Re: Teaching or not teaching pronunciation

Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 03:45:38 +0100

From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

This thread opens up the question of why it is that we are teaching a language at all in the secondary schools. The usual answers that we give is that people may, in some far-off land and time, need to speak the language that we teach. Now, in the situation in which I find myself - teacher of English in a European country - there is perhaps some justification for this view, just as there may be some for the teacher of French in Canada. However, I suspect it is more limited than we would like to believe - most people will be able to get through their lives without speaking anything more than a smattering of a foreign tongue, and those who discover a need to communicate later on will have recourse to Berlitz or some other similar institution, who do their jobs in a perfectly satisfying manner.

FLs are taught in schools for other reasons. Just as maths or history are taught for other reasons. School subjects do not have *immediately* utilitarian pay-offs - nor is there any great reason why they should. Schools are there to form citizens and to furnish the tools for thinking that citizens need. (Whether they are very good at doing this is another question). Learning a Foreign Language is part of this process.

Learning an FL helps - or should help - people think about language. Which means that they will think about thinking. It helps them think about the relationship between sound, gesture and meaning. It helps them think about the relationship between language and world-vision, about culture and cultures. Or it should do. Communicative methods, which, when applied with more enthusiasm than thought, often seem to reduce teaching goals to those of fluency, may not be the best kinds of approaches for schools.

It could be that to insist on phonological accuracy hinders fluency at first - I don't know whether this is so or not - but it is certainly the case children will be lead to conceptualize language more clearly if they are allowed to recognize and experiment with a sound (or gestural) system which is different from their own. That is one of the reasons why I think it is important to work on aural recognition in the first place. Language is sound. Or gesture. Movement. Dancing with your voice or with your hands. Dancing is culture.So much more than Halloween or the Day of the Dead.

Time I tried to get back to sleep.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason

iufm de versailles

tmason@club-internet