Subject: Pronunciation

Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 20:22:34 +0200 From: Timothy Mason To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

I don't know whether you can or should *teach* pronunciation, whatever 'teaching' means, but it seems clear enough that if you are helping people to acquire communicative oral skills, then the sounds of the language come high up the list of things you should be drawing their attention to.

It appears that little is known about how people acquire the sound system of a foreign language - SLA people concentrate mainly on the acquisition of grammatical competence (they've all been Chomskied). For ideas on how to approach this in class, you could consult The Silent Way - if you don't mind looking like a fish in a gold-fish bowl. In a thin field, I'm finding Clement Laroy's 'Pronunciation' (OUP, 1995) quite useful at the moment ; he suggests a number of activities that seem quite interesting, although I myself fight shy of his relaxation exercises. Might help to calm down all those hoodlums, though.

Ron Sheen suggests that it is the difficulty of making the sounds that causes problems. This may be part of it - certainly some sound clusters will be found difficult. But *hearing* the sounds is often part of the problem ; French learners of English, for example, have enormous problems with the the vowel in 'law', whereas they get it right in 'door'. Partly this is because the glide from 'l' to 'aw' is difficult for the French palate. But it is also because, as I've found on a number of occasions, they simply do not hear it as the same sound.

Careful listening is probably one of the keys to good pronunciation. How important is it? After all, some years ago one would meet people with the most charming French accent. So long as they remained consistent, they were comprehensible - at least as comprehensible as a Geordie to a Londoner, or as a New Yorker to someone from the deep south. With the massive arrival of audio-tapes, this classic French accent seems to have faded, and younger people get closer to the British sounds - but with less consistency. So what appears to have been an improvement in accuracy has gone hand in hand with an increase in communicative difficulties. Worth a thought or two.

Perhaps we should conclude that either you work on pronunciation very very well, or you just let it go hang. The middle course doesn't do anyone any good.

Regards

Timothy Mason

IUFM de Versailles

tmason@timothyjpmason.com