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Kent F. Kruhoeffer
Joined: 22 Jan 2003
Posts: 2129
Location: 中国
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 Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 6:55 am Post subject: |
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sheeba mentioned Peter Roach in her reply on page 1,
here's a link to his homepage: Peter Roach |
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teacheringreece
Joined: 05 Feb 2005
Posts: 79
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| Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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Sorry to be pedantic, but it's not the IPA that we're talking about, it's phonemic script. The phonemic scripts that most ELT/bilingual dictionaries use are based on the IPA, but only use a small fraction of it. The IPA has a full set of symbols that can be used to transcribe any language, so obviously we don't need all of them to transcribe English. I think it's important that we do make this distinction in ELT or think we can appear a bit foolish to the linguistic world in general, to be honest.
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| The problem with IPA is that there are at least EIGHT different phonetic spelling systems and many dictionaries have their own. |
I presume here you're talking about eight different phonemic spelling systems rather than different versions of the IPA? I don't think most learner or bilingual dictionaries use anything but scripts based on the IPA, so that shouldn't be much of a problem. But there are sometimes differences: for example, Longman has a kind of double /I/ and schwa symbol (one above the other) to indicate when both are possible.
From a teaching point of view, I'm always a bit worried about respelling to show pronunciation, just because I think it might confuse students about the actual spelling. Perhaps that's not actually a problem though. What I normally do is, rather than expecting students to completely master a phonemic script, I just use symbols here are there with problematic words, as well as underlining stressed symbols. So with 'village' I would underline the first syllable to show stress, and then write the symbol /I/ under the second syllable (explaining or already having explained what sound this is), as students often mispronounce this. I found this 'here and there' approach quite useful, and students don't get intimidated by it as they sometimes do with whole phonemic transcriptions. |
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hlamb
Joined: 09 Dec 2003
Posts: 431
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 6:12 pm Post subject: |
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| My school uses a simplified version of IPA, with some of the more obscure of less-used symbols omitted. We teach only native Spanish speakers, so can predict fairly accurately what they will have trouble pronouncing, and focus on that in our IPA. It seems to work very well-their pronunciation is far superior to Mexican students who have learned English without IPA. |
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