Teaching the Sound System of English

MARA HASLAM

­Framing the Issue

Proficient users of a language, including native speakers, are often not completely
aware of the complexity of the language knowledge that they have. The sound
system of English, like the sound system of every language, is complex. One aspect
of that complexity is the segmental or phonemic inventory. A segment is an indi-
vidual speech sound or a phoneme. These sounds can be divided into different
types. For example, consonants and vowels are considered different types of seg-
ments because the airflow is open and unrestricted for vowels and restricted in
different ways for consonants. Every language has a unique inventory of segments.
For example, the sound system of English includes the consonant /t/ as in the
initial sound in the word take (a voiceless alveolar stop) but it does not include the
consonant /x/ (a voiceless velar fricative).
Another aspect of the sound system that is important for teaching English is
phonotactics, the patterns of sounds that are allowed to appear next to each other
in a language. For example, in English, the consonant cluster /bl/ is allowed,
creating words like blot, but the consonant cluster /kv/ is not allowed, so words
like kvot are not possible in English. Sounds also combine into syllables, and part
of the complexity of language has to do with syllable structure, the types of syl-
lables that are allowed or not allowed in a language. English allows many types
of syllable structures that are not allowed in other languages. For example, a
word like fifths, with three consonants at the end of the syllable, is possible in
English.
Much of the complexity of a language is contained at the suprasegmental level,
aspects of sound that bridge larger units of language structure, such as intonation
and rhythm. Intonation refers to how English uses pitch (high or low voice fre-
quency) to indicate certain kinds of units of meaning, such as questions or state-
ments. Rhythm has to do with lengths of syllables and which syllable or syllables
in a word are stressed (emphasized) in relation to each other.
Another aspect of the sound system of English that teachers must be aware of
is that English does not consist of only one sound system. There are many

The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, First Edition.

Edited by John I. Liontas (Project Editor: Margo DelliCarpini).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0245

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 2 Teaching the Sound System of English

different Englishes, many dialects and varieties of English, each of which has a
characteristic sound system. While dialects are often identified by the geographi-
cal location, the sound systems of different users of English can vary depending
on other sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age, and social class. In addi-
tion, individuals can have idiosyncratic characteristics in the way they speak.
Therefore, the sound system of English is actually many sound systems of English.

­Making the Case

When infants are born, they are able to distinguish between all the sounds of
all of the world’s languages; however, within a period of only several months
they lose that ability and mold their perceptions specifically to the sound sys-
tem of the language they hear (Werker & Tees, 1984). Specializing in the sound
system of a native language is advantageous because it allows a person to accu-
rately perceive and process things that people say in that language even when
listening to different speakers under different conditions. However, when the
knowledge of one language’s sound system is applied to a new language that
the person is trying to learn, difficulties in perception can be caused by the lack
of overlap between the previously known sound system and the new one the
person is attempting to acquire. For example, Japanese has only one sound that
falls into the liquid category, /ɾ/, and Japanese speakers have predictably been
shown to have less accurate perception than native speakers of English when
dealing with the distinction between the two English liquids /ɹ/ and /l/ (Goto,
1971). A Japanese-speaking learner hearing either an /ɹ/ or an /l/ sound in an
English word is likely to perceive the sound as an example of the Japanese
sound /ɾ/, and, therefore, the English words light and right may be perceived
as the same word. This phenomenon has been called “foreign-accented
listening” (Hayes-Harb & Masuda, 2008) as an analogy to f­oreign-accented
speaking. The word which has been inaccurately perceived may be stored in
the learner’s lexicon in the “accented” form. Accented speech, then, can be
explained as the faithful articulation of the already-accented phonological
information stored in the learner’s language knowledge. From this perspective,
effective pronunciation instruction should not only help learners to improve
the accuracy of their production but also improve the accuracy of their percep-
tion as well.
An additional reason for teachers to focus on the sound system of English is
because perception is such an important aspect of developing listening skills. For
example, students who are listening to lectures in English can use their knowledge
of the sound system of English to identify certain intonation patterns that are used
in English to mark key ideas that the speaker chooses to emphasize. Students can
therefore identify which ideas are most important to take down in their notes and
which ideas they might expect to see in forthcoming exams. Users of English who
lack this perceptual ability will find it more difficult to identify key ideas in a
­listening situation.

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 Teaching the Sound System of English 3

In addition to thinking about the phonological characteristics of their English

learners, English teachers should also consider that the speaking skills of their
learners will be complemented by listening skills and expectations on the part of
their interlocutors. Teachers do not often have the luxury of teaching listening
skills to those with whom their learners will be speaking. Nevertheless, thinking
about the listener can guide teachers and students to make reasoned choices about
the aspects of phonology on which they can focus their energies.

­Pedagogical Implications

Choosing Appropriate Goals

Best practices in pronunciation teaching start with setting goals and choosing a
syllabus that meets those goals. The concept of “accent reduction” sometimes used
in pronunciation programs is flawed for a number of reasons. First, the emphasis
on accent is misplaced; while accent and intelligibility are somewhat conflated, it
is completely possible to have a non-native-like accent and still be intelligible
(cf. Winters & O’Brien, 2013). Focusing on intelligibility rather than accent keeps
the focus on communication. Second, “accent reduction” implies that the goal is to
reach a point where the student has no accent; however, the sociolinguistic reality
is that everyone has an accent of some kind. For many students, sounding like a
native speaker is not reasonably attainable. Therefore, focusing on accent reduc-
tion can be frustrating for both student and teacher. Because accent is a reflection
of a person’s identity, students may also wish to retain evidence in their pronuncia-
tion of their identity as a non-native speaker or as a user of other languages. For
these reasons, many pronunciation teachers choose to set goals for communication
and intelligibility rather than focusing on native-like pronunciation.
Aiming at intelligibility is often a reasonable goal, but this goal requires identi-
fication of the intended listeners for whom the speaker wants to be intelligible.
Until recently, much of pronunciation instruction has been focused on native-
speaker listeners, and this is quite reasonable for English learners who live in ESL
environments where they will be mostly interacting with native speakers. For
those pronunciation students who communicate using English as a lingua franca
(ELF), however, their listeners will likely be non-native speakers, and, therefore,
the pronunciation aspects that facilitate understanding for the listener may be
quite different. Jenkins’ (2000) Lingua Franca Core (LFC) is a syllabus for teaching
pronunciation focused on ELF communicative situations. The LFC is built on the
idea that there may be some aspects of pronunciation targeted to native-speaker
listeners that are not particularly helpful in ELF settings, and vice versa. As an
example, while native-like use of stress is considered to be crucial for intelligibility
with native-speaker listeners, the LFC claims that native-like use of stress is not
particularly necessary in ELF communication. A potential downside of the LFC is
that it was originally based on limited research. However, it has been somewhat
updated since its first publication and additional research on ELF pronunciation is

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 4 Teaching the Sound System of English

underway (e.g., Deterding, 2013). More research on what facilitates understanding

for non-native-speaking listeners will provide even better information that will
inform decisions about pronunciation syllabi tailored to the learners’ specific
­communication needs.
There are a number of benefits to including students in ongoing decisions about
what to teach and not teach. First, including students in needs analysis and sylla-
bus planning helps to make sure that the resulting syllabus takes into account the
students’ individual goals and also gives teachers an opportunity to help students
set reasonable individual goals. Often students’ beliefs about what makes appro-
priate pronunciation is influenced by customs in the local area or students’ vague
desire to sound exactly like a native speaker of some dialect. When teachers and
students work together to decide on goals, students will be more invested in the
process and teachers have a chance to explain to students why certain possible
aspects are included in the syllabus while others are not. For example, the pronun-
ciation of the “th” sounds /ð/ and /θ/ are not considered crucial to intelligibility
for any listeners, and therefore teachers can usually safely choose to deprioritize
these sounds in order to spend valuable instruction time on other aspects of pro-
nunciation. Teachers can also guide students through this process by helping them
become aware of the possible sociolinguistic consequences of certain accents and
pronunciation characteristics.
Balanced teaching of the sound system of English includes teaching of percep-
tion and listening skills as well as pronunciation. Perceptual training and instruc-
tion can help learners not only when they are working on pronunciation but can
also help them to achieve more listening comprehension. Listening goals can be
set by focusing on listening situations that learners will need outside of the
English classroom and analyzing those listening situations for the perception
skills needed. While teachers may base pronunciation instruction on only one
variety of English, effective listeners are able to perceive and understand while
listening to many different kinds of English, spoken by both native speakers and
non-native speakers.

Raising Awareness of Differences Between Sound Systems

Learners are often not able at first to perceive the differences between the sound
systems they are familiar with and that of English. For example, speakers of
Spanish, which has a relatively simple vowel system, are often not able to distin-
guish between the English words live and leave because the vowel contrast that
distinguishes these words does not exist in Spanish. Therefore, helping learners
gain explicit knowledge of the existence of an aspect of the sound system and why
it is important to their communicative goals can be used as a first step to address-
ing the aspect of the sound system being taught. Students’ motivation to learn and
incorporate the lesson into their phonology can be heightened when they under-
stand the potential benefits the pronunciation aspect will have in their future com-
munication while also empowering them to shape their pronunciation in a way
that broadcasts their desired identity.

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 Teaching the Sound System of English 5

Training Both Perception and Production

Research has shown that perceptual training can be effective at helping English
learners to improve the accuracy of not only perception but also production
(e.g., Bradlow, Pisoni, Akahane-Yamada, & Tohkura, 1997). Perceptual training
gives pronunciation students the opportunity to reorganize their L2 phonologi-
cal knowledge so that they can more accurately perceive L2 sounds when listen-
ing, can represent information in their store of L2 knowledge, and can pronounce
sounds and words. Research has shown that perceptual training tends to be
most effective and retained longest when it is focused on identifying meaning-
ful units rather than just learning to distinguish between different sounds
(Bradlow, Akahane-Yamada, Pisoni & Tohkura, 1999). This can be done by
designing training in a way that helps students identify meaningful words and
sentences. For example, students whose languages do not allow the same con-
sonant clusters as English, such as Mandarin, often epenthesize a vowel between
the consonants in question, making words like the one-syllable word glue sound
like the nonsense two-syllable word galoo. Perceptual training for consonant
clusters could, then, give students a task to choose between two images, one of
which represents the meaning of a word with a cluster such as sport and one of
which represents its epenthesized counterpart, in this case support, followed by
feedback. Another aspect of the most successful perceptual training is high vari-
ability, both in terms of the kinds of voices (male and female) that learners listen
to, as well as the words used as part of the training (Bradlow, 2008). In research
studies on such training, English learners do not typically make perceptual
gains such that their perception becomes as accurate as that of native speakers,
but they do consistently become more accurate in perception as a result of
training.

Teaching Strategies Related to the Sound System of English

Finally, best practices in pronunciation teaching include teaching students not
just the sound system itself, but also strategies for dealing with potential com-
munication problems related to the sound system. English learners can encoun-
ter misunderstanding even after extensive instruction, and having strategies for
dealing with these situations can empower them to keep communication flow-
ing smoothly, despite possible problems. For example, Jenkins’ (2000) data show
an example of such a misunderstanding where a speaker’s difficulty in pro-
nouncing the English /ɹ/-/l/ contrast causes the speaker’s interlocutor to
understand the phrase “red car” as “let car.” A speaker who perceives that a
misunderstanding like this has occurred can help to repair the misunderstand-
ing by adding additional information to encourage the listener to understand the
difficult word such as, “Sorry, I meant a red car, like the color of an apple.”
Speakers who are aware that a certain aspect of their pronunciation is likely to
cause difficulty can even use this kind of information to provide preventative
measures before misunderstanding happens. For instance, a user of English who

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 6 Teaching the Sound System of English

is not reliably able to produce voiced consonants at the end of words can take
advantage of the fact that native speakers of English tend to give more impor-
tance to the length of the vowel preceding the final consonant than they do to the
voicing of the final consonant for perception of the voicing distinction in this
context (Raphael, 1972). While the final consonant may still not be voiced, the
longer vowel will likely be a clue to the listener about which word the speaker
is using.
Learners can also take advantage of such strategies while listening to help them
improve their perception and comprehension. The example given above where
listening for emphasis intonation patterns helps students identify key points in a
lecture is one such strategy. Other strategies can include training learners to use
conversational responses that get the speaker to repeat or elaborate on the infor-
mation that was difficult for the listener to comprehend. For example, we can
imagine a conversation where the speaker says, “I’ll pick you up at 5:30.” If the
listener responds, “What?” the speaker is likely to repeat the entire original utter-
ance, while the listener responding with “Sorry, when will you pick me up?” will
more likely elicit only the time mentioned in the original utterance. A proficient
listener can choose to use one of these questions depending on what kind of repeti-
tion is desired.
In addition, proficient users of a language also know that listening involves not
just their own comprehension but also signaling to the speaker using “backchan-
nel” responses (e.g., sounds such as “uh-huh” and “hmm”) that encourage suc-
cessful communication. Using appropriate backchannel vocalizations and facial
expressions allows the listener to signal to the speaker his/her level of comprehen-
sion, to which the speaker can respond by making adjustments to the speech or
repairs if necessary. English learners with strategies like these listed in this section
can experience successful communication despite their pronunciation and percep-
tion difficulties.

SEE ALSO: Accent; Accent Reduction Versus Intelligibility; Choosing Texts for
Teaching Pronunciation; Cognitive Listening Strategies; English as a Lingua Franca;
Interlanguage Phonology; Issues in Teaching Pronunciation: Prosody, Intonation,
and Vowels; Lesson Planning for Teaching Pronunciation; Pronunciation
Assessment; Tasks for Teaching Pronunciation to Advanced Learners; Tasks for
Teaching Pronunciation to Beginners; Teaching Listening Strategies

References

Bradlow, A. R. (2008). Training non-native language sound patterns: Lessons from training
Japanese adults on the English /ɹ/-/l/ contrast. Phonology and Second Language Acquisition,
36, 287.
Bradlow, A. R., Akahane-Yamada, R., Pisoni, D. B., & Tohkura, Y. I. (1999). Training Japanese
listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: Long-term retention of learning in perception
and production. Perception & Psychophysics, 61(5), 977–85.

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 Teaching the Sound System of English 7

Bradlow, A. R., Pisoni, D. B., Akahane-Yamada, R., & Tohkura, Y. I. (1997). Training Japanese
listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech
production. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101(4), 2299–310.
Deterding, D. (2013). Misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca: An analysis of ELF
interactions in South-east Asia. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.
Goto, H. (1971). Auditory perception by normal Japanese adults of the sounds “L” and “R.”
Neuropsychologia, 9(3), 317–23.
Hayes-Harb, R., & Masuda, K. (2008). Development of the ability to lexically encode novel
second language phonemic contrasts. Second Language Research, 24(1), 5–33.
Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press.
Raphael, L. J. (1972). Preceding vowel duration as a cue to the perception of the voicing
characteristic of word-final consonants in American English. The Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 51(4B), 1296–303.
Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual
reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 7(1), 49–63.
Winters, S., & O’Brien, M. G. (2013). Perceived accentedness and intelligibility: The relative
contributions of F0 and duration. Speech Communication, 55(3), 486–507.

Suggested Readings

Avery, P., & Erlich, S. (1992). Teaching American English pronunciation. Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press.
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. with Griner, B. (2010). Teaching
pronunciation: A coursebook and reference guide. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Field, J. (2003). Promoting perception: Lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal,
57(4), 325–34.
Walker, R. (2010). Teaching the pronunciation of English as a lingua franca. Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press.

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