SOME NOTES ON THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION

1
Barry Pennock & Peter Vickers
Universitat de Valncia
1 Introduction
Before teaching pronunciation in the language class, we should ask ourselves a few
questions. The first is obviously whether it is necessary to teach pronunciation in the first place.
At the moment, there seems to be no consensus; on the one hand, Benrabah (1997:157) says:
After a swing of the pendulum in the mid-eighties, pronunciation teaching has again
should we say emerged as a skill that teachers cannot do without. On the other hand,
Trammell (1999: 315) offers the opposite opinion:
In the teaching of FL pronunciation under the imperatives of the current
communicative and acquisition approaches to language teaching, instruction in
pronunciation has been de-emphasized or remains at the level of minimal
phonemic contrasts.
This state of affairs is hardly surprising. Probably no other discipline is so prone to fads and
about-turns as TEFL. It is, therefore, left to the individual teacher to decide on the need to teach
pronunciation in class, or not. When one reviews the possibilities of adolescent or adult learners
reaching near-native competence, the odds seem to be stacked against them. Pennington (1996:
31-35) lists possible factors working against the attainment of good L2 pronunciation by NNs:
- Sensory acuity declines as they get older.
- Knowledge of L1 affects L2 learning negatively.
- The various critical period(s) hypotheses that put forward the idea that
loss of cerebral plasticity and gradual lateralization of brain functions
impedes acquisition of L2 phonology after a certain age.
- Language learning ability diminishes with cognitive growth.
- Negative affective and motivational factors are more common in adults
than in children.
1
This study is part of a research project funded by a grant from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologa
(PB96 0773).
Teaching English in a Spanish Setting, 231-241.
BARRY PENNOCK & PETER VICKERS
- More difficult input: unlike adults, children are exposed to simplified
language, i.e., motherese or caretaker speech .
- Decoupling of internalised grammar from the processes of speech
perception and production at a particular period in childhood prevents us
from exploiting natural connections between perception and production
available for language learning in childhood (Pennington 1998: 332).
- On the psychological level our pronunciation, including voice quality
and the articulation of individual sounds, is part of a persons identity and
personality. Any destabilising influence on his/her core personality may
well be resisted. (Pennington 1998: 335)
- Ones pronunciation is part of a socially and culturally determined
system of values and behaviours (Pennington 1998: 335). As such there
may be resistance to change.
Given these difficulties, is there any evidence that teaching pronunciation has any benefits?
Once again, there seems to be no consensus. Research carried out by Suter (1976) and Purcell
& Suter (1981) seems to suggest that formal instruction produces no improvement. However,
studies by Murakawa (1981), Acton (1984) and Jamieson & Morosan (1986) seem to point to
the fact that certain discrete problem areas can be dealt with. Even if we agree that teaching
pronunciation does help, is instruction in pronunciation so important? According to Morely
(1987: iv), intelligible pronunciation is an essential component of communicative
competence. Celce-Murcia (1987) offers the common sense view that there is a pronunciation
threshold below which communication becomes impossible. What this threshold is may be clear
intuitively but it is difficult to determine objectively. Munro & Derwing (1999), for instance,
argue that even NNs with heavy accents can be perfectly intelligible. If we understand heavy
accent to mean L1 sounds that do not affect the contrastive function of phonemes, we could
agree that this might be the minimum threshold that one would aspire to. We concur with this
view taking into account that in terms of oral/aural communication, the Cooperative Principle
(Grice 1975) plays a crucial role in that the hearer consciously or unconsciously adopts a
cooperative role and usually makes an effort to understand what the speaker is saying. If,
therefore, we deem instruction in pronunciation to be necessary, several questions arise:
a) exactly what kind of pronunciation should be taught what model
should we use?
b) what levels of proficiency should be aimed at?
c) what areas should be taught phonemes, stress, intonation?
d) when should we teach pronunciation and what teaching methods
should be used?
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SOME NOTES ON THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
2 Pronunciation Models
The answer to the first question seems to be quite straightforward to most people RP or
General American. The default choice seems to be RP for most teachers in Spain. It seems only
teachers from the United States teach American English and only students planning on studying
there ask to learn that particular variety of English.
If we opt for RP as the norm, there are numerous advantages. First, most of the dictionaries,
books on pronunciation for students and teaching methods are based mainly on this variety,
which has world-wide currency (Tench 1981). We would also do well not to forget that it is the
kind of pronunciation most students demand. On the down side, RP is still felt to be a class
dialect by many inhabitants of the United Kingdom. Perhaps more importantly, it is a variety of
English spoken by only 3% of the population of the UK, although it is the most wide-spread
accent at least in England (Ramsaran 1990: 182). Brown (1990: 13) expands the term RP to
include educated southern English; a loose definition which, if accepted, would extend the
term RP to a significant proportion of the population. Whatever our choice of model, we
recommend that students should be exposed to many different kinds of accents even if no
formal instruction is given on these varieties.
There is, nevertheless, a growing number of researchers who would choose neither RP nor
General American. They point out that students will probably spend more time speaking and
writing English in countries including their own where English is not the mother tongue.
Jenkins (1998: 119) makes this point when she says that we no longer regard English as being
taught mainly for communication with its native speakers .... With this fact in mind,
Pennington (1988) proposes that we use both native and non-native models of pronunciation.
The bias away from the native norm or norms in the case of these researchers (Jenkins 1998;
Pennington 1988; and Dalton & Seidelhofer 1994) has developed because they advocate
English as an International Language (EIL) approach rather than that of EFL. They do not go so
far as to say that we should stop our students from wanting to learn to sound like native
speakers and warn that we should all guard against political correctness (Jenkins1994: 125)
which automatically prefers the marginal to the established. The choice of EIL, if adopted,
would have important consequences such as obviating the need to sound like native speakers as
in the case of teaching the weak form of function words:
I would argue that it is possible to highlight some syllables without necessarily
reducing others, and that some native varieties do precisely this, along with the
vast majority of fluent bilingual speakers. Lack of weak forms may prove
disconcerting for some native receivers, but is unlikely to do so for non natives.
(Jenkins 1998: 123)
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BARRY PENNOCK & PETER VICKERS
Most teachers in Spain rarely even ponder on these issues as they work in a monolingual
setting in which EFL has traditionally been the default choice.
In any case, it is important, as Dalton & Seidelhofer (1994) argue, that RP, General
American, or non-native varieties should be treated as models, rather than norms. A model
should be, in their opinion, a point of reference rather than something we should attempt to
attain 100%. They add that only teachers should make the effort to try to approximate more
closely to the native model. Gimson (1989: 317) argues along similar lines:
He [the non-native teacher of English] has the obligation to present his students
with as faithful a model of English pronunciation as is possible. () His students
will imitate a bad pronunciation as exactly as they will a good one; and secondly,
if he is using illustrative recorded material, his own pronunciation must not
diverge markedly from the native model.
3 Levels of proficiency
The answer to the question of what level of proficiency we require will obviously depend on
what kind of course we are teaching. Even if we were involved in a course as highly skills-
specific as ESP Reading or Writing, could we entirely eschew pronunciation? We think not.
Despite the vagaries of our spelling system and the problematic relationship between
graphemes and phonemes, the written word is not a mere abstraction, independent of the
concept of sound. Behind every word lies its potential sound realization; graphemes connote
phonemes. One could only omit the pronunciation component if students were already familiar
with the essentials of English pronunciation. With no knowledge of pronunciation on their part
and no intention of teaching it on the teachers, what other means would be available to refer to
words or utterances other than saying, i.e., pronouncing them? If, however, we are dealing with
a course for students of general English at, let us say, primary, secondary, or tertiary level, in
which the so-called four skills are used, pronunciation must invariably be taught in some form
or other. To attempt to fine-tune a sliding scale of pronunciation proficiency is a task that, in
practical terms, is doomed to failure. As a rule of thumb and trite as it may soundthe
higher the teaching/learning level, the better the pronunciation should obviously be but
pronunciations described as good, average, poor are terms which tell us little, they do not
constitute objective criteria of quantification and, methodologically, they are virtually useless as
guide-lines for teachers and students alike. Even in the oral components of University of
Cambridge examinations such as Proficiency and First Certificate, examiners have to make do
with such vague band markers as near native competence or frequent mother tongue
interference in pronunciation and prosody which, nevertheless, rarely affects overall
intelligibility. Indeed, Gimson (1989: 316) goes no further than to establish two basic
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SOME NOTES ON THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
extremes: minimum general intelligibility and high acceptability. What most researchers
(Tench 1981; Carruthers 1987; Morley 1991; Kenworthy 1990; Cuenca Villarn 1996) do seem
to agree on is that we should aim at making students pronunciation intelligible rather than try
to get them to attain native accuracy.
4 Areas of pronunciation to be taught:
What areas to focus on when teaching pronunciation, is another area which teachers and
researchers frequently disagree on. The most obvious pronunciation problems are those of
phonemes. We can often pinpoint deviations from native pronunciation in just one segment of a
word, such as /Uinstead of /Uin words like the, this, that, to mention just one example. However,
there is evidence that total pronunciation precision is not a sine qua non for either
comprehension or production. There is also evidence that we use word-initial acoustic/phonetic
information to recognise words while being able to ignore elision or assimilation of word
endings (Tauroza 1993: 215). Brown (1990: 79) argues that while bottom up processing using
sounds and the knowledge of the phonological system is just one way of understanding speech,
we also use top down processing, i.e., context and paralinguistic features that express attitude
such as smiling, pouting, etc. For some researchers (Pennington & Richards 1986; Wong 1987;
Celce-Murcia, et al. 1996; Munro & Derwing 1999), the main areas of pronunciation worth
looking at in more detail are prosodic not segmental. In this respect, we have to take into
account two factors; the first is whether suprasegmentals are important in terms of intelligibility
and production and the second is whether they are actually teachable. Wong (1987: 2) states
that rhythm and intonation are the key elements of intelligibility. In the same line, Celce-
Murcia, et al. (1996: 27) found that Spanish speakers pronunciation of English improved
dramatically by teaching them typical English rhythmic patterns first in isolation from lexical
items or phrases, then by matching patterns to items or phrases, and finally by imposing the
patterns on words, phrases, and sentences. Pennington & Richards (1986 [cited in Trammel
1999: 316]) also emphasise the need to teach the prosodic domain along with connected speech
phenomena such as elisions, contractions and assimilations of neighboring sounds. Not all
authors agree that prosody is so important. Finch & Ortiz (1982: 131), for instance, state that
English spoken with some type of Spanish intonation does not present serious problems of
intelligibility. Although we have no doubts as to the pragmatic importance of prosody,
especially at higher levels of proficiency, we have major reservations as to whether it can be
taught effectively. Even simple statements such as: wh- questions are pronounced with a
falling tone, which teachers have uttered in the past, is only a partial truth (Brazil 1994: 20).
If one delves further, issues become even more problematic and patterns of use are either very
hard to find in the case of intonationor are so numerous, in the case of word stress, as to
make teaching them pedagogically unfeasible. This is the opposite view to the one taken by
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BARRY PENNOCK & PETER VICKERS
Jenkins (1998: 121) who says that nuclear stress, for instance, is not only teachable but also
learnable: systematic, and not riddled with complicated exceptions and fine distinctions. She
seems to ignore cases of affixation, compounding and the tri-syllabic weakening rule which are
anything but simple. Indeed, the entire question surrounding the teaching of English stress,
rhythm and intonation is fraught with complexities. The extraordinary importance of
suprasegmental features can hardly be over-emphasized; Monroy Casas (1980: 13-14), for
instance, refers to la enorme incidencia de estos parmetros [stress, rhythm, intonation] en
los segmentos sobre los que actan. In spite of the importance of prosodic features, problems
abound when it comes to teaching them. One of these is the problem of the predictability; of
supra-segmental difficulties, Monroy Casas (1980: 13) quotes from Weinreich (1964) si es
cierto que hay dificultades predicibles, existen otras que se materializan y no son predicibles.
Further problems arise through the need to approach holistically the teaching of stress, rhythm
and intonation; as Alcaraz & Moody (1993: 147) state: no es siempre posible (ni til
metodolgicamente) lograr una separacin completa de los mismos, porque entre s guardan
una ntima interdependencia. If, for example, we approach stress as an independent discipline,
teachers and learners are faced with a task so daunting that Roach (1991: 88) suggests treating
stress placement as a property of the individual word, to be learned when the word itself is
learned. Of the three above-mentioned suprasegmental features, intonation is probably the
most complex. The study of intonation has seen many developments since the 1920s but it is
still extremely difficult to find straightforward links between form and function. Roach (1991:
169) develops this point, crucial to any teaching strategy: Perhaps the most controversial
question concerning English intonation is what its function is; pedagogically speaking, this is a
very important question, since some would not wish to devote time to teaching something
without knowing what its value was likely to be. Roach (1991: 135) comes close to suggesting
that the teaching of intonation is, except in privileged circumstances, a lost cause: It is perhaps a
discouraging thing to say, but learners of English who are not able to talk regularly with native
speakers, or who are not able at least to listen regularly to colloquial English, are not likely to learn
English intonation, though they may learn very good pronunciation of the segments and use stress
correctly. Given the dubious teachability of prosody, we recommend concentrating on
segmental phonology. Time can also be spent profitably on connected speech phenomena such
as elision, assimilation and liaison as they are mostly automatic post-lexical processes.
Connected speech phenomena do not add meaning to utterances in the ways that intonation
does but do help students to make themselves understood and understand others. There are
disagreements as to what kind of connected speech to expose students to. Finch & Ortiz (1982:
83) distinguish between formal, unhurried colloquial and informal colloquial speech;
they recommend the second, which includes ideal citation forms () a minimum number of
contextual assimilations and elisions. Brown (1990) recommends concentrating on slow
colloquial speech, which, despite the resemblance to Finch & Ortizs (1982) term, is, in fact,
much closer to their description of the informal colloquial type. Both Finch & Ortiz (1982)
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SOME NOTES ON THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
and Brown (1990) do, however, agree that there are many kinds of speech, and that they form a
continuum (Finch & Ortiz 1982: 84; Brown 1990: 4). Rather than attempt to give a name to the
type of speech one should teach, we prefer, simply, to teach what we think are the most
common connected speech processes, for example, the omission of the voiceless alveolar stop
before most consonants in phrases like dont go, wont play, cant see, etc. If anything, Spanish
learners are remiss to omit any sound, which makes pronouncing English a lot harder for them
than it might be as it is much easier to
pronounce /UUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UU:UUU:/ than /UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UU:UUUU:/. If we can
get a student to elide the /U, the articulatory assimilation of /Uto /Uwould come naturally in
dont go as assimilation of |U to |U is also found in Spanish, i.e., cinco |UUUUU
Even if we do decide to concentrate on the two areas above, it is important to pinpoint the
problem areas in pronunciation (Sol Sabater 1984: 61) as the total time we have to teach our
students is limited trying to cover every aspect of segmental pronunciation and connected
speech would require many hours and would probably leave no time for anything else. Clearly,
time constraints constitute one of the major features of lesson planning and syllabus design. Just
as there are areas in our students pronunciation that require time-consuming remedial work,
there are others that can safely be dealt with quickly. Identifying problems, thus, is a necessary
step in our teaching practice. What segments can we safely spend less time on? Flege (1987)
states that we learn sounds which are dissimilar to those of our L1 more easily than sounds
which are similar to those existing in our L1. Major & Kim (1999: 160) suggest that some
learners may never acquire similar sounds in the L2 but simply substitute them with others
from their native language. On the other hand, other learnersnormally more advancedmay
attempt to acquire dissimilar sounds and eventually succeed in achieving accurate, authentic,
i.e., native-like pronunciation. This point is admirably summed up by OConnor (1986: 113)
who divides students into two distinct groups: The first group [of students], when they listen to
a foreign language, are more conscious of the foreignness of the sounds, that is to say they
listen to them as sounds and, if the sounds are unfamiliar, they recognise the unfamiliarity. The
second group tends to hear everything in terms of their own language [our italics], interpreting
even grossly different sounds as being the same as some sounds or sound sequence which they
hear every day. Our view is that this is particularly true of Spanish-speaking learners whose L1
contains a mere five vowel phonemes to RPs twelve and nineteen consonant phonemes in
comparison to RPs twenty-four. Replacing an L2 sound by an L1 sound may have no apparent
consequences, as far as comprehension is concerned, if both sounds are similar enough.
Another matter entirely is when learners replace, let us say, an English / Uwith a Spanish /U.
However, within limits we can safely ignore those Spanish substitutions which do not cause
difficulties of comprehension. Even in those cases where the differences are clear phonetically,
for example a Spanish trill for an English alveolar approximant, the only difference will be that
of hearing a heavy accent, although this should be avoided wherever possible. In brief, and to
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BARRY PENNOCK & PETER VICKERS
quote OConnor (1986: 115), The basic factor in improving [sound discrimination] is the
belief that two sounds really are different.
5 Teaching Methods
Once we have decided which areas to teach, the next question is how to teach them. The
EFL teacher almost invariably deals with pronunciation teaching in the same way as he/she
deals with most other aspects of TEFLin an integrated manner. For most teachers it
constitutes but a piecealbeit an important oneof a holistic approach. It is fore-, middle- or
backgrounded according to the teaching exigencies and strategies which, in turn, depend on an
immense range of factors: syllabus, student profile, student/teacher expectations, time
constraints, etc. Sol Sabater (1984: 61) proposes integrating pronunciation teaching but in a
conscious, systematic and rationalized way. [her italics] Ideally, however, there should be
time allotted to focus exclusively on pronunciation (Pennington 1996). We think that the single
most important thing we need to learn in order improve our students pronunciation is how the
articulatory organs work. In the words of J. C. Catford (1988): By actually making sounds
(very often silently) and attending to the muscular sensations that accompany their production
one can discover how they are produced . We have to be able to feel exactly what part of the
mouth we use to create each sound, especially those sounds which cause us trouble. This means
not only referring to diagrams and pictures but also carrying out exercises in order to become
acquainted with the vocal organs. For instance, the problem of distinguishing the realizations of
the phoneme /Ufrom those of the phoneme /Uis basically a simple difference of articulation and
can only be solved by reference to the articulators. The first sound is a laminal/palato-alveolar
fricative while the second is an apico/alveolar fricative. If we are to teach the difference to our
students, we need to know the difference ourselves. This means teaching teachers phonology
and phonetics. If we look at the description of /Uand /Uabove, most of us will remember that
when we were taught English phonology, the place of articulation of the tongue was seldom
mentioned. In fact, in most books they are described simply as palato-alveolar and alveolar
fricatives respectively. Sol Sabater (1984: 63) suggests that we start to teach English sounds
by exploring the students own phonological system, be it Spanish or Catalan in the case of the
Valencian Community. In this way we can teach the students something they already master on
a practical level and give names to phonetic gestures they are already acquainted with
fortunately, most of the terms we need to describe these gestures, mouth lips, tongue, teeth,
upper, lower, front back constitute the kind of vocabulary most students know. It is important
not to be too prolix in technical terminology as we do not wish to hide the articulatory wood
behind a theoretical swathe of trees. Of course, once the student has been trained to produce
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SOME NOTES ON THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
sounds correctly we can use other methods such as drills, pronunciation games, short
transcriptions and intensive listenings.
Finally, whatever techniques we use, we should not lose sight of a truism borne out by our
own and many colleagues experience: teaching pronunciation can be fun and should be
exploited as such. The adage of the three Ls still holds true: Laughter Lubricates Learning. The
act of mimicry, of juggling with contrasting sounds, may constitute a real source of student and
why not? teacher enjoyment.
6 Conclusions
We began this paper with the question: Should we teach pronunciation? While the question
may be applicable to the fields of theoretical, speculative pedagogy, within the sphere of chalk-
face TEFL it largely lacks relevance. We suggest turning the question on its head and rather
than ask whether we should teach pronunciation, we should ask ourselves whether we actually
do teach pronunciation whether we agree with it or not. In short, then, we posit that in TEFL
the teaching of pronunciation, overtly or covertly, is a pedagogical inevitability. The issue
hinges not on should we or do we but on how we teach pronunciation.
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