From the start I told her our aim would not be to get her sounding like me but to get her being comfortably intelligible by others.Distinguishing between 'ship' 'sheep' isn't on our syllabus in grand isolation, but being able to distinguish between /i:/ and /i/ and being able to make that and other distinctions surely has to be.She also has problems distinguishing between /i:/ /i/ and /ae/. Surely I have to attend to that otherwise she might join Jason and, without the forehead, say w nk instead of 'wink', for example. Shouldn't I try to help her avoid such a faux pas?How would you help the Ninas of the learning world, Scott?Dennis
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Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Jocelyn Hardman" hardman14osu@yahoo.com
Sun Feb 3, 2008 10:13 pm (PST)
The anecdotes have been hilarious! Just to add one of my own, during a mock teaching test, a potential international teaching assistant wanted to highlight the disparity between faculty and student parking options on campus. What came out of his mouth was,"students have just a few places, but faculty f--k all over campus." Unfortunately, he did not have the ability to repair the pronunciation error. Since we were able to figure out what he'd wanted to say, I suppose Scott would say that he was intelligible (at least to ESL teachers and trainers). He failed the test, however, because he was considered to be potentially unintelligible to monolingual US undergraduates. Like grammatical accuracy, pronunciation accuracy is not simply acquired by immersion, and its attendant communication and interaction, or all immigrants would speak their L2s like natives. Formal educational intervention appears to effect changes in these areaswith adult learners of L2s, or we'd all be out of jobs.Since some adult L2 learners aspire to professions which depend on high levels of pronunciation accuracy, such as teaching (although innacuracies in air traffic control or espionage would lead to graver consequences), then we should know how to train them.And if our teaching methods repertoire consists solely of phoneme drills, then we are seriously creatively challenged.Jocelyn HardmanForeign/Second Language Education75 Arps Hall/1945 N. High St.The Ohio State UniversityColumbus, OH 43210 USA(W) 614-292-5005(H) 937-767-2200
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Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Scott Thornbury" sthornbury@wanadoo.es scott_thornbury
Mon Feb 4, 2008 12:15 am (PST)
Interesting speculations, Jason, but I would query a couple of your conclusions:> Could we even go so far as to say that a drill, getting the sounds right, > provides a memory to the learner that he/she could and therefore now can > get the sound right? Or did the drill somehow have that behaviorist effect > on her mouth muscles to 'naturally' get it right next time? Or is it a > complex mixture of both plus other factors?1. "getting the sounds right" - there is not "right sound", especially where vowels are concerned. Ask any two "native speakers" to say ship and sheep and you will get a wide range of allophones, distributed all over the vowel quadrant. (And they will also vary according to their environment: the same speaker will pronounce the vowels in kill and keel slightly differently than in ship and sheep). In fact you may find that one speaker's ship is the same as another speaker's sheep. This, in fact, is a significant marker of the difference between the NZ and the Australian accent. (An Australian quiz show contestant in NZ answered a question, correctly, saying "Crobsy, Stills and Nash" but was heard to be saying "Steels" so was ruled incorrect. He took them to court, and won). So, no, there is no single correct representation of any single phoneme. What there IS, though, is a phonemic distinction - however native speakers pronounce ship and sheep, they will pronounce each word differently, so as to maintain a perceptible distance between them. The drill, therefore, may have served to raise awareness as to the fact that there is a distinction. It is then up to your wife (or the student) to find a satisfactory way of rendering that distinction, given the influence of their L1.2. Given the influence of their L1.... The evidence on the success of training adult learners to produce phonemic distinctions that don't exist in their L1 is fairly disappointing. The learner's neocortex becomes attuned to the phonemes of his/her L1 at a very young age, and thereafter loses its plasticity. As Nick Ellis writes "Transfer which requires restructuring of exisiting categories is especially difficult. This is the essence of 'perceptual magnet theory' ... in which the phonetic prototypes of one's native language act like magnets... distorting the perception of items in their vicinity to make them seem more similar to the prototype. What are examples of two separate phonemic categories, /r/ and /l/, for an L1 English languge speaker are all from the same phonemic category for an L1 Japanese speaker. And in adulthood the Japanese native cannot but perceive /r/ and /l/ as one and the same. The same form category is activated on each hearing and incremented in strength as a result... Under normal L1 circumstances, usage optimally tunes the language system to the input. A sad irony for an L2 speaker under such circumstances of transfer is that more input simply compounds their error; they dig themselves even deeper into the hole created and subsequently entrenched by their L1". (Selective Attention and Transfer Phenomena in L2 Acquisition... in Applied Linguistics 27/2, June 2006). So, we can raise our learners' awareness that there is a phoneme distinction in English that there isn't in their L1, but they will have trouble perceiving it in natural talk, and even more trouble producing it. Just as you can "raise my awareness" that there are sounds that a bat can hear that I can't. But it won't make me hear them.
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Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dennis Newson" djn@dennisnewson.de dnewson2001
Mon Feb 4, 2008 1:08 am (PST)
A fascinating reply by Scott to Jason's speculations. The Nick Ellisquotation does rather make it sound, though, as if nothing much can be done for learners with the problems outlined.Scott also wrote:" It is then up to your wife (or the student) to find a satisfactory way ofrendering that distinction, given theinfluence of their L1. "Surely one of the ways is to find a teacher. How much can a learner do ontheir own?Dennis
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Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Dindy Drury" dindydrury@yahoo.co.uk dindydrury
Mon Feb 4, 2008 6:23 am (PST)
I really liked Scott's mention of ‘making students aware that there is a difference between two sounds', I believe this would make them mroe intelligible. No one seems to have mentioned the word 'context'? I love the anecdotes, but utterances are surely intelligible within a context ? (Sorry, but another spelling anecdote - In Kenya, where some languages also have an l / r problem, I once saw a wonderful notice at a garage "Petlor'....)In classrooms students are often not really in a 'context' such as they would be at say a conference, meeting etc. Thus drills seem 'useless' and 'boring' - to teachers too!One teacher here recently remarked and asked why the new course book had 'all these difficult listening texts with non native speakers' - because the listening tasks are not 'RP' but many of the actors/ readers have African or Asian accents - tho as I pointed out they are probably native speakers. I think many teachers are unaware that most of their students will need to communicate with other L2 speakers of English, not L1 speakers, and then which sounds do you choose to imitate? A selection of accents in listening tasks is surely at least an awareness raising factor for students. Not very erudite in reply to everyone else’s, but just some thoughts. Dindy
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Re: Intelligibility as a moving target
Posted by: "Russ Taylor" russssch@yahoo.co.uk russssch
Mon Feb 4, 2008 6:46 am (PST)
Dindy Drury <dindydrury@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: I think many teachers are unaware that most of their students will need to communicate with other L2 speakers of English, not L1 speakers, and then which sounds do you choose to imitate? A selection of accents in listening tasks is surely at least an awareness raising factor for students. Not very erudite in reply to everyone else’s, but just some thoughts. Dindy, I agree wholeheartedly with this thought about exposure to a wider range of accents, it's something I have been championing myself for a few years now where I am currently teaching in China. But where are the kids going to find them? They won't encounter them in their own listening lessons, that's for sure.When I taught business English I had to use a Cambridge University Press textbook, I forget the title now, and pretty much all of the dialogues had a range of different accents from all of the continents. Are there any other resources like that does anyone know?Where I teach in Shenyang, China, teachers and students still want to strive for RP British English or standard American accents. They'll never get them but they still have the idea from the education system that they should strive for them nonetheless. As a consequence, pron teaching tends to start with IPA symbols and thus associated 'proper' sounds before moving on as swiftly as possible to a demonstration of how each person's own foilbles, errors or whatever, when taken in context, might not effect intelligibilty to any great degree at all. Where it does then it needs pointing out obviously but I guess I tend to focus now much more on stress, intonation, nuances of vocal expression as regards variable meanings rather than drilling phonemes. /i:/ /i/ and /I/ all need to be covered but as Scott so rightly points out it's the difference between them in an individual's oral discourse that needs to be emphasised much more than getting it 'right'. However, drilling does have a limited but important stage I'd say at the beginning of oral English courses. It should neither be overlooked nor overemphasised.Russ Taylor
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English pronunciation or Englishes pronunciations?
Posted by: "Costas Gabrielatos" c.gabrielatos@lancaster.ac.uk cgabrielatos
Mon Feb 4, 2008 3:37 am (PST)
The discussion so far seems to be polarised between teaching `native norms' or `intelligibility' - the latter in light of using English as a lingua franca (ELF) or `international English' (EIL). However, as many contributors have already pointed out, there is no such thing as a single `native norm', and the possibility of unintelligibility between native speakers cannot be ruled out. What has not been mentioned so far is that ELF/EIL is more of an expectation (or agenda) than an established reality - or, at best, an observable emerging trend, which has so far had little linguistic research attention. So, in my view, it is premature to issue prescriptive phonological guidelines for what may, or may not, become ELF/EIL in the future. In fact, such practice could also be seen as linguistically imperialistic (Phillipson, 1992), as it treats local pronunciation as somehow `problematic' or `deviant' (while being 'benign' enough to also allow for native features).Perhaps, then, this discussion could also fruitfully address the issue of established and emerging Englishes; i.e. local (native) varieties of English, which "appropriate" (Canagarajah, 1999) BANA English norms and blend them with linguistic features of the native/local languages. Interestingly, such Englishes have been more consistently documented and analysed than the elusive `international' variety of English - although mostly in their written form. In terms of documentation, there are corpora of such Englishes, most notably by the ICE project at University College London. In terms of analysis, see for example the journal World Englishes, published since 1981, and the recent Handbook of World Englishes.Costas Gabrielatos
References
Canagarajah, A.S. (1999). Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kachru, B., Kachru, Y. & Nelson, C. (eds.) (2006). The Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Blackwell. (Book information: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=9781405111850)
Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Websites
ICE project: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/index.htm
World Englishes: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/aims.asp?ref=0883-2919&site
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Get Well Soon Olesya
Dear Olesya,
On behalf of may friends and teacher, I wish you get well soon and we all hope to see you next week.
You have missed the carrot cake!!!
Best wishes
Aysegul
On behalf of may friends and teacher, I wish you get well soon and we all hope to see you next week.
You have missed the carrot cake!!!
Best wishes
Aysegul
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