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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: |
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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 the | | | |
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