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[Jizzo T. Clown]

Students need to know these! Nowadays, most respectable dictionaries use IPA, which, if the students know it, can be very useful when encountering a new word. So how are they to recognize the differences between "tough" "cough" and "bough"?

The obvious answer is that you teach them. However, if they come across these words individually on their own and want to look them up, if they can't read IPA, they may be at a loss.

I'm not saying that the IPA is the be-all-end-all of pronunciation, but it is certainly a tool that can be used to improve students' awareness of different sounds--much like using katakana in Japanese.

[woza17]

Hi Roger
My son spent 6 months at the beginning learning pronunciation. He is often complimented on his Chinese pronunciation. Even I can hear the difference when other foreigners are speaking Chinese and even the locals here in Guangdong.
Good job Kev. Teachers that folow after you will revere your name.
I have started focusing more on this area in my classes.
Very hard to change ingrained habits though with the adults. I keep telling them to open their mouths to get the correct pronunciation maybe I will invest in buying 20 mirrors so that they can look at their mouths when they are speaking.

When I actually get them to do this the pronuciation is near perfect. I have also suggested that they record their voices and listen to the tape and listen for the differences.


Today in class at the middle school I was doing a review quiz with my 60 odd students 3 of the students pronunciation was perfect, I got goosebumps. Wonderful voices that would put CCTV9 presenters to shame. These kids are only 14 well modulated voices bloody amazing. I can't take credit for that but I would love to know why.
OP good thread

[Roger]

Thanks wozal17, for your comment!

Has anyone - by the way - ever bothered to learn how to write English words phonetically? The IPT is widely taught in Chinese English classes - by Chinese teachers! Few foreigners are familiar with it, though.

[klaus]

it is very simple to "stop your students saying "aahs" after words"

you just deal with/ teach them about syllables. when you want to teach them how to pronounce a new word (or an old one in a more natural way) you write it on the board and put vertical lines between the syllables. i personally put a large dot under the stressed syllable and strike the board as i say the syllable, but i used an S here.

for example:

ig | no | rance
S


a | pa | the | tic
S............S

when a student says "make-ah" instead of make, you show on the board that the the word in question has only one syllable

eg make (not make | ah )

problem solved in 5 seconds. the reason that chinese beginners and even more advanced learners often add an unecessary syllable to words like "make" and others is that chinese has no syllable with a "final k" (for example). it just takes a bit of practise and they soon stop doing it. you might have to remind them from time to time though. it's hard to develop the new maxillolingual musculature and neurology required for the pronunciation of syllables that are not simlar to those of ones mother tongue.

later u dont need to write anything on the board. u just say a word to them and ask them how many syllables they heard and where the stress was. u'll end up getting the right answers.

eg. consideration - how many syllables does this word have? which syllable or syllables are stressed? (the "which syllables are stressed" question should also be used to check proficiency with nominals - first, second, third etc)

for any words that you encounter at any time and that are a real mouthful put them on the board like you did when u went through it with them at an earlier stage.

[vikdk]

sorry Rog but I've gotta put my hand up here - I was part of an experiment in the 60's in Birmingham (UK) where we learnt from 4-7years old something called ITA - initial teaching alphabet (a phonetic alphabet). The experiment was not a success. My appaling spelling is apparently something me and my fellow ITA brethren share - and aparently one of the major reasons the scheme was abandoned
Kinda put force into that argument that re-learning something can be mighty difficult - indeed even more difficult than learning it the hard way in the first place!!!!
Also shows how the consequences of what we learnt in our early years can stick with us for a long long time!!!!

[sheeba]

It's one difficulty teaching students about phonetic symbols which I personally believe is of use to them but what about teaching students where to place their tongue in all this ? Surely it's no good unless they know how to articulate the sounds properly ?

[dajiang]

hey there.

Kev said:

[Midlothian Mapleheart]

post deleted

[amandabarrick]

You can teach them the IPA all you want, they know the symbol for th (the oval with a line through it). But when they are speaking in a conversation they still say s i.e. thick and sick. No matter how many times you teach the symbol, the only way to train your mouth to make the sound is through lots of practice speaking in useful, practical, authentic situations. I prefer to teach the sounds without the symbols, as they are not necessary and only confuse them. They know they need to put their tongue outside, but do you want your students thinking about each sound that comes next in every word they speak? Is that fluency?



--AB

[sttwo]

It's been my experience in China and Korea that over the course of time that all of the students learn phonetics well.

When the students are very young, they aren't familiar with it and it does appear alien. In such cases I find phonics far more useful because it includes word stress, patterns of noun, adverb, and adjective formation from parent verbs. It includes etymological roots and numericals.

These are the concepts that aren't taught in this region and they make for great comprehension problems. you can ask six young adults consecutively "What's the historic significance of your hometown or city?" and get a matching answer, but if you rephrase to use "historically important you may get blank stares. It' more profound if you ask "What's important about the history of your hometown or city?'' because word stress changes along with the part of speech.

Worst of all is that you will have loads of people madly grabbing their electronic dictionaries to look up "historically" when they fully understand "history".

The very bedrock of phonics, groups of letter making the same sounds very frequently, seems unfamiliar. Whether it's "bun, fun, run" or "listen, christen, thistle" and exceptions such as "bought, taught, lost, saw, haul" it all needs to be incorporated or the vowels are brutalized to the point of not being understandable.

The incorrect pronuncation moves to mispellings, aural comprehension errors and may make reading a battle as well. if they don't hear themselves saying things correctly then they don't understand others unless they also say them incorrectly.

With due diligence you could theoretically move to people who would be able to enunciate "I'm sloughing a slough of sunburnt skin in the boughs of this tough old apple tree where I sit".

If you don't do this, they will be saying "treen" station and Little "Ride" Reading Who'd" forever. Nobody anywhere will have any idea what in teh hell they're saying and neither will they.

[Roger]

What I have found is that it's not enough for us to correct their mispronunciations, point them out or use illustrations on the board; a lot of their problems stem from their ingrained Chinese usage of Roman letters: you should attend a Chinese (Mandarin) class to hear them pronounce letters such as 'x', 'z', even 'g' or 'h'!
Their teachers prepare them in theory but not in practice.

And the schwa problem flows directly from that hence its seeming insuperability! Your students learn how to pronounce a few words you can deal with during class but they ought to learn how to deal with all the rest of the English words on their own. And that's not what their teachers did.

Pronunciation is not just about how toarticulate specific English phonemes such as the 'th' sound or how to pronounce the 'x' in 'excellent' as compared with 'xenophobic'. The students ought to find the key to the mysteries of the English language, then learn to be on their own.

For example no Chinese teacher gives them an intro to stress, no Chinese student seems to know the difference between short and long vowels and ditto for diphtongs as in the case of 'make' (see above). You can tell them ten thousand times that the letter 'a' in 'make' is pronounced like 'ay' in 'say' - it won't sink in to the depth of the subconscience where it would automatically activate the relevant organs of their mouth.

Besides there is a very practical challenge: can you expect your own students to practise such things in their spare time and actually pay attention to how they pronounce ENglish?

They would be bored stiff and not even understand why they should do it! This is not "learning" in the classical Chinese sense!

[sttwo]

I believe another strong contributing factor is the variance between the pronunciation dictated by the Pinyin system and that of English.

For example, the Pinyin sound "mai" is pronounced as "my" and this is what, I believe, causes people to pronounce the English "said" as "side". The Chinese sound "feng" is pronounced "fung". This contributes to such problems as clearly distinguishing English vowel changes in irregular verbs. Learners fail to comprehend the importance in establishing the time reference in this when a time indicator isn't expressed as a result.

[Roger]

I am not sure how much pinyin influences the Chinese mind when it is reading English; probably not more than English does an English speaker's mind when it's confronted with the different pronunciation conventions of a new language, say, Chinese or French.

But yes, the phonetic transliteration does have some negative influence sometimes as evidenced by how Chinese pronounce words like 'car' and 'card'. It's come to my attention only recently that that Chinese neologism - the word 'ka' meaning 'card' - is pronounced as though the syllable was open and interchangeable with 'card'. Maybe this happens more often here in the South whose natives do not naturally producthe 'r' sound in Mandarin since Cantonese doesn't need it.

I wonder whether Chinese are somehow restricted in their pronunciation on account of the limited combinations of consonants their own language uses; you know if your own language doesn't have consonant clusters like some Slaw languages do ("KRPinsky") then you tend to have difficulties in producing such sounds; English does give unusual pronunciations short shrift as in the case of Greek loanwords - pneumonia, psychology - so why shouldn't Chinese do the same (no internal 'r's hence no combinations of 't' and 'r' or 's' and 'r'?

[lostyrfriction]

many of my university students were familiar with the IPA but were not able to reproduce the sounds correctly. it'd be in your best interest to familiarize yourself with how each sound is articulated (even if you wont use IPA or aren't familiar with it). this will not only help you to teach how each sound is made, but it will help out in the future when you are trying to teach some aspect of pronunciation. without a grasp of phonetics, i'd find it difficult to teach something like english palatalization.

plus, some people are visual learners. if they can visualize an IPA symbol for a sound when they are thinking about something, why not teach it? IPA may not help in "real" conversational situations, but it certainly helps in teaching and learning spoken english.

technically you dont HAVE to teach anything. all of us native speakers learned it on our own. unfortunately our students dont have the same chance. the IPA can help the learning process but you need to make it work for you.

[sheeba]

I know we didn't use the phonetic symbols to learn our language but I use it even now as a native in words that I am not entirely sure of . It's also useful for me to distinguish American differences to British sometimes . I'd say it's a very useful tool for all of us .