Goodwin: Teaching Pronunciation

Teaching Pronunciation By Janet Goodwin

Aubree Bixman

When working with ELL it is important that we keep in mind that a goal we must have for them is that they should be able to communicate with confidence and with ease. Goodwin explains that incorporating pronunciation along with pragmatic meaning and nonverbal communication can give students the tools they need to achieve these goals.

Goodwin explains four goals for students that teachers should strive to meet in the curriculum: functional intelligibility, functional communicability, increased self-confidence, and speech monitoring abilities. Intelligibility means that if an accent is present it is not distracting to the listener. I especially liked the term accent addition for students as to acknowledge their L1. Functional communicability includes learning to use pauses, pitch, movement and stress to effectively communicate in realistic social situations. Self-confidence is in terms speaking and being understood, thus teachers must provide students with real life situations and provide students with consistent feedback to increase this confidence. Finally, when students learn to pay close attention to their own speech and that of others they can imitate language.

Goodwin suggests that the English sound system has shifted from a bottom-up approach to top-down. This means that the sound system is addressed as it naturally occurs and that suprasegmental and segmental features can be looked at more thoroughly. It suggests that when speech is unclear it is necessary to take a closer look, thus moving from a macro to micro level. This approach recognizes that all sound features build off of each other. These features include:

· Thought Groups: pauses that divide our speech into manageable chunks called thought groups. Learners often understand the concept of pausing but pause at incorrect times, often pausing too often

· Prominence: a syllable that is emphasized within a thought group understood due to lengthening it and moving pitch up or down

· Intonation: the melodic line or pitch pattern that help to communicate attitude

· Rhythm: The alternating of stressed (longer) and unstressed (shorter) syllables. English uses stress-timed with stresses occurring at regular intervals.

· Reduced Speech: to achieve rhythm students must de-emphasize syllables while stressing others; de-emphasizing is more difficult to achieve

· Linking: The connection between words that occur in speech such as don’t you to sound like don-chew

· Consonants

· Vowels: syllable core in which the sound can be lengthened or shortened. Challenging because English has more vowels (14) than most other languages, which can be spelled in many different ways.

· Word Stress: the syllable within a word that receives the primary stress

Goodwin stresses that it is important for learners to be aware of all pronunciation features: thought groups, prominence, rhythm, reduced speech, and linking “work together to package our utterances in a way that can be processed easily by our listeners. So, rather than being more comprehensible by speaking each word separately, our learners actually become less fluent and less comprehensible.”

The framework for teaching pronunciation includes five steps

1) Description of Analysis: teacher presents feature and shows when and how it is used

2) Listening Discrimination: Use listening activities that include minimal pairs (word pairs that vary by one sound i.e. pan and pin or boat and vote) to identify the different pronunciation features

3) Controlled Practice: Activities almost entirely focused on form (poems, rhymes, dialogue, dramatic monologue)

4) Guided Practice: Focus shifts to meaning, grammar, communicative intent and pronunciation

5) Communicative Practice: Balance between form and meaning in which activities become more communicative.

Goodwin suggests several different techniques for teaching pronunciation. First is identifying the differences of minimal pairs. Second is using cartoons and drawings to analyze and create a discussion. Using rhymes, poetry, and jokes help to demonstrate the rhythm of speech and makes spelling and pronunciation easy and predictable. Drama not only helps with pronunciation, but with other aspects of communication including nonverbal communication.

Many tools are available to teachers to help with improving fluency. This includes cassette tapes, which students can play back and hear and video recording which students can hear and see their communication techniques.

While working towards achieving pronunciation it is important to assess students and provide them with ongoing feedback. The article suggests that students should have time to formulate an answer, but should only answer orally, which can be recorded for both teacher and student to use later to assess communicative ability. Feedback can be achieved in three forms, self-monitoring, peer feedback, and teacher feedback. Self-monitoring can be achieved through self-correction and self-analysis of recorded speech. Goodwin suggests that peer feedback may be more productive than just instructor feedback due to the fact that someone that is slightly more advanced may have more impact o a student. Teacher feedback should not be focused on every error that students make, but instead on errors that can cause breakdown of communication, errors that occur as a pattern, and errors that relate to the pronunciation we are teaching.

A stressed point that I found to be very important “it is the errors that students make that guide us toward what to teach.” Thus we must always be attune to our students, providing ongoing feedback and using that feedback to create student focused lessons that can help to improve pronunciation and communication skills and eliminate learner frustration.

Task:

Explain a time when you were interacting with an English Language Learner and had a hard time communicating with them or understanding what they were trying to communicate to you. How was it resolved? Were you frustrated? How do you think they felt? Explain a technique that could be used to help improve their pronunciation and communication skills.