Dear Alex

The questions you ask (Can theory help teachers? Which theories can make a difference? Should teachers bother?) have some points in common with the ones that led me to produce a PhD thesis. It was entitled "The role of imitation in learning to pronounce" and argued that in two central areas - the learning of 'timing' patterns and the learning of speech sounds - children don't learn by copying what they hear in the speech of others.

That might sound a bit surprising, but there's no evidence whatsoever (not the tiniest scrap) that imitation is how children learn these things, and there's quite a lot of evidence against. In addition, alternative mechanisms exist and are much more plausible. There are details on my website - http://p.messum.googlepages.com/home - and SpeakOut! is going to publish a summary of what I think is actually going on, and what the practical implications are for teaching, later this summer.

(Incidentally, in the third central area  - learning patterns of intonation - I'm agnostic about the extent to which imitation is involved.)

So for me, any theory of pronunciation/phonetics/phonology which starts with the assumption that children learn these things by imitation is not going to be of any help to teachers because it will be based on a false premise.

Quite apart from this, but still on the subject of theory, there's the longstanding scandal of the IPA vowel quadrilateral, which uses labels which appear to be articulatory descriptions but which are actually understood by phoneticians to be acoustic labels. When I asked the audience at a PronSIG event about this a few years ago this was not appreciated at all. Everyone thought that the positioning of symbols on the diagram represents the significant/target positioning of the tongue for the vowel in question, which is not the case. (There's more about this in an article I wrote for SpeakOut! in 2002, including references to some articles by phoneticians that complain about this. My article can be downloaded from the website.)

Since phoneticians partly justify their position on the basis of the benefits their work brings to language teachers and speech & language therapists I don't think that 'scandal' is too unfair a characterisation of this state of affairs. These two groups of people need an articulatory model for their work, and phoneticians instead give them an acoustic model which very misleadingly looks like an articulatory one. I don't think that this is responsible at all.

This isn't intended to be a balanced reply to your question. I'm sure there's a case for the defence but I'll leave it to others to outline it.

With best wishes

Piers


--- In iatefl_pronsig@..., "pronsig_mod" <pronsig_mod@...> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone!
> The latest edition of TESOL Quarterly has a focus on the role of theory in TESOL in
> general. I find that pronunciation is the area with the most extreme division between
> theory and practice. Would it be fair so say that the majority of TESOL teachers have never
> read a phonetics or phonology textbook? Would it be fair to say that the majority of
> people who call themselves phonologists or phoneticians have never taught languages or
> at least haven't done so for a considerable number of years?
> Phonology has been the driving force behind linguistic theory, starting with the likes of
> Sweet, Vietor and Jespersen of the Reform Movement. Then Generative Linguistics began
> with Chomsky and Halle's analysis. Audio-lingual methods, at their most refined, were
> careful phonetic approaches to teaching language. Optimality theory began with analysis
> of sound, Labov's starting point was word pronunciation, and most recently views of
> language have asked us to take into account varieties of English with significant variation
> in their phonological make-up.
> And yet, what does any of that mean to the 'front line' teacher? It takes a lot of time to get
> to grips with all the theory behind pronunciation. Actually, it's more than that. You have to
> specialize. I've taken a fairly long trek into the field, but a fair amount of phonetics and
> phonology literature is still a blur of enigmatic graphs and weird notation to be honest.
> But then I see practical and simple exercises like using elastic bands to show long and
> short sounds and think they are nonsense.
> So, I was wondering what you all think. Can theory help teachers? Which theories can
> make a difference? Should teachers bother?
>
> Alex.
>