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Accuracy and Fluency: Phonologyour objective is

to develop our language skills as teachers

• As language teachers we are models of language behavior for your students. Therefore, we need to ensure that we continually improve on:

• how natural our expressions are

• how natural our voice sound is

• how accurate and natural our lexis is

• how accurate and natural our grammar is

• how we learn

• What advice can you give your colleagues on how to do this?

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A word from Rod Ellis

• *Principle 8: The opportunity to interact in the L2 is central to developing L2 proficiency

• While it is useful to consider the relative contributions of input and output to acquisition, it is also important to acknowledge that both co-occur in oral interaction and that both computational and sociocultural theories of L2 acquisition have viewed social interaction as the matrix in which acquisition takes place.

*Instructed Second Language AcquisitionA Literature Review, 2005 Research Division, Ministry of Education, NZ

In short

• Successful language learning is driven by the skilled management by the teacher of meaningful interaction between students in the learning environment.

What should the trainer do today?Develop language competence through managing meaningful interaction.

Are people designed to speak?

• How do they learn it?

• How important is listening?

• Can you learn pronunciation without listening skills?

英语教学论英文版主 编鲁子问副主编罗少茜 王军审 校 Francis DOOGAN Maria BJORNING GYDE

• Mr. M, a junior high school English teacher, is very strict with his students’ pronunciation.

He thinks that teaching English pronunciation is mainly teaching basic English speech

sounds. If students read phonetic symbols, letters of the alphabet and words correctly, they

will, according to Mr. M, have good pronunciation. When students pronounce words

incorrectly, Mr. M always carefully explains the details of the pronunciation and corrects

every mistake his students make. But after a term, his students’ oral English has not

improved and it is still very difficult for them to express themselves fluently in English.

Why should students listen?

• If our students learn to listen well, they learn more about sound and meaning.

• If we learn to listen to our students we can guide them more.

• If we listen, students learn that listening is interpersonally effective.

• If we learn to listen to ourselves we can be better language models.

• Listening in class and outside class is a natural process that aids learning.

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Do you listen?

• When you ask a question are you doing it to evaluate or communicate?

• How much of your exchange with your students is actual communication that says you value listening?

• How much of your exchange models the complexity of normal conversation?

• How much of your class involves students talking and listening to each other?

Speaking Competence =

• Clear meaning

• Pronunciation of individual sounds

• Stress, pause, rhythm, intonation

• Grammatical and lexical range and accuracy

• Effective communication

• Are voice sound, grammar, lexis and effective communication independent skills or interdependent skills?

• In what way?

Transcribe what you hear.

• My dog is really clever and he likes to steal things from the neighbours.

Common mistakes in phonology

This and some following slides adapted from Learner English Cambridge University Press ©2001 Swan and Smith Pages 310 to 324

Chinese and English Phonology

• There are more vowel contrasts in English than in Chinese, so English vowels are closer to each other in terms of position in the mouth than Chinese vowels.

• This means that more effort is required to distinguish them.

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• The contrast between /i:/ and /ɪ/ has no equivalent in Chinese.

• Learners confuse pairs such as eat and it, bean and bin.

• The same applies to /u:/ and /ʊ/, leading to confusion, for instance, between fool and full, Luke and look.

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• /ae/ does not occur in Chinese. Learners tend to nasalise it.

• It may also be confused with /ɑ:/, /ʌ/ or /e/, so that a word such as cap might be pronounced /keɪp/, carp, cup or ‘kep’.

• /ɒ/ has no equivalent in Chinese. Learners sometimes make it sound like /ɔ:/, /аʊ/, /ʊ/ or a front vowel.

So for instance shot might be pronounced short, shout or /ʃʊt/

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• Chinese diphthongs are usually pronounced with quicker and smaller tongue and lip movements than their English counterparts.

• Learners make these sounds too short, with not enough distinction between the two component vowels.

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Practice and compare

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Consonants

• In the three pairs of stops /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, /k/ and /g/, the unaspirated group /b/, /d/ and /g/ are voiced in English but are on the whole voiceless in Chinese.

• Chinese learners tend to lose the voiced feature in speaking English.

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Voice and unvoiced contrasts: practice and compare

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• /v/ is absent from most Chinese dialects. As a result, it is sometimes treated like /w/ or /f/: invite may be pronounced ‘inwite’; livepronounced ‘lif’.

• Many Chinese dialects do not have /n/. Learners speaking these dialects find it difficult to distinguish, for instance, night from light.

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• /ɵ/ and /ð / do not occur in Chinese. /(ɵ)/ is likely to be replaced by /t/,/f/ or /s/

So for example thin may be pronounced tin, fin or sin;

• /ð / is likely to be replaced by /d/ or /Z/.

So for example this may be pronounced ‘dis’ or ‘zis’.

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1. Tin

2. Thin

3. Din

4. ð th(i)n

• Final consonants in general cause a problem.

• There are few final consonants in Chinese, learners tend either to add an extra vowel at the end, or to drop the consonant and produce a slight glottal or unreleased stop:

• duck, for instance, may be pronounced /dʌkə/ or /dʌ’/;

• wife may be pronounced /wаɪfu:/ or /wаɪ’/.

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• /l/ in final position is particularly difficult: it may be replaced by /r/, or followed by /a/, or simply dropped:

• bill, for instance, may be pronounced beer, /bɪlə/ or /bɪ/

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Consonant clusters

• Initial consonant clusters are lacking in Chinese, and cause problems.

• The common error is to insert a slight vowel sound between the consonants, pronouncing spoon, for instance, as ‘sipoon’.

• Final clusters are more troublesome. Learners are likely to add syllables, or to simplify the cluster (for instance, by dropping the last consonant). So dogs may be pronounced /dɒgəz/ or /dog/;

• crisps may be pronounced /krisipu:si:/ or /krisipu:/.

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Reduced syllables

• Are far less frequent in Chinese than in English.

• In Chinese these are usually pronounced more prominently than in English, and undergo fewer phonetic changes.

• Learners tend to stress too many English syllables, and to give the weak syllables a full pronunciation:

• fish and chips (with and stressed and pronounced /aend/)

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• ’The capital ’of England ’is London. (with both the and of emphasised)

• When speakers try to reduce the accent on the English weak forms, they sometimes find them so hard to pronounce that they omit them:

*fish chips.

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Juncture

• The single syllables of basic Chinese units leads to learners’ separating English words rather than joining them smoothly into a ‘stream of speech’.

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This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cow that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

104 words

Voice recording1. Think about last week for 1 minute. Do not make any notes.

2. Record yourself on your phone talking about your last week, for one minute.

3. Listen to your recording and write down everything (everything, exactly) you have said.

4. Give your phone and what you have written to your partner. Your partner will see if it is the same.

5. Count the number of words you have said in a minute.

6. Read what you have written and check your language – is it natural and accurate? Correct your mistakes.

7. Record the corrected version and listen to it.

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We learn pronunciation by listening

• Listen again and again

• Listen to VoA

• Listen to BBC

• Listen to anything online

• Listen actively and passively

• Follow a practice to recognize before you produce

• Listen and summarize

• Listen and ask yourself questions (who, what, when…)

• Listen and repeat in your head

• Listen and speak as real communication

Focused listening

• We ask ourselves questions as we listen e.g.

• Who…(Who is it about?)

• What…(What is happening/What happened? )

• When…(When does it happen/When did it happen? )

• Where…(Where does it happen/Where did it happen? )

• Why…(Why does it happen/Why did it happen? )

• How…(How does it happen/How did it happen? )

• What is my opinion on the topic?

• What is my opinion on the quality of what I have listened to?

• English Listening Lesson Library Online (ELLLO) contains hundreds of pre-recorded monologues and discussions on an enormous variety of topics, geared to English speakers at six distinct levels of skill from beginner to advanced. The lessons come in video as well as audio formats and can be sorted by topic, skill level or speaker’s home country.

• http://www.elllo.org/english/home.htm

How to improve learner pronunciation challenges

Visual aids

1. Exaggerated gestures for intonation

2. Finger-counting for syllables

3. Finger-counting for words

4. Clapping for stress

5. Arrows and stress marks

6. IPA

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Modelling techniques

• Drills

• Sound discrimination exercises and activities, including use of minimal pairs

A little more practice

Making vowel sounds

• We move our tongue, lips and jaw.

• The air flows out through the different shapes made by the mouth. It is not stopped.

Listen, look, say

monophthong lips jaw

cart ɑ: long round open

beat i: long spread close

work ɜ: long relaxed medium open

bore ɔ: long round open

boot u: long pout medium open

Listen, look, say

bit ɪ short relaxed medium open

book ʊ short relaxed open

bet e short relaxed medium open

better ə short relaxed little open

hut ʌ short relaxed medium open

cat æ short relaxed medium open

shot ɒ short relaxed medium open

Listen, look, sayDiphthong lips jaw

tour sure ʊə pout close open close

tie аɪ relaxed open close

tote əʊ relaxed open close

pier ɪə relaxed open close

toy ɔɪ relaxed open close

taste eɪ relaxed close open close

cow аʊ relaxed open close

air еə relaxed open close

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More techniques

1. Match sound to phonemic symbols

2. Copy what you hear

3. Write what you hear

4. Use phonemic chart for description and discrimination

5. Exaggerate mouth, lips, jaw

6. Drilling

Using drilling for pronunciation

1. It gives learners models they can copy.

2. It is guided repetition of target language.

3. It gives mechanical practice in where to put tongue, lips, jaw.

4. It develops a memory of grammatical and phonological language patterns and chunks, which provide the basis for language acquisition.

Listening and speaking

1. How quickly do fluent speakers speak to each other?

2. How fast are the little words (auxiliary verbs, determiners, conjunctions, pronouns)

3. What is the average time gap between hearing something in a conversation and replying?

Does word stress affect pronunciation?

How many syllables? Which are stressed?

intelligence unambiguous phonetically

recording brilliant possibility

monkey disabled content (n.)

Are there word stress rules?

1. Stress on first syllable

• Most two syllable nouns and adjectives have stress on the first syllable

2. Stress on last syllable

• Most two syllable verbs have stress on the last syllable

3. Stress on second syllable from end:

• Words ending in ‘ic’

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Are there word stress rules?

4. Stress on third syllable from end

• Words ending in ‘cy’, ‘ty’, ‘phy’, ‘gy’

5. Multi-syllable words

• Have usually more than one stress, i.e. a primary and a secondary stress

6. Compound nouns

• Noun stress is on the first part

Are there word stress rules?

7. Compound adjectives

• Adjectives stress is on the second part

8. Compound verbs

• Verb stress is on the second part

Effect of intonation on meaning

• Which questions usually have rising intonation?

• Which questions usually have falling intonation?

• Why?

Contrastive Stress

1. I hear Lena went to Shanghai last

Tuesday.

a) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

2. Did you come back from Shanghai

last Tuesday?

b) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

3. Ah, I hear you went to Beijing last

Tuesday.

c) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

4. Are you going to Shanghai this

Tuesday?

d) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

5. What’s this about you being seen in

Shanghai last Monday?

e) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

6. So you went to Guangzhou last

Saturday.

f) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

7. I hear you both went to Beijing last

Tuesday.

g) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

8. So you are both going to Shanghai

next Tuesday.

h) No. I went to Shanghai last Tuesday.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.

I don’t why she swallowed a fly,Perhaps she’ll die.

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There was an old lady who swallowed a spiderThat wriggled and wriggled and jiggled inside her.She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,Perhaps she’ll die.

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There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.How absurd to swallow a bird!

She swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,Perhaps she’ll die.

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There was an old lady who swallowed a dog – What a hog to swallow a dog!

She swallowed the dog to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly,

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a cow. I don’t know how she swallowed a cow.

She swallowed the cow to catch to catch the dog, she swallowed the dog to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,Perhaps she’ll die.

There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. I don’t know how she swallowed a horse.

She swallowed the horse to catch the cow, she swallowed the cow to catch to catch the dog, she swallowed the dog to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed the horse.

She’s dead, of course!