Обучение письму

 

THE CONTENT

1. Teaching aims…………………………………………..2
2. Teaching techniques……………………………………2
3. Classroom procedures………………………………….6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching aims

 

The aim of pronunciation teaching must be that the students can produce English speech which is intelligible in the areas where they will use it. The teacher will have to concentrate on the important phonemic contrasts and select allophonic variations only to ensure intelligibility, not to achieve a totalset of native-speaker-like variations. In teaching the different uses of /t/ and /d/ to students who have difficulties with either or both, the distinction of voicing is a useful starting point and examples should be taken of these sounds used between two vowels, as in rated, raided, sighting, siding, a tin, a din, etc. In initial position preceding a vowel, the distinction must emphasise presence or absence of aspiration, and in final position lengthening of the vowel preceding /d/. Other allophonic possibilities such as lateral plosion (as in little, puddle or nasal plosion (as in kitten, goodness) are not crucial for the students’ intelligibility, though they must be able to understand words said in this way.

Teaching techniques

 

In foreign language teaching, pronunciation is the one area where it is generally agreed that imitation is the essence of the learning process. Some people are better at imitation than others, but one thing is clear: in order to imitate correctly one must have heard correctly what is to be imitated. Unfortunately there is not so much the teacher can do to help his students to hear accurately. He can direct their attention to sound differences, give them plenty of opportunity to listen, but he cannot give them the ability to hear them. On occasion he can make the task easier by separating out the items to be heard.

If the students cannot hear a /ts/ combination at the end of words like cats, mats, and persistently hear either just /kæt/ or /mæt/ or /kæs/ or /mæs/, the teacher can contrast /t/ with /ts/ and /s/ with /ts/ separately. (Failure to make the plural correctly is often due to a pronunciation problem like this one, as are some other apparently grammatical errors.)

As far as actual pronunciation is concerned, the teacher cannot rely upon explanations of tongue position or even diagrams and the use of mirrors. Apart from a few items such as lip and front of tongue positions, the sensory-motor skills involved are normally well below the level of consciousness and are not easy to deal with consciously. Some kind of intuitive mimicry is necessary. It is sometimes found, incidentally, that when the classroom pronunciation demanded by the teacher does not accord with that which the students hear around them outside the school, they can often mimic the required accent effectively in order to mockit, and their apparent inability to produce it in class is psychological rather than physical. Another source of help may be some noises used by the students when speaking their own language, i.e. onomatapoeic noises for sounds of birds, the wind, trains, etc. In a few cases these might constitute an English phoneme, as the sounds for the buzzing of the bee or for requesting silence do in English. For successful imitation, students need to listen to themselves.

Most people cannot really monitor their own speech, and help from tape recorders can be invaluable. Hearing himself on tape in contrast with the speech model not only convinces the student that he has, or has not, achieved success, but gives him clues for further improvement.

As with all learning, motivation is a highly significant factor in pronunciation. The more it can be made necessary for the student to improve his speech, the more rewarding will the teaching be. Motivation can be real or simulated. Where it is possible, actual contact with speakers outside the class in real communicative contexts (shops, etc.) is of course ideal. Where this is not possible, games in the classroom which are so designed that either hearing correctly or speaking correctly are built in as an essential part of the game provide a context where communication is felt to depend on accurate speech. For example, a class can be divided into teams, standing or sitting in rows. The first person in each row is given an instruction to whisper to the next person, who whispers it to the next, and so on down the line. When the last student has received the instruction he must obey it quickly. If it is worded to highlight a pronunciation point so that an error in speech or recognition at any point along the row might occur, students will in fact be engaged in pronunciation practice in a meaningful context. Thus, if the instruction were ‘Draw a ship on the blackboard’, and students had difficulty distinguishing /i/ and /I/, the row which produced a drawing of a sheep would not be the winner! Given the aim of encouraging accurate imitation, the teacher’s choice of what to teach and in what order to teach it, depends partly on his decision as to what sound features are essential for intelligibility in the variety of English he has to teach.

The degree of difficulty which these sound features present to the students is governed largely by the sound patterns of their native language. By comparing the sets of phonemes and their commonly used allophones in the native language and English, the teacher can assess the areas of pronunciation where difficulty is likely to occur. He will not necessarily be able to predict exactly what errors the student will make, but he will know which sounds or supra-segmental aspects will cause trouble.

Although the different languages of the world have all drawn on different sounds and sound features from the infinite range that the human vocal tract could produce, the underlying principle of system of distinctive contrasts with permitted variations is common to all. Without information about all parts of the system, it is easy to fall into errors of over-simplification. Speakers of German might be thought, for example, to have no trouble with /b/, /d/ or /g/, since these occur in German as well as in English. But inspection of their place in the sound system of German will show that they never occur in final position, so that a German speaker pronounces ‘cab’ as /kæp/, ‘bud’ as / b∧t/, and ‘dog’ as /dok/. The point to remember is that the learners who are not in the habit, in their own language, of hearing certain distinctions will just not hear them in English, and therefore will not pronounce them either. The reason why a German learner might persist in these errors, in spite of being able to say /b/, /d/ and /g/ perfectly well, is that he has simply failed to hear that they occur at the end of words in English. Likewise a French speaker, who uses /i/ and /I/ interchangeably and has never learned to distinguish them, may not even notice the difference between ‘live’ and ‘leave’ and may think they are homonyms.

Even a speaker of a language like Spanish which has the two sounds but uses them differently (not as different phonemes but as different allophones of one phoneme) will fail to use them correctly in English because he will expect a different degree of significance to attach to them. Attention to the whole system, and adequate recognition practice, are the chief keys to successful pronunciation teaching. Native language interference applies equally strongly to the supra-segmentals.

Foreign judgments of the English as unfriendly, or even as very polite, are often based on faulty interpretation of their intonation, whereas the English judgment of certain foreign speakers as rude or aggressive is usually based on a likewise faulty interpretation. The native language habits of intonation and stress and general tone of voice are so all-pervading and deeply ingrained and further out of awareness than vowels and consonants which can often be physically demonstrated, that people find it difficult to accept that there is a systematic variation from one language to another. Thus, if a foreign speaker makes a segmental pronunciation error, he is excused as a foreigner and his speech is interpreted more or less correctly depending on the context. But if he makes a supra-segmental error, a judgment is made of his personality, not of his language. Thus a German speaker might call someone and use a falling intonation, ‘Mr Smith!’, as would be appropriate in German.

This will make him sound authoritative and possibly impolite in English, for gentle polite calling requires a rising intonation. Such intonation differences are a source of misunderstanding even among native speakers of English from different regions.

 

 

 

 

Classroom procedures

 

It is very difficult to build up a graded teaching sequence for pronunciation teaching, because, even at beginner level, all the sounds of English tend to occur within the first few months of teaching. Since, as has been seen, the drilling of isolated sounds has little value, it would also be quite unrealistic to attempt to teach the sounds of the language before going on to the language itself. The teaching sequence must therefore be organised in terms of priorities and degrees of difficulty. The amount of time devoted to specifically pronunciation teaching depends on the larger priorities of the course in general. A useful guide is the precept ‘little and often’.

The teacher should be prepared to slip a few minutes’ pronunciation drill into a lesson at any point where a significant problem is noticed. But random assistance should not take the place of a systematic attempt tointegrate pronunciation teaching into the course. It has a natural place in much grammar work, e.g. the teaching of plural endings, third person singular simple present tense, simple past tense and past participles of regular verbs, use of questions of different types, use of adverbial modifiers involving intonation distinctions, and so on. Pronunciation practice itself might be very short or may occasionally occupy several minutes. In either case a few key principles should be followed:

1 Recognition practice should precede production practice.

2 But since production reinforces recognition, there is no need to wait for perfect recognition before asking for production.

3 The sounds to be heard and spoken should be clearlyhighlighted in short utterances.

4 But this should not be taken to the extreme of tonguetwisters like Peter Piper.

5 Students should be given the opportunity to hear the samethings said by more than one voice as the model.

6 The English sounds can be demonstrated in contrast with other English sounds or else in contrast with sounds from the native language.

7 The target sound contrast should be shown to function meaningfully, i.e. students should realise that it makes an important difference to their intelligibility to use it properly.

This can be done by a procedure involving aprogression from straightforward drill, where the success or failure is simply measured by the teacher’s approval or disapproval, to a simulated communication situation like a picture-word matching exercise, or a game, and then to a real communication situation like the understanding of a story or joke where the meaning might depend on the sound contrast being taught. The heart of any drilling or demonstrating of specific sound features is contrast of one kind or another.

The most efficient way of showing contrast is by minimal pairs. Any pair of words or phrases or sentences where there is only one feature to distinguish them is a minimal pair. e.g. part port a tack a tag He’s coming? He’s coming. Such pairs can be used in the following ways:

(a) The teacher instructs the students to judge whether he is saying two things that sound the same or different. Sometimes he says the contrasting pair, sometimes he says one member of the pair twice.

(b) The teacher says three items, two the same, one different. Students judge which item is the different one.

(c) The teacher says one of the pair and students indicate which one it is, either by referring to numbers (e.g. Sound 1, Sound 2), or by referring to pictures illustrating the words, or by performing an action illustrating the word, or by writing the word on the board or in their books, or by marking a choice in an arranged exercise, etc.

(d) The teacher says one of the pair and students either repeat it after him, or say both members of the pair, or say the other one. This can be done chorally, or by

individual students chosen at random, or in turn rapidly round the class.

(e) The teacher says one of the pair and the students have to use the sound feature being highlighted in an utterance of their own, either orally or in writing.

(f) The teacher shows a picture, or performs an action, or gives a clue, or writes a word on the board, or holds up a flash card, which elicits from the student either a choral or individual production of one or other member of the pair. But pronunciation teaching does not stop at the drilling stage.

The ultimate step is the recognition and use of the sound feature in normal speech. But the learner should be completely unconscious of his pronunciation, and pronunciation teaching at this stage consists of the teacher’s monitoring and making notes of what pronunciation features require further conscious drill. Where there is a recognition problem, a common teaching error is to falsify the speech to facilitate comprehension.

The teacher should always talk at normal speed, rather repeating numerous times till he is understood, or paraphrasing where necessary. The difficulty is not to take the easy way out for the exigencies of the moment, thinking that the problem canbe dealt with adequately later. It is, paradoxically, the teacher who is most aware of and sympathetic to his students’ problems who is most likely to do this. Pronunciation then, whilst it can be described and taught in isolation, is not to be regarded as a separate area of language learning, but as a number of contributory strands in the fabric of English, strands to which teachers and pupils give their attention from time to time.

 

 

 

1. V.J.Cook, Active Intonation, Longman, 1968.

2. A.C.Gimson, An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, Arnold, 2nd edn, 1970.

3. B.Haycraft, The Teaching of Pronunciation—A Classroom Guide, Longman, 1970.

4. M.Heliel and T.McArthur, Learning Rhythm and Stress, Collins, 1974.

5. J.D.O’Connor, Better English Pronunciation, Cambridge University Press, 1967.

6. J.D.O’Connor and G.F.Arnold, Intonation of Colloquial English, Longman, 2nd edn, 1973.

7. P.Tench, Pronunciation Skills, Macmillan 1981.