CRITICAL
REVIEW
of
TEACHING
PRONUNCIATION
(Written
by: Janet Goodwin)
By:
Teguh Raharjo
NIM : 100221509261
Email:
teguhraharjo71@yahoo.com
Abstract
This paper reviews
the chapter entitled “Teaching Pronunciation” by Janet Goodwin from the book
“Teaching English as Second or Foreign Language” Celce-Murcia (ED) 3rd
edition. In this article, the author will also give the pro and contra side
about the material discuss in the chapter. However, the author will not only
criticize the chapter but also he will a solution or advice to the things being
critic later on.
Keywords: Critical
review, teaching pronunciation
A.
INTRODUCTION
Teaching pronunciation is so crucial to our students
because pronunciation is the language feature that most readily identifies
speakers as non-native. I actually agree with Goodwin’s article
that written in the book “Teaching English as a Second or Foreign
Language.” However, I would like to give
some criticism. First I think he doesn’t explain/discuss about the factors
within learners that affect pronunciation. Second, I think he doesn’t explain clearly
about Suprasegmental Feature and Segmental Feature.
In the context of English language teaching (ELT), pronunciation
is an integral aspect of communicative competence that can impact the desire to
use the language as well as the quantity and quality of input received and
output produced . Pronunciation tends to be neglected in the second language
(L2) classroom, and L2 teachers are frightened by the idea of teaching
pronunciation.
This paper reviews seven goals that are very important for
teaching pronunciation. They are increased attention from researchers, focus on
developing learners’ communicative competence, a focus on teacher education,
focus on intelligibility/ comprehensibility, focus on methods and materials
development, use of useful instructional software, and focus on the
suprasegmentals.
B. BODY/DISCUSSION
From
Janet Goodwin’s discussion, I think he doesn’t explain/discuss about the
factors within learners that affect pronunciation. Brown (2007:340-341) states
that there are six factors within the learners that affect pronunciation
(adapted from Kenworthy, 1987, pp.4-8).
1.
Native language. Clearly, native
language is the most influential factor affecting a learner’s pronunciation. If
you are familiar with the sound system of a learner’s native language, you will
be better able to diagnose student difficulties.
2.
Age. Generally speaking, children under the
age of puberty stand an excellent chance of “sounding like a native.” If they
have continued exposure in authentic contexts.
3.
Exposure. It is difficult to define
exposure. One can actually live in a foreign country for some time but not take
advantage of being with the people.
4.
Innate phonetic ability. If
pronunciation seems to be naturally difficult for some students, they should
not despair; with some effort and concentration, they can improve their
competence.
5.
Identity the language ego. Learners need
to be reminded of the importance of positive attitude toward the people who
speak the language.
6.
Motivation and concern for good
pronunciation. Some learners are not particularly concerned about their
pronunciation, while others are.
Second,
I think he doesn’t explain clearly about Suprasegmental Feature and Segmental
Feature.
Suprasegmental
Feature
Suprasegmental
features relate to sounds at the macro level. Advances in research have
developed descriptions of the suprasegmental feature of speech extending across
whole stretches of language (prosody).Unlike
languages such as Vietnamese or Mandarin which are tonal, English is
stress-timed and syllable-timed (for example, WHAT’s his address?). Jenkins (2002) emphasizes that effective
communicative pronunciation competence can be achieved more though improving
supra-segmental production in preference to segmental. Lingking, intonation and
stress are important features for effective pronunciation at the suprasegmental
level (Burns,2003)
Segmental
Feature
According to
Seferoglu (2005), segmental aspects of the sound system include individual
vowels and consonants. Because segmental phonology is relatively more easily
explained and taught than supra-segmental features, some studies focus on
studying segmental phonology in preference to suprasegmental features.
Segmental features relate to sounds at the micro level. They include specific
sounds within words (for example, l as
in lamp, r as in ramp, a as in hat). The sounds system of consonant,
vowels or their combinations are called phonemes.
Phonemes are sounds that, when pronounced incorrectly, can change the
meaning of the word (Burns, 2003).
There
are seven goals that are very important for teaching
pronunciation (Gilakjani, 2012).
1.
Increased Pronunciation Research
Many teachers do not pay enough attention to pronunciation
instruction. L2 teachers are worried that they aren’t well prepared to teach
pronunciation, or even to incorporate some pronunciation activities into their
regular language classrooms. They feel as though they don’t know where to
start. This is where research comes in. Practical research can help teachers to
determine where to put the focus. They show that most of the phonological
changes that immigrants make in acquiring their L2 occur during the first year
in the L2 environment.
They have carried out a similar study with consonants and
consonant clusters in word-initial and word-final position and found that many
segments and combinations of segments did not require any intervention. These
are just a few examples to show that research does have something to contribute
to what teachers do in the classroom.
2.
Focus
on Developing Learners’ Communicative Competence
Communicative competence is the
aim of pronunciation teaching and learning. It stresses the need for meaningful
communicative tasks in the language classroom, including those that focus on
pronunciation. Pronunciation exercises that relate to daily use of English
include, for example, role-plays of requests that learners have to make (e.g.,
to ask a boss for a day off or to ask a bank teller to cash a check). Learners
can become careful listeners in their own conversations. It shows that learners
need exposure to conversations so they can hear variation in pronunciation. By
using audiotapes and videotapes, teachers can give learners meaningful exposure
to variation in pronunciation and increase their communicative competence.
3.
Focus on Pronunciation in Teacher Education
There have been many improvements in pronunciation instruction,
and others have published very useful resources for teachers. There are very
few TESL programs that offer a full course in teaching pronunciation. There are
TESL programs that have no requirement for even an introductory course in
linguistics, which is surprising indeed. In addition to initial training for
all ESL/EFL teachers, there is also a role for ongoing professional
development. Some studies show that many ESL/EFL teachers don’t feel
comfortable dealing with teaching pronunciation. An increased focus on
pronunciation should extend to classroom teachers as well, even though they are
not necessarily designated as language teachers.
While English is a stress-timed language, many other languages are
syllable-timed languages. English tends to stress one or two syllables and
pronounce the rest of the word or sentence. This means that English sounds are
often unclear to some speakers of other languages. Therefore, pronouncing
equally stressed words or sentences may increase students’ comprehension along
with adjusted speech rate. Teachers should be modeling accurate pronunciation,
not trying to imitate their L2 students by putting equal stress on every
syllable. Students should be able to communicate with other people in the
community. They need to hear which syllables have reduced vowels and which do
not.
4.
Focus on Intelligibility and Comprehensibility
The other goal is a focus on
intelligibility and comprehensibility, rather than accentedness. Accentedness is
a judgment of how much one’s speech differs phonologically from the local
variety. Intelligibility is the degree to which a listener understands a
speaker. Comprehensibility is a judgment of how easy or difficult an
individual’s pronunciation is to understand. In other words, accent is
difference, comprehensibility is effort, and intelligibility is actual
understanding.
The intelligibility principle is the basis of the other approach,
which holds that L2 speakers should be comfortably understandable. It published
an extensive study in Language Learning, in which they examined the
nativeness of nearly 200 individuals who spoke Swedish as a second language.
Spanish was the L1 of all the participants, who started learning Swedish
between the ages of 1 and 47 years. These people were chosen because they
self-identified as being native-like in Swedish and all were extremely high
proficiency. When compared to native speakers in a battery of tests, none of
the late learners (over the age of 11 when they started speaking Swedish) had
equivalent scores. Thus, despite their exceptional language skills, these high
proficiency L2 speakers were not comparable to native speakers.
5.
Focus on Methods and Materials Development
Gilakjani suggests that ESL teachers “need to be provided with
courses and materials to help them improve their effectiveness in teaching
pronunciation.” She adds that there is also a need for “high quality, effective
materials, especially computer-based materials with audio demonstrations, for
learners of ESL pronunciation, both for self-access and for use in classes
where the teacher needs support of this kind.” Teachers need a greater appreciation of the
pronunciation difficulties faced by learners of ESL and the reasons for these
difficulties, and a simple framework for understanding the situation of the
second language learner.
Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) for pronunciation can be an
effective tool as it “provides electronic visual feedback (EVF), which can help
meet this essential need by showing the exact sound features that learners
produce and thereby drawing attention to changes that they need to make.”
6.
Use of Useful Instructional Software
The next goal is to use more easy-to-use and useful instructional software.
There are some very good researchers who have worked with technology, and there
are some good programs, but nowhere near enough. Teachers have been encouraged
to use technology resources. It is necessary that more teacher-friendly
resources be developed. The key benefit of computer assisted pronunciation
training is that it can be individualized to the student’s needs.
Automatic speech recognition would give learners the feedback they
need, but unfortunately, it is unlikely to reach an accurate enough level for
some time. There are current technologies that have great promise for
opportunities to practice speaking comprehensibly with real listeners, but the
extent to which the average ESL/EFL teacher uses these resources to improve
pronunciation is a question in our mind.
7.
Focus on the Suprasegmentals
In the late 1970s, several teachers/theorists took a stand by
suggesting that at a very basic level if communicative competence was the goal
of language learning, then it would have as one of its essential components,
intelligible pronunciation. For this reason, intelligibility rather than the
native-like competence valued in traditional approaches became the goal of
phonological instruction. Therefore, teaching speech from the perspective of
suprasegmentals seems indispensable within the communicative approach to
teaching EFL.
Curriculum and syllabus designers need to focus on the
suprasegmental features of pronunciation. In making their case for emphasis in
teaching rhythm to ESL learners in China for example, discovered that Chinese
students were not aware of the difference between the rhythm of the
syllable-timed Chinese language and the stress timed English language and
therefore drawing their attention to this suprasegmental feature helped significantly
in improving their communicative ability. Recent approaches to teaching
pronunciation in computer-based contexts follow the communicative approach in
teaching pronunciation.
The
last, Goodwin doesn’t mention factors that affecting the learning of pronunciation.
The teaching and learning of
pronunciation have focused on the following issues: the importance of accent,
stress, intonation, and rhythm in the comprehensibility of the speech of
nonnative speakers; the effects of motivation and exposure on the development
of native-like pronunciation; and the intelligibility of speech among speakers
of different English varieties.
a.
Accent
An accent is “the cumulative auditory effect of those features of
pronunciation that identify where a person is from, regionally or socially”
b. Stress, Intonation, and Rhythm
For this reason, pronunciation research and teaching focus both on
the sounds of language (vowels and consonants) and on suprasegmental features-that
is, vocal effects that extend over more than one sound-such as stress, sentence
and word intonation, and speech rhythm
c.
Motivation
and Exposure
Along with age at acquisition of a language, the learner’s
motivation for learning the language and the cultural group that the learner
identifies and spends time with help determine whether the learner will develop
native-like pronunciation.
d.
Intelligibility
and Varieties of English
Because English has become an international language, teachers
need to keep in mind that their adult students will speak with both native and
nonnative English speakers outside of the classroom (e.g., a fellow student or
a boss at work may be a native speaker of Bengali, Spanish, or Vietnamese).
Jenkins’ seminal work (2000) on the phonology of English as an international
language. Jenkins (2002) calls these minimal features of pronunciation a
lingua franca core. Teachers of adults learning English should be aware that the
goal of improving pronunciation for many adult learners is mutual
intelligibility, not perfection.
C. CONCLUSION
Most teacher preparation programs can introduce some focus on L2
pronunciation issues and that pronunciation can be better incorporated into L2
curricula and better assessed. We are now at a point
where most L2 teachers recognize that there is nothing wrong with having an
accent, and that intelligibility and comprehensibility should be the goals of
L2 speakers, not native-like status. Technology is advancing and there is a key
role for virtual worlds and other sorts of practice opportunities informed by research.
There are always at least two people involved in real communication and both
sides should try to achieve communicative success, rather than putting all the
responsibility on the shoulders of the L2 speaker. Teachers in the field of
pronunciation teaching and research are the people best equipped to help L2
students. For those of us who teach at universities and colleges, we can start
with our own students. A major change in teachers’ attitudes towards
pronunciation instruction is indispensable and it is their job to speed up
change. By incorporating current research and its implications into their
teaching practice, teachers can help learners gain the skills they need for
effective communication in English. It must be borne in mind that teachers are
the models for their learners, so first of all they should have good
pronunciation; otherwise, they can harm their students.
References
Brown, H. D. (2007). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive
Approach to Language Pedagogy. (3rd ) Edition. White Plains, New
York: Pearson Education, Inc.
Burn, A. (2003). Clearly speaking: pronunciation in action for teachers. National
Center for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquaire Universiydney NSW
2109.
Gilakjani, P, A, A Study of Factors
Affecting EFL Learners’ English Pronunciation Learning and Strategies for
Instruction. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, Vol 2 No
3: February 2012.
Jenkins, J. (2002). A
sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for
English as an international language. Applied
Linguistics, 23,83-103.
Seferoglu,
G. (2005). Improving students’ pronunciation through accent reduction software.
British Journal of Educational
Technology, 36(3), 303-316.
