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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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 Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2007 9:51 pm Post subject: |
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| furiousmilksheikali wrote: |
Do you understand the distinctiom between is and ought? In a perfect world we could babble anything we want and everyone will and should understand us. |
It isn't about 'anything goes.' It's about recognising the difference between patterns of language use and genuine mistakes,
| furiousmilksheikali wrote: |
| The inconvenient truth is that this doesn't happen. You have studied an MA in Applied Linguistics so please post me a study that shows, conclusively, that diversity in English is an unmitigated benefit to the student. |
PM me your email and I'll send you some, not enough room on the forum.
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furiousmilksheikali
Joined: 31 Jul 2006
Posts: 1660
Location: In a coffee shop, splitting a 30,000 yen tab with Sekiguchi.
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| Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2007 10:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Alrighty. I shall post it to you in the next twenty four hours. I know where you're coming from but I simply disagree with that side of the debate. It is an interesting one to be sure and I respect your position. I simply happen to think it flawed in this case. |
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wintersweet
Joined: 18 Jan 2005
Posts: 345
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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Mark
Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 12:36 am Post subject: |
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| womblingfree wrote: |
| Mark wrote: |
| This seems like a strange comment to me. Why would North Americans be given phonetics/phonology lessons to correct their natural pronunciation of their first language? |
And by the same logic why would we teach phonetics to correct the natural pronunciation of peoples second language? Practically everyone that speaks an L2 speaks it with the accent and inflections of their L1.
| Mark wrote: |
| We could accept all kinds of speech "diversity", but we don't, which is why we have speech therapists. |
You are confusing diversity with people with speech disorders. We accept diversity every time we leave our house, there are millions of variations of English from town to town, state to state and country to country.
Claiming that people who speak differently to you have a speech disorder will get you a one way ticket to E.R.
Try it in New York!  |
I'm not confusing speech diversity with speech disorders. I did that deliberately to make a point. It's a question of what is variation and what is disorder?
Look at it this way, there are many accents of English, but most of those accents differ in terms of phonetics rather than the underlying phonology. Speakers from England pronounce the long "o" sound in "boat" differently than speakers from Canada, but both groups have a sound that corresponds to that phoneme.
I'm not saying that Japanese speakers (or anyone) should imitate the exact phonetics of any particular accent, but they should be encouraged to speak phonemic English. By blending the distinct phonemes of "l" and "r" into just one phoneme, they are making themselves difficult to understand. It has nothing to do with their accent.
There are many varities of "l" and many varities of "r". Substituting the French "r" for the English "r" does not make the speaker difficult to understand because the French "r" does not correspond with a phoneme of English. Replacing the "r" sound with a "d" would be confusing.
There is of course some phoneme-blending in some accents (i.e. the vowels in "caught" and "hot" and "car" being pronounced identically in many parts of NA).
If you're arguing that speakers should be able to speak english should not be expected to make phonemic distinctions that do not occur in their native language, well, I think that's just silly.
I understand where you're coming from and I respect your opinion, but I have to strongly disagree. Would you seriously agree that trying to pronounce English with only five vowel phonemes is a realistic possibility? If you were learning German, would you substitute "K" for the "ch" sounds and ignore the umlaut vowels? |
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Mark
Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 12:41 am Post subject: |
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| womblingfree wrote: |
| Mark wrote: |
| nobody is forcing them to correctly pronounce "r" and "l". They're perfectly free to substitute their Japanese "r" for both sounds and we can call it "diversity". However, and it's a big "however", this seriously limits the understandability of Japanese English. |
No more so than the understandability of any other English variant from anywhere else. If there is misunderstanding it is just as likely to come from the listeners lack of communicative ability than from the L2 speaker.
There are enough English speakers who are all but unintelligible to people outside of their social grouping. Japanese pronunciation sounds like Hugh Grant compared to someone with a thick localised English dialect, whch will not only contain wildly different pronunciation, but also local phrases and words that are completely unknown to the listener. |
Again, even thick localised accents tend to respect the basic phonemes of English. Once you figure out what the local version of the "o" in "boat" is, you can start to understand them more clearly. People speaking English with a completely different underlying phonemic structure is a different matter.
And most people with thick localised accents tend to lose those accents when they leave the local area. They retain traces, of course, but their speech modifies itself over time. |
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Mark
Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 12:42 am Post subject: |
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| johanne wrote: |
| Quote: |
Phonics is a way for English-speaking children to learn how to read English.
It's based on the assumption that the students have acquired the sound system of English. |
Actually you will find plenty of ESL kids learning English phonics before they have learned to speak it. It is a common occurance in primary school classrooms in any major English speaking city with an immigrant population. Phonics is nothing more than teaching how the letters used to write down a language are connected to the sound of the language. You can teach this to people who do not yet speak the language fluently, or even at a beginner level. I've been doing for the last 7 years.
If you start teaching phonics at 6 six years, the children naturally pick up the sounds. They have no problems differentiating 's" and "sh". Children that age are natural mimics and in fact some ESL speakers master phonics before native speakers and appear to be "reading", although their limited understanding of the language means they are not understanding what they are decding. If you combine the teaching of language and phonics you will get kids learning English words and pronouncing them clearly and in many cases the kids will be thinking in English from almost the beginning of their language learning.
I don't think Japanese need to speak like natives, especially considering "native" English is full of different accents, but by learning phonics the majority of students will speak in an accent that is clear to most other native and ESL speakers and communication is the point. Teaching phonics from Grade 1 will help them read the words as it sounds in English and not as they sound in katakana and that makes a difference in how understandable they will be to other English speakers (native or second language).
If you look at the French Immersian program in Canada 5 year old kids are taught French phonics when they can say little more than "bonjour" and while only some kids go on to become fluent French speakers the vast majority of them (over 90%) pronounce French words clearly and are easy to understand. |
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Phonics is an important component for kids learning a foreign language, but it by itself will not provide them with a clear accent. That was my basic point and I agree with what you say in your post. |
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Mark
Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 12:47 am Post subject: |
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| womblingfree wrote: |
| furiousmilksheikali wrote: |
This is a fashionable and yet foolish stance.
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It's not a stance it's how people speak.
If you want to drill your Japanese students to pronounce their R's then that's up to you.
Have fun. |
Disagreeing with your premise doesn't mean that one would endorse mindless drilling. Students need to understand that "l" and "r" are basic contrastive phonemes in English and they need to understand the phonetic differences between them. This will allow them to improve their ability to make the sounds and it will improve their ability to listen for them. Some will develop a phonemic distinction and some won't, but I think it's information that learners need to know. |
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Mark
Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 12:57 am Post subject: |
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I know I've made a lot of posts in a row, but i want to clarify something. I'm not attacking you, womblingfree, but I do disagree with you. I'm familiar with Jenkins' work and I basically agree with her premise. But, IIRC, she does say that consonant distinctions are very important for comprehensible speech. I would argue that an "l" and "r" distinction is important for comprehensible speech, particularly in the case of Japanese English where many vowel phonemes are condensed into only a few. A reduced vowel phonemic inventory combined with a reduced consonant phonemic inventory is a recipe for incomprehensibility.
Anyway, the proof is in the pudding. Haven't you ever watched Japanese speakers try to communicate in katakana English? Other people (not just native English speakers) can't understand them. That's the basic problem.
Last edited by Mark on Mon Jan 29, 2007 2:46 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mark
Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 1:18 am Post subject: |
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And (to add yet another post) I thought I'd also say that I disagree with the idea that English will really become the global second language. It is becoming a lingua franca in Western Europe (and maybe eventually in the EU as a whole) as well as among international business people and diplomats, but I don't think it's suitable for the whole world and certainly not for the average person who has no interest in English except for its utility as an international language.
I actually believe that a constructed language like Esperanto would be a much better choice, but the world disagrees with me on that one. |
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SDSUMarcus01
Joined: 13 Oct 2005
Posts: 20
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 2:12 am Post subject: |
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How about:
I want to go to (verb)+ing. |
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markle
Joined: 17 Jan 2003
Posts: 1316
Location: Out of Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 2:18 am Post subject: |
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[quote="SeasonedVet"]
| Quote: |
| Moreover seeing that Chinese and Japanese languages are related (but the sound systems are different?) and Thai and Sanskrit/Hindi are related, how come Thais do the same with the "L" and "R" but Indians don't? Indians go heavy on that Retroflex. |
As had already been pointed out Chinese and Japanese are related in Kanji only. The same is true with Thai and Sanskrit/Pali (Hindi is no way related to Thai), they use the same script and share some words. It would be like trying to say Italian and Indonesian or Vietnamese are related because they all use Roman script. Thai is complicated further by factors such as languages specific to social status, education and regional accents. In Thai the hard 'r' phenome is spoken by Khmers, Malays, Royalty and the well educated, the 'l' phenome is spoken by the Northern and Lao people and immigrant Chinese. Throw into that a few American educated hi-so kids who think it's clever to throw in an English 'r' phenome instead of the traditional rolling Thai 'r' and you have lots of fun. |
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Mark
Joined: 23 Jan 2003
Posts: 500
Location: Tokyo, Japan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 2:24 am Post subject: |
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In case anyone's interested,
I did a quick check and it seems that the sound "r" in Japanese is not a standard tap as I originally thought, but rather a lateral tap. Normally, a tap is a complete closure and then air is released over the centre of the tongue (like the "t" in American "city"), but the Japanese one is lateral, which involves air escaping over the sides of the tongue, rather than the front. "l" is also a lateral sound.
I'll look further into how the sound is articulated, but given its lateral component (and the fact that it may also alternate with a more central tap), this is surely a big part of how and why Japanese mispronounce r/l but also of why other people sometimes hear r and sometimes l. A standard central tap would sound kind of like a short Spanish "r" and would be a decent substitute for English "r". A lengthened Japanese "r" (i.e. just hold the sound for longer) usually works as a substitute for "l".
One way to help your students make the l/r distinction might be to encourage them to try and hold "l" for a longer period of time and make their "r" really short. The "r" will still sound like an "l" somtimes, but at least there will be a consistent difference in the way students pronounce the two sounds. |
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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 3:13 am Post subject: |
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| Mark wrote: |
| Students need to understand that "l" and "r" are basic contrastive phonemes in English and they need to understand the phonetic differences between them. |
Any educated English student knows this, they just can't pronounce them easily.
The exercises you describe to change pronunciation would be more at home with a child suffering from a speech disorder rather than a language learner. We're teachers not speech therapists!!
Like I said the infatuation with pronouncing English words like a 'native' can lead to all sorts of problems and, in the case of Korea, actual physical mutilation. If you were teaching Indian students in a call centre then perhaps mimicing a native speaker would be of benefit. But most people use English to cross international boundaries not simply to talk to Westerners.
This whole discussion shows the importance of needs assessment and individual learning plans for students and not the battery hen syndrome that goes on in conversation classes. As for business English 
Don't become victim of a native speaker fallacy, the vast majority of the worlds English teachers are non-native speakers with differing pronunciations. The vast majority of English language teachers around the world are not native speakers and in many, many cases are all the better for it.
Last edited by womblingfree on Mon Jan 29, 2007 4:17 am; edited 1 time in total |
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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 3:25 am Post subject: |
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| Mark wrote: |
| I'm familiar with Jenkins' work and I basically agree with her premise. But, IIRC, she does say that consonant distinctions are very important for comprehensible speech. I would argue that an "l" and "r" distinction is important for comprehensible speech, particularly in the case of Japanese English... |
Differentiation between /L/ and /r/ is particularly unimportant in the case of Japanese English as absolutely everyone on earth is aware of it!
What researchers like Jenkins clearly agree on is that not giving non-native speakers the respect accorded to native speakers when it comes to differentiation in language is prejudicial. Speaking with a thick dialect is differentiation, speaking in a foreign accent is a 'mistake.' Very wrong.
Not that anything goes obviously, but when there are quantifiable patterns common to the vast majority of a particular speech community labeling them all as 'deficient' and 'in need of correction' is absurd.
| Mark wrote: |
| Haven't you ever watched Japanese speakers try to communicate in katakana English? Other people (not just native English speakers) can't understand them. That's the basic problem. |
That's the problem of the person who hasn't learnt Japanese in order to speak with groups of Japanese people. |
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