Hello J. Murphy
I think you have been rather unlucky to meet so many teachers with so little knowledge. Having prior knowledge of linguistics and so, I feel, in some position to judge, I would say that the CELTA I attended some years ago now provided a good "introduction" to the world of pronunciation to my fellow trainees. I think the problem lies after that point, in that often the area gets forgotten about at the beginning of teacher practice (there are so many other more complicated things to grapple with such as grammatical nuances etc) and then very few have the time or inclination to go back to those "funny symbols" and reincorporate them into their classroom methodology. As the years roll by, a kind of fear creeps in and eventually a defensive rejection of the whole skill. This is how I have read the reactions of my colleagues who are excellent teachers in many other ways.
I'm a little worried about your dismissal of games in the classroom as "time wasting" as well......
And should the word "obfuscate" really appear in an email?
But perhaps I'm being flippant - I'm off on holiday this afternoon so in a rather non-academic mood!
Best regards
Anna
Anna Bernard
EFL Lecturer
Ecole Nationale de L'Aviation Civile
7, avenue Edouard Belin
BP 4005
31055 Toulouse CEDEX
Tel: 00 33 5 62 17 41 15
| "pronsig_mod"
<pronsig_mod@...>
Envoyé par : iatefl_pronsig@... 16/07/2008 14:23
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Hi J.Murphy,
You sent your message to the Moderator e-mail, rather than posting it on the site, so I'm
copy-pasting it across.
To respond to posts, click on 'reply' at the top left of the post, then 'send message' at the
top right. To post new topics, use 'post' in the left-hand bar.
Cheers,
Alex.
Hello
I am a relatively new English language instructor in Bangkok Thailand working at the
post-secondary level with, supposedly the best students in the country. The statement
posted by Alex re: instructors lack of relevant instruction in the basics of both phonetics
and the rules of phonology -even just English phonology- is a propos and somewhat
shocking. Yet as any instructor in Thailand can attest, most non-bilingual Thai speakers
of English are utterly confused about basic rules of English pronunciation e.g. stress and
rhythm (weak forms; heavy or light syllables;word;foot) and seem to expect their native
speaking language instructors to know such details of their own language.
In my brief time teaching here, I have encountered 0 native English speaking language
instructors who can even decipher the standard IPA symbols for their own variety of
English. The TEFL certification courses offered by fly-by- night 'institutes' and more
reputable schools, including ALL CELTA courses and others (I have seen the curriculum for
these courses and spoken to their 'graduates' and many of the instructors) offer
obfuscation, falsehoods and frankly more misinformation than any rational person should
be expected to consume.
A standard Linguistics 100 course, as offered in almost every western university, would
provide an antidote to this sorry state of affairs. So here's a thought.
Why not require a basic education in the 4 fundamentals of descriptive and analytical
linguistics - phonetics; phonology (do you know the difference between the two?); syntax;
morphology- plus one course in language acquisition so these language instructors might
at least have basic tools to understand and explain the phenomena of their own and all
language to unsuspecting learners of English? Seems like a simple task to accomplish, not
a mountain to move. By requiring such a basic education of English instructors BEFORE
entry into the profession, many of the glaring language knowledge deficiencies of English
instructors could be avoided. Also, this shift to a slightly, not much, but slightly more
scientific approach to language education for teachers of language would entail throwing
out most if not all the theory and advice from the field of so-called 'applied linguistics'
which as anyone with an education in linguistics can tell you, is a gross misnomer if ever
there was one. Such absurdities as 'multiple intelligences (sic)' would be seen clearly as
the hogwash that they are.
As for phoneticians being out of touch with teaching, that need not be the case. Perhaps
most researchers in academic phonetics are simply too busy in their own(more interesting)
field and with the duties of their academic posts to be concerned with TESL. And the truth
is, it takes very little knowledge of phonetics to make a difference in instructors' relevant
knowledge base. A Phd in phonetics is definitely not necessary.
One or two undergraduate courses in phonetics would suffice to bring most instructors
level of awareness of acoustic phenomena well beyond the point necessary to make a
difference to the ESL classroom.
So, there you have it. No need for elastic bands, or other time-wasting games and
'activities' in the classroom. Imparting real relevant knowledge need not be a fear inducing
endeavour. Destigmatizing the importance of linguistics in the field of TEFL would be a
good starting point to re-educating all those struggling and somewhat
delusional("teaching pronunciation is a waste of time") practitioners in the field.
J. Murphy
--- 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.
> >
>
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