Job Discussion Forums

[sonya]

[Deconstructor]

Teaching pronunciation is a dead end endeavor for the most part. Basically students will speak the way they speak and there is nothing, or very little, anyone can do.

If a student is often incomprehensible, I try to make him/her aware of the problem and some activities can be done with very marginal results.

Ultimately pronunciation problems are not in the mouth, they are in the ear. This is why children speak with the accent that they grow up with. Students need to listen to a great deal of native speech to make the minimal improvement. Haven�t you noticed that usually students can repeat after you and it�s almost always an improvement, but give it a few minutes and the same mistake is back? This is why listening to talk radio or watching TV for a couple of hours a day is fundamental.

For me as a teacher there is one single rule: if the student is comprehensible, nothing more need be done; leave the well enough alone. Sometimes they come to me and ask me to help them speak with a native accent. My reply is always the same: There is nothing I can do for you; it is a dream you should abandon because it is never going to happen.

Of course, if s/he is a Korean, he might consider a tongue surgery that seems to be taking root in Korean these days. Thus, s/he will damage his own native language accent as well and �solve� his/her problem that way.

[Justin Trullinger]

[astro]

[astro]

[astro]

[astro]

Sorry for posting the same thing 3 times! Apparently, I haven`t caught on to this whole posting thing! Thanks for all of your ideas! I appreciate them.
MG.

[sonya]

how is their accent, is it very noticably french?

are you teaching them to speak with a british or american accent?

[astro]

[sonya]

I'm currently studying French phonology.. so if you can get any ideas from what my class does:

the first thing my professor did, the first day of class, was have us say the phrase, "Je m'appelle [nom]" in the worst American accent imaginable - in other words, as if it were a sentence in English, and asked us to identify what made it sound so bad in French. The rest of the course basically flowed from there. It really helps to learn the IPA and do some transcription, it helps with learning and understanding the sound system and tendencies speakers have. We tackle vowels a lot. French tends to have clearer vowels that are given full value, while in English we tend to dipthongize them or anticipate the consonant, or turn them into schwas.

I don't know much about English phonology.. sitting here, I'm trying to think of some generalizations, but the truth is it seems vastly more complicated than French. One of the reasons why French is such a smooth sounding language is because they regularize syllable length, and generally only assign stress to the end of a group of words. The opposite is true in English, where syllable lengths vary. Stress assignment is tricky.. it's generally trochaic and articles and function words don't get stressed, but stress also changes according to what kind of affix is attached, or what the function of the word is.. You could possibly practice stress with different forms of a word.

Also, in English we tend to anticipate liquids and nasals (l, r, n, etc.) We aspirate our p's at the beginning of the word, while French doesn't. When we do voicing assimilation, it's the reverse of the tendency in French.. take the word observe for example. Note the b and the s that neighbor each other - b is voiced, and s is voiceless, but in English voicing assimilation the b influences the s, and makes it a z. So observe is pronounced as obzerve. The opposite is true in French, where it's pronounced as opserve. These are all things to look out for, all things that French speakers have a tendency to retain in English. Have them practice examples of these tendencies. It helps to listen to dialogues and to mimic them to get the English intonation and stress pattern down, as well as to listen and sing along to songs, but mostly it's very important to be aware of what you're doing "wrong".

[Chancellor]

[astro]

[SueH]

There's a book, by the same guy who wrote 'Pronunciation Games' - Mark Hancock, called 'English Pronunciation in Use' which might be of use.

Although it uses Southern British as the model it does include material (including 4 cds) for other accents, and there is plenty on stress as well. Worth a look.

[dmb]

[sonya]

Yule..?

Whether or not you nasalize a vowel in English makes no difference in its meaning, nasalization is just a phonetic process that happens in pronuncation before nasal consonants (this may vary with dialects (I don't know)).

On the other hand, in French a word with a vowel [+nasal] means one thing, and a word with a vowel [-nasal] means another - they are underlyingly two seperate phonemes. they can show up in the same environments while meaning different things.

dish and main? plat et principal? Or did he use other words..

here are some minimal pairs in bastardized IPA:

main (hand) mE+nasal
mais (but) mE

soin (caring attention) - swa+nasal
soi ("self") - swa

attend (wait, kind of expect) - a.tE[+n]d
entend (hear) - a[+n].tE[+n]d

etc.