Hi Piers,

Sorry about the tabloid subject line - I just like stirring.

I was really interested by your post, and I've been studying your PhD over the
last week,
and won't say much more about it (except that it's a great read) until I've had
more of a
chance to digest it. It's meshed with a lot of the areas I've been looking at,
and my
experiences both as a teacher and learner of languages. I'm looking forward to
the
summary in Speak Out!.
At the moment, I'm not so convinced by your placing of Gattegno on a pedestal,
but I
haven't read much of his work nor experienced the techniques, so I'm staying
open.

The point you make about the 'vowel quadrilateral' is interesting. I remember
reading your
article on this a while back. I've never found that 'quad' useful in teaching,
yet it appears
in lots of books. I suppose the question is "what would a articulatory diagram
look like?"
or "how is such a complex physical 3D (4D?) system best represented for language
learners?"

You say that phoneticians justify their existence by their service to teachers
and speech
therapists, but I'm not sure that's the case. I've recently finished an MA - I
chose my
university on the basis on wanting somewhere which took a practical,
teaching/learning
approach to language. I decided against one very prestigious uni on the basis of
an
informal discussion with the head of the course "This course is about second
language
acquisition" I was told, "It has nothing to do with teaching."

One feeling I get from your post is (and please correct this!) "theory is good
if it's the right
theory". Of course practically speaking I can't disagree, but philosophically,
it's not very
satisfying!
There was an interesting discussion of pronunciation teaching on the Teacher
Education
and Development SIG site which (for me) highlighted how poorly pronunciation
teaching
research is reported and poorly phonetics/phonology findings are matched to
teaching
implications. Wild claims and leaps of logic seem to be the norm.
As a simplistic example:
1 - Teachers aren't well informed about the systems of intonation, nor how to
teach them.
2 - Attending classes does not seem to improve intonation.
3 - Therefore, intonation cannot be taught.
The nonsense of this logic hasn't stopped the argument from appearing in
numerous
books and articles.

By the way, thank you so much for having your PhD and other work so easily
available. I
think it's sad that there's such great post-grad research that is often
inaccessible. There's
a 'files' section on this discussion list. Would you (and anyone else) be
willing to upload
your research to make it available to members? (If anyone would like to upload,
please
contact me at my moderator email address).


Alex.


--- In iatefl_pronsig@..., "Piers Messum" <p.messum@...> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
>