Job Discussion Forums

[James Hetfield]

I'd like to include "ACCENT REDUCTION" as a skill I could tutor privates in Latin America. My TEFL course reviewed a Tongue/Teeth/Mouth/Throat chart for vowel and consonant pronunciations. LET'S CLARIFY: ACCENT REDUCTION same as PRONUNCIATION CORRECTION, or you see these as two separate disciplines?

REDUCING pronunciation errors: Is this more a SCIENCE in which you could chart each error, or an ART which anyone could do if they are a good listener? Some on previous thread say accent removal is almost impossible and not worth the hard work. BUT some L2 sounds so bad it hurts to listen. Worst I've heard is the India accent, especially from Indians who learned in public schools and fell into bad habits without any Native English speaker to ever correct them.

When I listen to Free Speech Radio I have to brace myself: Several correspondents in India suffer an intolerably painful accent: Every word with accent on 1st syllable they mispronounce as accent on 2nd syllable, combined with high-speed mangling of grammar that hurts ears like nails on a chalkboard.

HAVE YOU BEEN EFFECTIVE correcting pronunciation? Did you use SCIENCE, with charts and mouth-shaping, or was it more an ART of good listening combined with student dedication?

[spiral78]

I think you'd be more realistic to call it 'accent reduction.'

Personally, I think it's both an art and a science. Yes, there are some techniques that can help tremendously, but if your student happens to have a tin ear, the outcome (while better than without the benefit of science) will still be below that talented,motivated student with a good ear.

[James Hetfield]

Word. I just edited to replace REMOVAL with REDUCTION.

Any more responses out there?

HAVE YOU BEEN EFFECTIVE reducing accent or correcting pronunciation?

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

I've done it (meaning, I've been successful at it when I've tried it in the past), to an extent (as part of English teaching, not as a subject on it's own). I think you need to have more background than just seeing a chart, though. It takes a lot of practice to be able to identify sounds that are made, you go on what is actually produced, not what you think ***should*** be produced (and therefore just looking at a word written down and then writing the IPA for it, isn't useful), so you need to really, REALLY know the sounds that the students are making (this includes knowing the sounds, and the way they are articulated, which AREN'T in English). Vowels are particularly hard. Probably you need to take a university course dedicated only to phonetics (in those types of courses often tests consist of listening to language that you don't know and possibly have never even heard before and transcribing what you hear into IPA so that someone else who has never heard the language before could actually reproduce those sounds), after having already studied both phonetics and phonemes in a linguistics survey course. And then after that, then you start to see that a big part of the issue with accent modifcation is in sentential stress- not phonemes or phonetics at all. And also word choice. And so on. It's really a LOT more than just knowing a chart.

Short TEFL / TESOL courses give people the impression that they are learning everything that they need to know, but in reality, it's like anything else. You could be taught 'how to be' (in reality, it's more like 'about being') a book editor, or a PR guy, or a copywriter, or journalist, or novelist, or poet or any other language related job in a month or less, but that would actually only be a very, very superficial overview of topics that people in these careers actually study in depth, and most likely continue to study on their own in an informal manner both as part of their jobs and in their free time (if you don't like your language related job, get a different job- one that you can leave and forget at the end of the day. For most people, you can make as much or more money in retail management than at a language job- not many journalists will become editors of papers, not many copywriters will go on to be creative directors, not many book editors will ever move into the top positions of book publishers). It's similar to the philisophy that because you speak English, you can teach it (because you can read a very influential, bestselling book for English Lit class and analyse the metaphors and symbolism, you can therefore write a very influential, bestselling book). Another example of that standard could be to say that because you've done elementary school, you can teach elementary school. It's just not really true. Look at it this way: To teach ESL in a university, you need a master's degree, usually in an Applied Linguistics (TESOL) related area. To be a speach therapist you ALSO need a degree in Applied Linguistics, but it's a DIFFERENT APPLICATION of linguistics (it's a different degree area). And you most likely aren't going to be a speech therapist without a master's degree in Speech Therapy. Accent modification is an area related to speech therapy.

It's not really pronounciation correction in that there are different English accents and so no one native accent is best. English is an offical language of Singapore, but (depending on the person) there are a lot of similarities between Singapore English and Indian English.

I don't see accent modification as a particularly necessary thing to do most of the time, but I do see it as something I can help people with, if they really want to work on it (and if it actually IS a barrier to people understanding them then it definately is something that needs at least a bit of attention).

Read (or even better, go see) Pygmalion. It's an awesome play and it's about accent modification (in the early 20C). Not sure if I'd call it directly applicable to current life or accent modification in foreign language studies, though. But still, it's a great play!

[rusmeister]

It's both.
When I want to teach the phoneme, "th", for example, I jutht thtart thtalking with my thtongue bethtween my thteeth. Ith you thdo this thor a couple oth minuthes they thill get the thrift. Itth amathing how well that workth!

At least it eliminates that irritating 'z' - ""Zees ees mai haus" and so on.

[santi84]

My father in law took a Berlitz class sometime back in the 1980's for accent reduction (he's Francophone) and it was done through his employer (phone company that made calls to the rest of the Anglophone country). I don't know enough about the actual speech sciences of it, but I'd say there's a decent market in it for companies in addition to working with individuals!

[MO39]

[Justin Trullinger]

[gaijinalways]

I would disagree, and find that you need to focus on L1 and L2 differences in pronunciation. Word stress is important in trying to get English sound more natural, but it won't fix problems with subsituting the wrong consonant or vowel sounds in some words. And often stress won't change the meaning, though it might make it harder to bring attention to what you think is important or needs more attention from the listener.

[Justin Trullinger]

I don't think we necessarily disagree Gaijin- and my ideas are certainly flavoured by the fact that I've taught mostly places where sylable timed languages are spoken, so sentence stress in English IS one of the big differences.

Working with Spanish speakers, I would say that there are a couple of specific instances where word and sentence stress DO fix the problem of "wrong sound." A lot of the most common wrong sounds have to do with weak forms in English, that old Schwa, being pronounced as full vowels. So working the rythm and timing to give stress to the other words eventually moves the weak forms into being closer to what they should be.

I don't know how generalizable this is to students from other language groups, but with Spanish speakers, fixing stress does fix sounds.



All the best,
Justin

PS. I-m not saying that individual phoneme work is unimportant. Word stress and sentences stress correction will leave "b" vs "v" errors intact, and many many others. It takes all kinds of work, including sounds, stress, intonation, volume tendencies, ways of expressing register....But I find that a lot of people, teachers and students alike, address pronunciation is if languages were just piles of individual sounds, which may explain why sentence stress is a hobby horse of mine.

[stillnosheep]

Accuracy in word and sentence stress trumps accurate vowel sounds any day of the week. Try a simple test. Repeat a sentence correctly but change a vowel, everybody will understand it. Now choose another sentence and repeat with stress allover the place. It will be much more difficult to understand.

Of course work on accurate reproduction of English phonemes is important. But between Englishes differrent speakers produce vastly differnt sounds when pronouncing the same word. Variations in word and sentence stress patterns are much less extreme. To a large extent it is these patterns that give English its characteristic 'sound'. This is one of the reasons why people can sound Chinese, or French, or German without knowing a word of the language. They have picked up on typical stress patterns, along with the typical vowel sounds.

Crucially the pronunciation of speakers of Indian English, or Singapore English is not wrong, merely different. As English becomes an increasingly international language, speakers from the UK and Ireland, the US and the 'white' commonwealth become an ever smaller minority of the community of English speakers and we have to move away from the idea that some idealised accent from any one of these countries can provide a model of 'correct' English. Communication is key, and most often speakers of English as a foreign language need to communicate with other speakers of English as a foreign language more than they need to communicate with natuive speakers.

Which isn't to say that phonetics is unimportant and if a student wishes to sound more 'English' or whatever for purposes of prestige then by all means let's teach BBC English, but even BBC English is not what it used to be...

[James Hetfield]

I enjoy listening to thick accents from around the world. But as you point out, syllable stess especially can be so bad it hurts to listen:

G'day mate! Top o da mornin ere on ABC Radio Sydney! Bruce got da audio feed from Sri Lanka, good on ya mate so now let's havalisten:

Re PORT ingfromSri LAN kathisis RaJIVforBBCradioMumbai: TO daythe Indi ANPar LIAmentre NEWD the lawde CLAR ingtheBen GALti GER an endan GERDespecies so FERnow deben GALti GERshallbe safefromhun TINGhowev ERpoach INGmaycontin UEtobeaprob LEMforBBCradiothisisRa JIVrepor TINGlive OW MY EARS MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP

[gaijinalways]

[stillnosheep]

JH: As long as you are aware that Australian English is no more 'standard' than Indian English and that not only are there many more speakers of the latter than the former but that for most EFL learners, particularly in Asia, it will be more important to be abler to communicate with Indian English speakers than Australian ones, then fine.

GA: Of course there is a need to point out 'Yafoo" (Japanese speakers have only one sound for 'h' & 'f') and other such problems arisisng from L1 interference.

Btw there is no longer a 'standard' on BBC. The battle against the imposition of such and for the acceptance of regional accents has been won. Already on international financial television, eg Bloomberg versions such as Singaporean, Indian or Chinese English are heard more often then 'BBC' English. Perhaps in 20 yrs the field will be known as English for International purposes and British and American accents along with those of the predominantly white commonwealth and former commomwealth countries will no longer enjoy priviledged ststus.

Singaporean and Indian English accents are not wrong, just different. To think otherwise is just discrimination against regional accents on the global scale.

Ps I did refer to students who may wish to sound more 'English' or whatever. Obviously my point about teaching 'BBC English' is applicable obly in the former case. If a student wishes to sound more Australian or American (God only knows why ) then a different model would apply.D

[santi84]