TEACHING PRONUNCIATION

Pronunciation is probably the most neglected topic in English teaching syllabuses and programs. The English and Spanish pronunciations of letters and phonemes are very different, and it’s difficult for Spanish speakers to develop the tongue movements necessary to pronounce certain English phonemes. That is why teachers should know how phonemics work and how to work on pronunciation in class.

Features of pronunciation:

1. THE PHONEMIC CHART + BASIC TERMINOLOGY

The International Phonemic Alphabet (IPA) is a set of symbols that linguists use to describe the sounds of spoken languages. Some of those symbols can be seen here, along with the muscles used to produce them:

From then, we can learn some of the basic terminology for linguistics:

PHONEMES: a meaningful sequence of sounds, it can change the meaning of the word. Ex.: cat vs. pat.

ALLOPHONES: variants of a sound that depend on the context. Ex.: dark and clear /l/ -> the dark /l/ is pronounced with the back of the tongue (crystal), the clean /l/ is pronounced with the front (life).

MINIMAL PAIRS: principle used to establish how many phonemes there are in a language.

VOWELS: there is no obstruction to the air flow in their pronunciation. There are 12 vowels in English:

The most problematic vowels in terms of articulation are /i:/ vs. /I/ (as in “sheep vs. ship”), /ɔː/ vs. /ɒ/ (as in “door vs. on”), /u:/ vs. /ʊ/ (as in “shoot vs. good”), /ʌ/ vs. /ae/ (as in “up vs. cat”), /a:/ (as in “laugh”) and /ɜ:/ (as in “learn”).

• The case of “schwa” or /ə/ happens only in unstressed syllables, as in teachER or feaTHER. It is hard to model and needs two syllable words or connected speech.
• One-syllable grammar words (and, to, at…) tend to be unstressed and pronounced as schwa.

CONSONANTS: there is air obstruction when pronounced, whether is total closure or partial. 

Consonants that often pose problems to Spanish speakers are:

• /v/ (as in “very”), 
• /z/ (as in “lizard”) and its contrast with /s/ (as in “lizard vs. Susan”), 
• /dʒ/ not /j/ (as in “James”)
• /ŋ/ - as in “sing”, “finger”
• /h/ - because in Spanish it doesn’t sound, so in English Spanish speakers tend to pronounce it too strong (him -> jim, house -> jouse)
• /r/ - ex.: remember, the first “r” is not as strong as in Spanish
• /p/, /b/, /d/, /g/, /t/ - because they don’t sound quite as in Spanish
• /ʃ/, /ð/, /j/, /w/ and /ʒ/.

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2. TECHNIQUES TO TEACH PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS

1) Receptive/awareness-raising activities: the origin of pronunciation are the muscles. We move one or the other muscle from the front of the tongue to the back to produce each sound, as can be seen in the very first section of this post. These MOVEMENTS can be trained by making the students aware of them. They can sense the physical contrast of two difference pronunciations, for example, if they touch their vocal chords as they pronounce voiceless (don’t produce vibration) and voiced (produce vibration) consonants. LISTENING DISTINCTION can also be trained with activities like raising their hands when they hear certain sounds, thinking of what the phoneme sounds like,…

2) Modelling: differences in articulation can be modelled - place, manner, voiced/voiceless, stress, intonation,…

3) Drilling: better used before introducing the written form. CAREFUL: Repeating chorally has the risk of not hearing every student.

4) Minimal pairs: they can be used in awareness-raising activities to work on difficult phonemes to Spanish speakers, specially variations and difficult phonemes for Spanish speakers -> sheep vs. ship, cat vs. cut.

Let’s see a real example of a pronunciation activity…

BEES AND SNAKES

This activity is designed for 2nd Grade of Primary (7-8 years old) with an A1 level. It is an awareness-raising activity to help students differentiate the /s/ and /z/ sounds, usually complicated for Spanish speakers.

1) The first part of the activity will be performed by the whole group. The teacher uses the bees and snakes’ onomatopoeias to practice. She tell them we will be working with bees and snakes, and to introduce the topic of sounds, she asks the students: “how do bees sound?”, “how do snakes sound?” 

2) When the explicit sounds have come forward (/s/ vs. /z/), the teacher asks them to touch their neck. Then she says “let’s all make the bee sound” and asks them what they feel. Then she says “Now let’s make the snake sound” and asks them what they feel. Then, she questions whether they find differences between both sounds. It is expected they’ll say that with the /z/, they feel vibrations, while with the /s/ they don’t. The teacher clarifies that this is due to the fact that they are different sounds, just slightly, but it is important to make the difference.

3) For the second part, the class is divided in two groups: Team Bee and Team Snake. On the blackboard, the teacher sticks a picture of a bee on one side and of a snake on the other, and the groups locate themselves in front of those sides in their tables. Each group has to think about either: words whose pronunciation has the “bee sound” (/z/) / “snake sound” (/s/), or objects that produce those sounds (like a phone buzzing). She will provide them with some examples:

• /s/: soap, sheep, shout, shy, this. 
• /z/: buzzing, these, Chinese.

They write the words under the picture, and when they’re done, the whole class will touch their throats again and pronounce the words to self-asses if they’re correctly placed. If some words are wrongly categorised, they’re switched into their correct group.

4) After this, the groups switch. Team Bee is now Team Snake and vice versa. They do the activity again and try to think of words their classmates didn’t come up with. Then the assessment process is repeated. This way all the students will work to think of both pronunciations.

REFLECTION

I can say without a doubt that I never had pronunciation instruction when I was at school. The only resemblance to it was when the teachers corrected our pronunciation while we spoke to them, but we never had proper trainign. I find this alarming considering there are many English phonemes Spanish does not have, and thus certain collocations of the tongue are difficult and have to be trained.

I learned pronunciation through listening to interviews in English and speaking it with natives, but I do not believe this is enough, because to this day there are certain sounds that are hard for me to pronounce even though I could be considered bilingual. Furthermore, when it comes to understanding pronunciation, it is also highly necessary to foster listening and try to distinguish sounds, since English-speaking people make slight differentiations when pronouncing certain sounds that may be undetectable to Spanish speakers. For example, /b/ and /v/ are pronounced differently, but Spanish speakers cannot hear it if they did not receive proper trainig. 

With this unit I have realised that, especially in the early years, it is very important to work on pronunciation and differentation of sounds, and not just correct the attempts students make, but doing focused tasks. It was interesting trying to create an activity for very young learners since it is believed they may be too young to properly speak a foreign language, but fostering pronunciation from an early age can solve many problems for their future.