Authors Robin Walker and Gemma Archer discuss how they empower educators to feel confident and prepared to teach pronunciation in a time where the practice has fallen to the wayside.
For far too long, pronunciation teaching has been left out on the margins of English language teaching. From the central position it occupied in early teaching methods, we have reached the point today where some coursebooks carry no explicit pronunciation work at all.
In part, this is because successful pronunciation teaching is a complex mix of the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘who to’ – a mix that can be difficult to get right. In addition, unlike grammar or vocabulary, pronunciation has a significant component of skills acquisition. This requires teachers to come to the classroom equipped with a range of tricks and tools that they can use to get learners to do things with their mouths that often feel completely foreign to them. In this respect, the language teacher is very much like a sports coach or dance instructor. The aim is to get learners to do things rather than to know about them. Knowledge alone is not enough.
Aware of the unique nature of pronunciation teaching, in ‘Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World’ we have been as careful as possible to take teachers into account, and to support them in a number of ways.
One of the first is through clarifying the main goal of pronunciation teaching today. To this end, an early activity invites teachers and learners to reflect on what constitutes ‘good pronunciation’. Previously, this was associated with a native-speaker accent, whereas today, it is widely seen as pronunciation that is intelligible to your listeners, wherever you are, and whoever they may be. Helping teachers and learners to redefine ‘good pronunciation’ is helping them to find the motivation they need for meaningful pronunciation practice, both in and out of the classroom. With pronunciation, the right attitude is critical to success.
Another way we support teachers is through the structuring activities. After a brief description of purpose, each activity is presented in a step-by-step fashion so that teachers can go into the classroom confident that the activity will work. In addition, the step–by–step instructions are backed up with ‘Getting it right’ tips.
These multiple bytes of practical advice are all born out of our own classroom experience, which covers the two major teaching contexts operating in the world today; classes with learners from multiple first-language backgrounds, and classes where learners share the same mother tongue. In addition, many activities are followed by a ‘Why this works’ inset to explain, as clearly and as briefly as possible, the theory that underlies the activity.
Doing an activity without fully understanding where it fits into the wider pronunciation mix can undermine a teacher’s confidence and makes the teacher more of a kitchen assistant who can only produce good food by slavishly following the steps in the cookery book. Instead, we want to help develop fully-fledged chefs who can modify an international recipe to make it work using local ingredients.
The last twenty years or so have seen pronunciation teaching evolve so much that we had no doubts about including guidance in our book for various frequently neglected areas of pronunciation teaching, such as using the learner’s mother tongue, and technology. As with other areas of life today, technology in the form of apps and computer software can be a friend or a foe when teaching or learning pronunciation. Digital recordings, for example, allow us to analyse our learners’ performance and identify problem areas, to monitor their progress throughout the year, or to assess their level at the end of the year.
However, some new technologies glitter but are not gold, and it is only by analysing the latest software and apps using the criteria we put forward in the book, that teachers and learners can evaluate each of them in turn. Guided analysis like this allows users to choose the best app, software or internet site for classroom or independent use.
In general, the more widely available a resource, the better. This is especially true of the most widely available pronunciation teaching resource, which is the learner’s L1 pronunciation. Until now, the mother tongue has been widely seen as a major obstacle to good pronunciation, but when our goal is international intelligibility, the mother tongue can become an invaluable resource.
To make best use of this free resource, teachers should possess a good working knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of the learner’s first language. Suddenly, non-native teachers find themselves in an advantaged position over many of their native-speaker colleagues, who are usually less well placed to exploit the intricacies of their students’ mother tongue. Suddenly, non-native teachers can bring their personal experience of learning the pronunciation of English directly into their teaching – something native teachers can’t – and then walk into the classroom equipped with a unique strengths and skills.
As we have just seen with the new role of the learner’s first language, pronunciation teaching aimed at intelligibility as opposed to accent, shines an entirely new light on who makes a good instructor. With intelligibility as the goal, any teacher whose English is intelligible, is, by definition, an excellent classroom model for their learners. This is true regardless of whether the teacher is a non-native speaker or a native speaker with a regional accent.
Moreover, teachers who share the same L1 as their students are ideally situated to act as guides along the road to internationally intelligible English. Who better to lead you on the potentially difficult journey than a person who has already made that journey successfully?
With all that in mind, perhaps what we are the most proud of as authors is the fact that the book empowers all of those teachers who, up to now, have been uncomfortable teaching pronunciation, or who may lack confidence and simply avoid teaching it altogether. Those teachers have often told us of the conflict between the accent found on existing teaching materials and their own non-native speaker or regional native speaker accents. In this respect, our book both embraces diversity with regard to the accents of both teachers and learners, and is genuinely inclusive.
With international intelligibility as the goal, nobody is left out of the critical task
of teaching and learning the pronunciation of English.
‘Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World’ is available from Oxford University Press and local distributors.
