More chirpy remarks (November & December 2016)

Hello! Doing some proper writing is really tough these days, so here's an update of my latest rambles on pronunciation issues and accents while on the go. Enjoy!

Workshop report: "Pronunciation Matters (?)" - Uni of York, Dec 7th

Today I was really lucky to get to attend a fantastic workshop/talk on pronunciation at my Uni called "Pronunciation Matters (?)", delivered by Prof. Sam Hellmuth. I was really eager to attend because I had the chance of auditing Prof. Hellmuth's classes this term and I can attest to her great knowledge, experience and teaching skills (and many of you know I am not easy when it comes to praising people!).

Below you will find a short account of the talk in my usual colloquial style and in one sitting (so sorry about any potential typos!). As I always say, any misunderstanding of the content presented is my own fault, and evaluative comments on the presentation are attributable to me alone (unless explicitly attributed to someone else!).

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The session began with Sam's exploration of her journey from being a learner of Arabic -and a few embarrasing moments of her own- to becoming a teacher. This first anecdote lead to questions regarding pronunciation goals and how we can measure pronunciation gain, issues which were discused during the presentation by the presenter and the participants (as there a few slots for group discussion, which was really exciting!). (BTW, if you want to learn more about pronunciation goals and the complexity behind their selection, you can always go back to my early 2015 blog posts: here and here)

The first group discussion already triggered those heated pron-teaching-related discussions we are all familiar with: accentedness vs intelligibility, the difficulties in defining intelligibility, what accents we should teach, what accents learners want to learn...After the discussions, Sam also mentioned some well-known references in the EFL and ELF worlds, such as the paper on L2 accent and credibility issues, and accent discrimination problems in the US in the job market, among other things.

The following step in the presentation included a quick review of studies on three forms of "pronunciation gain measure": (foreign) accentedness, intelligibility, comprehensibility (these terms have been widely defined in the papers and books by Derwing and Munro if you need to trace them back, more currently discussed in the 2015 Pronunciation Fundamentals book, which guides some of the discussion by Sam Hellmuth in this lit review). There was a very interesting overview of different research findings which could potentially point to interesting teaching priorities, which I will try to summarise below:

• accentedness, that is, the "perception of how different the accent in question is to the L1 accent used as reference" was highly dependent on suprasegmentals, though of course segmentals also play a part (Anderson-Hieh et al 1992)
• Quick detour! Here's a fun fact that Sam presented: an accent can be even detected in speech recordings played backwards, according to Munro et al 2013 (which could be attributed to voice quality, or in my view, to base of articulation)
• intelligibility, that is, "the extent to which someone understands whath was said", is not dependent necessarily on levels of accentedness. That is, a native-like accent does not necessarily make an intelligible accent. Suprasegmentals appear to have a diminished role in ensuring intelligibility according to the studies by Munro and Derwing (1999) and others. (I have my objections here, as usual...but they would need a whole post)
• comprehensibility, in other words, "the listener's perception of how difficult it is to understand an utterance", can also be affected by prosodic choices.
• An alternative measure could be that of fluency, but it was not planned as part of this presentation (and I agree, it does deserve a presentation of its own!).

Consequently, these variables can be affected by different types of "pronunciation errors" and carry important teaching implications regarding goals, and the teaching of segmental and suprasegmentals.

Another quick reference was made to the (in)famous Critical Period Hypothesis and the findings by Munro and Mann (2005) stating that it is possible to improve your pronunciation after puberty (which, to be fair, is what most of my teacher trainees and myself have done! We ought to consider ourselves heroic!?). (BTW, more on the CPH and pronunciation in my review of Linda Grant's "Pronunciation Myths" book here). This could be seen as part of the "good news" regarding pronunciation improvement.

A very interesting comparison ensued, between two possible selections of features to teach when it comes to pronunciation:

Fraser (2001)	Jenkins (2000)
> NS hearer 1.     word and sentence stress 2.     syllable structure (phonotatictics) 3.     vowel length distinctions 4.     major consonant distinctions 5.     vowel quality distinction (those with a high functional load) 6. minor consonant distinctions (those with a low functional load).	>NNS hearer 1.     consonant inventory 2.     some phonetic detail 3.     consonant clusters 4.     vowels 5.sentence stress (especially for contrast)

 Note: Jenkins' proposal is described in more detail in the ELF blog: https://elfpron.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/what-is-the-lfc/

A brief explanation of functional load followed, together with some comments on possible criticism to current teaching materials that place too much emphasis on contrasts like /ð,θ/ which have a low functional load in English. And here I need to input my own voice: I agree entirely with this point, but I think the problem is not the inclusion of this pair as part of the materials, but the actual grouping of features. I completely understand the fact that these two sounds are articulatorily similar and differing in voice, BUT I think a more teaching-friendly approach would present this sound together with those that may bring trouble for learners, such as /d/ vs /ð/ or /s/ vs /θ/ for Spanish speaking learners of English, for example.

Finally, in this lit review, some of the most interesting bits appeared: the discussion of how possible ways as to how we can actually measure pronunciation gain, and what different bits of research have found.

• Saito (2013) has reported that training phonetic perception may be a way of improving in production, which is a claim that has been also tested in other previous studies in other languages. (BTW, if you want to read my report on a talk by Saito earlier this term, click here).
• The Beginner Language Learner Survey conduected in June 2014 with learners of German at the Uni of York compared students' answers regarding their feelings when it comes to pronunciation: native speakers of English learning German valued comprehensibility more over intelligibility and accentedness, though the three of them were rated high. Those learners of German whose L1 was not English valued intellibility more highly over accentedness (with quite a low rating in comparison) and comprehensibility.
• A very interesting piece of research by Sam Hellmuth and Florence Edwards compared learners' accentedness ratings to establish whether pronunciation improvement could be due to their "year abroad" experience or to individual cognitive abilities. The data, which included a questionnaire regarding their "learning context factors" (age of acquisition of L2, experience abroad, motivation for a native-like accent, etc), and the results of a non-word repetition task (Gupta,2003) pointed at very interesting findings: students who appear to have been graded as more native-like are in fact those who have a better "phonological working memory" (PWM), the ability to retain phonetic detail in your mind and reproduce it.  These were presented as the "bad news", since the "year abroad" experience did not necessarily lead to a more native-like accent, and this would relegate accentedness achievements only to the "gifted". However...
• a second study, this time on "stress deafness", implies that there are many things that can be learned and taught, and that the phonological working memory can be trained, and that the knowledge of other languages is really beneficial when it comes to pronunciation matters. This other study was initially done for French by Dupoux et al (2007) and it was replicated by by Bethany White (2013 graduate), and it tested native English speakers' perception of stress in English, Spanish and Japanese non-words. In short, the results revealed that students had a lot of trouble in the "sequence recall task"  (retrieval task of strings of words with different stress patterns and a final "OK" which blocked access to acoustic memory), and those students who had some knowledge of Spanish did slightly better for Japanese. This study also established that in fact stress "deafness" in another language is a phonetic "business", as lack of reduction (lack of schwa) was a defining factor in those who had trouble identifying stress in Spanish and Japanese. (I have to admit I chickened out of asking this because I may have been entirely wrong, but as we listened to some of the non-words which were supposed to be controlled for intensity and pitch changes, I could not help noticing that the Japanese renderings did show some pitch difference across syllables (naturally!?) and I myself believe this can also affect perception, for obvious reasons. But I did not ask at the time, so treat this as just a fleeting impression!). This study has interesting implications for teaching, at least for English speakers learning another language, since it can be used to redefine the teaching of stress by actually helping students to tune in to phonetic features over stress rules, at least for perception purposes. And this also supports the tenets of those models of second language learning based on inhibition of first language perception (Darcy et al 2015, for example)

Even though it was a very short session (time did fly by! I wanted more!), a lot of very interesting comments, findings and debates cropped up. Once again, this shows how "hot" pronunciation is as a topic (in all possible senses!), how much research is still needed, and on a personal note, how I wish all the work being done in Argentina could get researched on and published, as we have so much to say on pronunciation teaching, and so very little reported.

Course report: Managing your Voice

Those of you who have been students of mine will know that as a pronunciation trainer I got very serious when it came to voice care. Working on pronunciation requires working on your voice (and of course, finding your L2 voice): stretching your pitch range, finding new articulations, and thus, new "resonances", etc. At times, for some people, this may result in strain, and that is when we need to intervene. We are not speech therapists, but we have the duty to tell students when we feel there is something that needs to be seen to by a professional. And as we are (well, I was) training teachers, I think it becomes all the more important that we train our students on ways in which they can take care of and manage their voice in a healthy manner. Denying that voice care is part of our job, is, in my very humble opinion, a serious neglect. I have seen far too many colleagues and students get serious vocal trouble, and I would not want to see this happening to more teachers.

I personally underwent some training at the Instituto de la Voz in Buenos Aires (I am so grateful to Carlos Demartino and Fga. Liliana Flores, they saved my voice!), because I needed to take care of my own (at the time, "decaying") voice, and then I felt I was responsible for passing this on to my students. I had an opportunity yesterday, here at York, of reviewing some of my training and doing a bit more in a short course called "Managing your Voice", delivered by the two most fantastic facilitators I have met lately, David Howard and Francis Newton.

So in the next few paragraphs, I'll be sharing some of their "tips and tricks" with you. (I don't have access to the slides, so I will have to describe them for you, I am afraid!)

The course began with a lecture. David Howard is an engineer (who actually also trained in UCL with Gimson!) and gave a very interesting review of the organs of speech. What made it fascinating is that the description was made in both biological and engineering terms. So alongside the diagram we are all familiar with, he included one that showed fabulous representations of the diaphragm as a piston, the intercostal muscles as a bellows. He discussed the whole phonatory and articulatory process in the three stages, according to activity: the power source, the sound source, and the sound modifiers. With the help of some videos and some gadgets (pic below!), David showed how the whole mechanism works.

Through some eletroglottograph (EGG) recordings, the facilitator showed us the "noise" the vocal folds make before they are amplified and turned into specific sounds. He recorded members of his choir, and we heard their "singing" through the EGG output. It was fab!

I was particularly interested in the description of vowels, because in my previous training at IV I had also found the treatment of vowels by speech therapists quite surprising. At times when we describe vowels in articulatory terms in our phonetics courses we focus on tongue raising and lowering,  and of course, what part of the tongue is involved. For speech therapists and speech science in general, the focus is also on the areas of resonance within the mouth cavity that result from tongue movement, which is why for a vowel like /iː/ it is not just the front tongue raising that interests us, but also the resulting space in the back area . David showed vowel production and resonance with the use of an electrolarynx and two tubes that had already been set with three spaces of resonance for Japanese vowels [i] and [a]. (Of course, after the course I just had to get into eBay and see whether these were available!)

Elecrolarynx and the oral cavity tubes. The elecrolaryx would send air into the tubes and these would produce vowels! 

This is David's demonstration of an electrolarynx and the tubes:

After the theoretical presentation, we had our practical session with Francis. Some of the highlights are described below:

• Dos and Don'ts (applicable 1-2 hours before performing/teaching/lecturing):
• Don't drink: coffee or black tea (astringents), alcohol, fizzy drinks or coke
• Don't eat: chocolate and banana (high levels of fat, cannot be "washed off" easily with water, you need acid, like lemon, to do so), dairy products
• Don't shout: in difficult spaces with bad acoustics, just choose your spot and make sure there is more space in your mouth, overarticulate if necessary. It will make a great difference!
• Dooo drink: lots of water, herbal teas.
• Posture:
• you need to make sure your neck stands high and tall but you should look forward, not up or down;
• you need to stand straight, as a "Frankfurt sausage" (ha!), finding your posture by standing on tiptoe and making sure the golden thread that goes from your head to the floor acts like your axis.
• you need to make sure your shoulders are not "crouched", so you should try to act as if you were wearing a "Bolero jacket" (that is quite high at the back) and you needed to bring the back of it down.
• (sorry about this one!) in order to make sure your belly comes out (yes, ladies, essential, sorry to say!) and your diaphragm has enough room to do its job, you have to imagine you are holding a lemon between your butt cheeks (of course, we just had to laugh!).
• Exercises:
• going from a normal [a] sound very softly towards your creaky/frying quality helps you feel and somehow massage your vocal folds;
• to check your that you are breathing properly, and to see how the diaphragm, intercostal muscles, and belly work, you can try very energetic sequences of [fːtʰ], with the plosive halting the /f/ really strongly. You should keep a hand just above your belly navel to check this.

At the end of the course, we were asked to introduce ourselves briefly, and we received some feedback on our speech, posture, and presentation skills.

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As teachers, our voice is our most precious treasure. We need to be systematic in our vocal exercises, before and after using our voice for a long time. Dr. Howard reminded us that over the course of one day, a teacher will have made her vocal folds vibrate over a million times (imagine getting other muscles of your body to move that much in just 8 hours!). So always keep your water at hand, work on your posture, make sure you feel grounded to the floor, and be kind to yourself.

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Some extra tips I've learned at Instituto de la Voz:

• To avoid clearing your throat or coughing (both could be really damaging to your vocal folds, if you need to cough, do so gently), you can produce a continuous alveolar trill [r] for a few seconds (easy for us, Spanish speakers!)
• you can massage your larynx area gently with your thumb and index finger, going in circles.
• you can create more space in your mouth by making sure your tongue has got enough tonicity. Stretch your tongue out (as dogs do when they yawn), to the front and to the sides.
• Yawn!

This week's "Chirpy Remarks"

Hiya! I am finding it increasingly difficult to do any writing these days, as I'm terribly busy (believe me, being a student full-time is quite heavy!). But then, my mind still strays in the "pronunciation teaching" sphere every now and then (though someone told me today "that's not who you are anymore", and I have to come to terms with that), and I needed to voice some thoughts, so I decided to make the most of my 8 am morning walk to Uni to do some recording. These audio files are noisy and are not very cohesive, but they do serve as a sort of "diary" for my thoughts on pronunciation teaching, and how different classes, discussions and papers make me see my "past life" in a different light.

So here's the summary this week's early morning, out-of-breath but really passionate "chirpy remarks".

Podcast-y post: Pronunciation, embarrassment and fun: reflections on my first month in the UK

Note:My mention of the fricative and its frequency refers to the possible affrication of /d/ I may have produced (Sorry!).

Event Report: PronSIG's Different Voices - University of Brighton

Yesterday I travelled some 500 km to the lovely University of Brighton to attend and present at PronSIG's "Different Voices" event. It was a great opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues and also to see how pronunciation teaching is "handled" in other parts of the world.

Here's my report on the talks I had the chance of watching (as usual, any misrepresentation of the information here is entirely my fault, and evaluative comments are entirely my own). The full programme is available here, and the live-tweeting/facebooking, here and here. (Otherwise, you can check the storified version of all tweets at the bottom of this post)

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The opening plenary was by John Wells. His talk, "Don't be frightened of intonation!" was a brief review of the some of the content and examples in his 2006 intonation book, so to us, many things looked pretty familiar, but there were some people in the audience scribbling non-stop on their handouts, so there was a lot of new content for some attendees. Wells' presentation started with a discussion of what systems of intonation could be said to be universal, and which, language-specific. Among the first, tonality was included (perhaps I will not entirely agree that it is wholly universal, myself, but then, I don't know as many languages as Prof. Wells does!) and then tone was considered to be partly language-specific, partly universal. A large focus of the talk was on tonicity, and there were cases of broad and narrow focus, contrastive focus, event sentences (which Wells called "events and disasters" ;)  ) and some intonational idioms. Regarding tone, Wells reviewed the typical fall vs rise distinctions and their associated typical grammatical contexts (statements, pardon questions) and the implicational meanings of the fall-rise. There was also a mention of major vs minor information (instead of using his reference to trailing and dependent tones), which somehow reminded me of Tench (1996). I think the best tip given was the importance of teaching tonicity through deaccentuation rules. At least for Spanish learners, this is essential!

The second slot was made up of two smaller sessions. I attended Michael Vaughan Rees' "The do it yourself tongue twister kit", which was a truly entertaining and creative workshop on alliteration and rhythm that included a competition and even a final group chant jazz session!. We had fun building rhythmic and alliterative verses based on the idea of "X bought Y", (X=name; Y=product, and the verb "bought" could also be replaced by an alliterative synonym or other verb). Such a simple verse, and so versatile!
BTW, I personally love Michael's book "Rhymes and Rhythm", and I fully recommend it to teach aspects of connected speech.

The next session was by the wonderful Richard Cauldwell. On this occasion, Richard reviewed the use of the software Sonocent's Audio Notetaker to train students for oral examinations and presentations. Through the software, different chunks of audio were colour-coded according to the criteria selected (the choice of tone, for example) and feedback was added to students' recordings. Cauldwell demonstrated how a textbook unit can also be presented in AN, on a single page made up of the combination of text, video, image and the audio panels (this looked like a particularly attractive idea for materials design!). I particularly love Richard's ability to make complex ideas so simple, and the use of metaphors is certainly one of his greatest achievements: the idea of "mountainous" speech (using rises and fall rises, chunking appropriately) vs the flat monotone"valleys" many learners engage into in their reading or speaking activities. Richard specified that his goal was to help students make their speech "listenable" without perhaps going a bit deeper into rules of intonation which could make the speech predictable, but not necessarily "listenable". This last bit reminded me of many of my teacher trainees who were somehow "overadapted" to intonation rules, and overapplied the same patterns in their speech, devoid of all expression and meaning (and I am not talking oblique orientation here, I mean the fall-rise + fall pattern trap, the continuous use of the same pattern over and over again!). At times the overapplication of rules does make machines of us, and we forget about expression, about making words mean....
Richard's handout is available here.

After lunch, we were all looking forward to the always great Adrian Underhill and his very unusual presentation title "...somewhere in the air, floating, not reachable...", based on a lovely piece of reflection Adrian received as feedback after one of his training courses. This is a very difficult presentation to describe, because it was all about proprioception. It is one of those things that you need to film and watch and try over and over again. Just a few highlights that I feel I can communicate in writing:
Underhill's premise is always the same, and it gets more and more real and clear with every presentation I see: we have to take pronunciation out of the mind, and into the body, pronunciation is an "embodied" thing, and a greater part of this is about developing propioception, "the inner sensing of what the muscles are doing, and how much pressure is being applied". Underhill claims that many teachers fail to help students with their pronunciation because they are not aware, physically speaking, of what is going on in their mouths, and they just try to refer back to their books.
We tried a number of metaphors for different parts of the mouth (trees, sky, marshes...), we reviewed the four "buttons" (lips, tongue, jaws, glottis), we tried word choreographies and different speeds and voice qualities that enabled us to feel articulation of words, connected speech as it were, in different ways. We were also invited to try different sound discovery sequences, looking at how one sound can help us discover the others.
I am sorry I cannot do justice to this presentaion, but I guess it's one of those things that need to be "experienced". Some of the pics of the slides will at least give you an idea of the different propioception prep we tried together:

I was up next, discussing some ideas on "pron-tegration". Since I will not be making this presentation any more (and I wonder if there will be more pronunciation teaching presos from me in the future, given my current teaching-less status! *cries a little*), I am sharing my slides with you here (those of you attending my talks for E-Teaching Online and UNSAM will probably recognise some of the proposed activities):

Cantarutti prontegration finaldraft_blog_PronSIG2016 from PronunciationBites

Liam Tyrrell was in charge of the last concurrent session. He discussed "attitudinal intonation" and the challenges that teachers find when trying to teach intonation for attitude, the sort of  reasons behind this "benign neglect". There was a mention of some current and previous literature on intonational descriptions, and how difficult these appear to be when it comes to applying the concepts to practice, and a few remarks on how pitch range is different in different cultures, which makes an intercultural class even harder to teach in this respect. An interesting discussion ensued after the presentation, regarding all the aspects that pertain to intonation, and to whether certain things can, or should be taught, not only in terms of production, but also in terms of being able to read pragmatic meaning (sarcasm, for instance).
My personal take on this is that intonation can be taught, that there are underlying rules, and thus, it is not erratic (otherwise we would not be able to recognise meanings, I believe), but then there is also a lot of variation in the choices made (as with all other linguistic systems!). So I guess there is a standard "intonational toolkit" of meanings that can be generalised, applications that can be made to be "safe", and others, which will definitely depend on context, and on genre. We cannot teach intonation outside genre, outside context, and I believe that is one of the great "sins" in intonation teaching, the presentation of de-contextualised examples that apply as generalisations. (One of the reasons I am doing this PhD, by the way, is precisely to overcome those limitations. Anyway, this has become a very long personal detour!)

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All in all, it was a lovely meeting of pron-thusiasts and experts, in a beautiful setting (the Falmer campus is really something!), in an atmosphere of genuine attempts to share in our passion for pronunciation teaching.


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Colloquium report #1: Researching, Learning and Training Late Second Language Speech', by Kazuya Saito

Hi, there! I've been looking for excuses to blog before my read-load and write-load become bigger than they already are, and I have found one! Every Wednesday, one of my Departments (yes, I am member of both the Language and Linguistics and the Education departments) has a colloquium, and today's talk was highly relevant to us, pron-lovers.

Kazuya Saito, from Birbeck Uni in London, has presented the results of his research on late L2 acquisition. "Late" acquirers would be those individuals who start learning a second language after puberty, here defined as people aged 16 onwards. His study involved Japanese speakers in their late teens and adults who had settled in Canada.

Find my (informal) report on the event below, with a few of my own comments, of course. (The usual disclaimer: all misinterpretations or misrepresentations of the info presented are my own)

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The talk began by reviewing two well-known models of L1 and L2 acquisition (or actually, "learning"? That is a whole separate debate....): the Speech Learning Model (SLM) by Flege (1993, 003, 2009), and the Critical Period Hypothesis (for this, Saito quotes Abrahamsson 2012, DeKeyser 2013, but the CPH dates from much earlier). Saito claims that these theories trigger different predictions as to what could happen to late learners.

The SPM would predict that enough exposure ("experience effects") to L2 will help learners to invoke those speech learning abilities that we applied for our L1, so age will have an effect on their ultimate level attainment, and so will the length of residence in a foreign country. The CPH, on the other hand, predicts that near nativelikeness is not attainable after puberty, which would affect late learners, and it also establishes that the skills employed for the learning of a second language involve general cognition -that is, explicit and intentional processes - rather than the explicit and incidental language-specific processes. (This latter point, I think, is very, very important when it comes to favouring explicit pronunciation instruction. However, the role of explicit pronunciation instruction was somehow argued against -or downplayed- in this presentation). In other words, for the CPH, the effects of the length of residence will also be limited.

This lit review finished with references to conflicting results in studies related to the effect of length of residence and age (mental note: go back to Linda Grant's (2014) edited volume for examples!). There was also a reference to something that is highlighted in other studies I have read, the role of motivation and aptitude as well in determining the levels of ultimate attainment. What is more, the presenter made some slight criticism to the methods employed in some of the studies, as they focused on native speaker evaluation of accents globally. Thus, Saito's "niche" lies in the focus on one specific pronunciation feature: the Japanese flap [ɾ] vs English /r/. (Two comments: I have used /r/ for the English version because it was not very clear to me whether the target was an actual retroflex approximant [ɻ], or the alveolar [ɹ] one. And for the Japanese sound, the alveolar tap symbol was used, but in the speaker's description, I often wondered if it was not the alveolar lateral flap [ɺ] that was referred to. The Handbook of the IPA says that for Japanese it's [ɽ], actually, so I should have asked! ).

The difficulties that Japanese speakers face when it comes to English /r/ are threefold: two of these are related to adjusting cues already present in Japanese: the retraction of the tongue body -shown as the lowering of F2 values, acoustically speaking -(which is why I guess the target /r/ is a retroflex, perhaps) and the prolongation of length/duration; whereas the new feature for these learners would be  the presence of labial, alveolar and pharyngeal constructions, manifested acoustically in the lowering of F3.

The study was aimed at discovering some patterns in terms of the effect of AOA (age of acquisition) and LOR (length of residence), and it involved a number of Japanese people who had moved to Canada after they had turned 16, and most of them had only had instruction in English at school -using a Grammar Translation method, according to the presenter-. They have all been described as being "highly motivated" to attain a high level of English because of their need to communicate. The experiment consisted of testing the subjects' production of English /r/ in a picture-description spontaneous production task (adapted from Munro and Mann, 2007). In all the pictures there were target words with /r/, and in order to make sure participants were tested in a more spontaneous situation, the first 3 descriptions were presented as being "for practice", and the other four were used for the test.

The results of the study revealed the following:

• In terms of tongue retraction, most participants improved over their first six months of residence, and after that period, in this respect, their performance was deemed native-like.
• As for duration, the correlations were significant after 12 months of residence.
• When it came to the development of the new parameters (F3), levels of attainment were diverse and late acquirers were definitely at a disadvantage (only those moving to Canada before the age of 20 achieved better results in this study), but definitive changes were seen after 10 years of residence (!).

(Very interesting!)

Some implications for teaching were mentioned later. (I have to admit that this is perhaps where I would disagree the most, but it is true that I have worked in non-immersion contexts, and things are definitely different there). Based on these results, Saito contended that an effective tool is the use of contextualised instruction over explicit instruction of the target sound. Some of the activities mentioned included the use of prompted discussion and role plays with target words that were corrected on the spot. Some included /l,r/ minimal pairs, others did not. The testing of these activities after training students for 4 hours in two weeks rendered an improvement in students' /r/ sounds from 60% to 75%. (Plus, the "shock effect" of constant correction cannot, of course, be underrated, if these are highly motivated students!) In my view, explicit pronunciation instruction (because of the employment of these cognitive procedures mentioned earlier) is necessary to help create these new articulatory habits. I do, however, strongly make a case for contextualised and communicative pronunciation work, but not as the entry point to learn the sounds, but to make explicit instruction somehow transferrable to more spontaneous contexts (and this is, after all, the end result that Saito was seeking).

There were some very brief, but interesting questions. The issue of U-shaped learning and plateaus that is described in some psycholinguistic theories (if I remember correctly, Major's Ontogeny model, for example?) was brought up, inviting in a way the exploration of a more diachronic study of the same subjects. Another issue mentioned is whether a similar effect would be reached for the training of VOT as a low functional load feature, which was considered non-distinctive (well, I may have disagree with that, I believe that both VOT and vowel length can be distinctive in native-speaker's ears, no matter their allophonic status!).

All in all, it was a very interesting and thought-provoking talk with many implications for pronunciation teaching, both in immersion and other ESOL contexts. And a confession: at first, I was doubtful about attending a talk about Japanese, but I have to admit this whole uni experience has really widened my horizons to all the beauty and human and cultural wealth there is in this world.

A podcast-y ramble: My first week in the UK

The only permanent thing is change

"The only permanent thing is change", they say. And even though my life has changed to different degrees in these last 15 years as a teacher, at times things change a bit more drastically.

If you have been reading me, you will probably know that I am an Argentinian EFL teacher, lecturer in Practical Phonetics and teacher trainer in Buenos Aires. This is the life I chose for myself many years ago, and after years of hard work and relentless study (and yes, at times a little bit of luck...), I have little by little been able to attain different teaching posts. I can't really say how grateful I am for this decade of pronunciation teaching. I have learned so much from lesson planning, and grading, and first and foremost, from my students, and my success and failure while accompanying their process. 

But today, a new challenge awaits. I envisaged a new life for me, because I think I don't know enough (to my own standards, that is) about phonetics, conversation, pragmatics and communication in general, and I want to learn more; I have this thirst to continue improving on  my understanding of English phonetics to be able to put all my intuitions and hunches in line. And I had to be honest with myself and tell myself that perhaps I was not going to find all that knowledge and all those resources I needed close by. So I made a bet, a sort of dream investment, a couple of years ago. And today, I can say I have achieved a new dream, the beginning of a new dream.

I will temporarily stop being a teacher (well, working as a teacher, because..."once a teacher always a teacher"!) to become a full-time PhD student. And I will be leaving my beloved country for some time, where English is my classroom-only language, to move to a place where I will be probably only use English, from dawn till dusk. And yes, Pronunciation Bites will perhaps change as well. It will may become a log of personal stories of social failure with my apparently posh English, or a blog of observation of different accents of English, a set of reflections on things worth teaching, and who knows what else may become blogging-worthy!

I am so grateful to all the people who have taught me so much in Argentina, in direct and indirect ways. I learned tons from both confrontation meetings and coffee sessions with colleagues and friends; I learned a lot from master classes and from words in passing; from books and from behaviour; from gossip and from advice. I am grateful to my friends, my students, my colleagues and the administrative staff at each and every place I've taught or studied at. I am also grateful to all those people I cannot, sadly, take as role models. I have been infused with ideas of who I want and I don't want to be from each and every person I've encountered, and each and every situation I've had to face, and I am deeply grateful for that.

I won't lie. I find this new experience equally scary and fascinating. I can't wait to embrace the world of learning that awaits. I can't wait to start a life of having almost nothing, of giving up on so many things I've achieved and collected over the years, to humbly get into this "you know nothing, Jon Snow" type of state. I may succeed, or I may fail miserably. But I will try to keep this space open, because I believe in sharing and  because I will always be a teacher, and think like a teacher, and live like one, and most importantly, because pronunciation is, and will always be, my passion.

Brief Briefing on IV Jornadas de la Didáctica de la Fonética - UNSAM

Hello! Today I got the chance to take part, for the fourth time, in the Jornadas de Didáctica de la Fonética, which will from now be named after the wonderful Clem Durán. This conference in pronunciation teaching is held every two years at Universidad Nacional de San Martín. 

Due to personal reasons I will not be able to make it to the second day, so I wanted to briefly comment on some of the things I found interesting about today's activities.

In the ! morning plenary, Prof. María Emilia Pandolfi discussed some interesting priorities and areas that need attention when training Argentinian opera singers to perform in Italian. Some lovely audio samples were presented. I personally think the world of coaching in Phonetics formsingers, radio speakers and actors is something worth hearing further about. (And yes, Italian is sooo enticing and melodious to my ears..😍)

Prof. Adriana Boffi made a deeply thought-provoking analysis of oral exam descriptors, comparing English and Spanish assessment standards and discussing the underlying beliefs and (my take here) ideological underpinnings behind some lexical choices in he rubrics. Boffi made a point of all the different aspects that constitute a person's "pronunciation" and how difficult it is to establish clear boundaries and bands for assessment.  Issues related to the interlocutor's "effort" in trying to understand, intelligibility and identity were reviewed and problematised, and the role of intonation as a key element in the presentation of pragmatic meanings was highlighted. 

In the afternoon panel there was a historical and sociolinguistic review on the vicissitudes in the selection of a teaching variety for pronunciation (this reflection centered around Portuguese, but works for all languages!) by Prof  Nélida Sosa. Prof. Luiz Roos, in his own entertaining style, presented some reflections on the difference between "mistakes" and "errors" and the practice of correction to learn vs correction to assess. I had my own 15 minutes to make a brief, informal, exploration of ideas and principles in "pron-tegration" (BTW, I have to admit I am no longer a reliable speaker of Spanish..sadly...)

I was in charge of moderation of one of the concurrent sessions slot , so I was lucky to hear the presentation of five very diverse papers:

Esquibel, Eliana, Gordillo, Germán yRomán, Sandra (UNLaR) 
discussed their innovative experience in analytic listening (Ashby 1996) applied to intonation training -to tone perception, in particular- so as to enhance tone production alongside it. I myself think that a multiple choice task of the kind they suggest does help restrict the number of distractors for tone perception (which is why in the last two years I have replaced the regular dictation amd decoding tasks with other ear-training activities...worth another post!)

Peréz, Liliana(UNCuyo) made a literature review of the comparison between the processes and strategies involved in reading aloud vs reading silently. A case for reading aloud in the Phonetics class was put forward, after weighting down advantages and disadvantages.

Grasso, Marina y Martino, Daniela Lorena (UNLP) (lovely accents, in my view, btw!) made a very interesting report of the kind of work they do with third year teacher training students at university. Trainees are asked to record a lesson and provide an account of the prosodic choices associated with Teacher Talk based on the model by Sinclair and Brazil (1982, and others). On a personal note, I was looking forward to this presentation, as I've been working with classroom discourse in my Lab 3 and 4 courses for a couple of years, and to see how effective and significant this kind of work is, in all these different institutions, makes me believe we can find a way out of intonation L1 transfer by making use of our student's own working context ( yes, in my country most teacher trainees have already got a lot of teaching experience!). My own students admitted that the Teacher Talk unit in the syllabus is one of the few contents with immediate application outside College, into the real classroom (a lot to think about!).

Ibáñez, Karina.  (UNLP) discussed some of her findings in the use of the level tone in French, validated by native French speakers' perception of possible pragmatic meanings. I cannot fully appreciate the nuances of the language due to my own ignorance of  French, but Karina's proposal of studying language in context and with authentic materials in order to discuss situated values of one is transferable to other languages.

Panzachi Heredia, Damaris Ana Ruth y Luchini, Pedro Luís. (UNMdP – UCAECE Mar del Plata – Colegio Atlántico Sur (CADS) presented a very interesting experiment on processing times and comprehension of three passages: one with proper accentuation, one in which the choice of nucleus is unlikely, and an "accentless" one ( to be honest, I found this idea of accentlesness quite difficult to figure out. To me, it was more of an oblique version with a succession of accents maked with level tones, but then that could be the effect of my own "perceptual mould", or expectations). Subjects were asked to complete a number of tasks used to test info retrieval and processing times. This was a pilot study that promises to be quite interesting, once some adjustments are made. Looking forward to hearing more about this!

So here ends my brief briefing of what I have been able to take down and focus on at the conference. All misinterpretations of the theories and results presented and typos remain my own. Goodnight!

Reflections in Passing #8: Pronunciation and Failure

This is yet another podcast-y post, unedited, off the top of my head, based on the lessons we can learn when things go wrong.


Some references you may want to consult:

• Field, J. (2014). Myth 3:Pronunciation teaching has to establish in the minds of language learners a set of distinct consonant and vowel sounds. In Grant, L. (2014). Pronunciation Myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. Michigan Press. (I reviewed his chapter here)
• Fraser, H (2010). Cognitive theory as a tool for teaching pronunciation. In: De Knop, S,  F. Boers, A. De Rycker (2010) Fostering Language Teaching Efficiency through Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter

BTW, here's J.K. Rowling's speech on the "fringe benefits of failure":

Pronunciation Integration #5: Word Stress and Vocabulary Sets

These days every teacher in Argentina is probably drowning under a pile of exams to correct, and I am no exception. But as one of the assignments I have been marking is actually testing this very topic, I wanted to draft a short post on possible connections between word stress and certain vocabulary areas. (Just to be reminded of how word stress can make us feel stressed! ;) )

I first came up with this idea a few years ago, after designing a vocabulary poster for my advanced learners at school, and then heard about this possible form of integration from Mg. Roxana Basso, who once made a few comments in passing on the connections between certain compound types and vocabulary groups, so I think this is a topic that requires some attention, as it has great classroom value.  

I have claimed several times that the best way to decide on what pronunciation features to teach is by looking at our syllabus and textbook (a full related post here). So today's post will be an attempt to propose that there is a connection betweeen theme-based lexical sets and some basic word stress patterns for compound words.

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Brief Theoretical Overview

First things first, what is a compound word? This is not an easy question to answer. Compounding is a very productive process in English, and the frequent combination of two words making up a unique semantic unit usually undergoes a historical process. The combination is generally "born" as two separate words operating together, then they may become hyphenated, and then, become one word, even, through a process of monolithicity (Zenobi, 1987). There is always a debate as to whether to consider several combinations actual compounds, or just collocations, as the typical contrast between a DARKroom (a "true" compound) and a DARK ROOM (a phrase or collocation).

The truth is that combinations of two or three words in English that generally operate together may reveal different stress patterns (if you need a review of levels of stress, you may consult one of my previous posts here). We generally distinguish about single-stressed (left-stressed) vs double stressed compounds (or rightmost stressed) (Ortiz Lira,1998; Teschner and Whitley, 2004), that is, compounds in which the first item carries the primary stress versus those in which the primary stress is borne by the second item, with a secondary stress on the first item (whose location will depend as to whether there is stress shift or not...and that deserves a separate post!). A single-stressed compound could be READing glasses, and a double-stressed one, SLEEPing BEAUty. 

Out of the dozen rules presented by theorists, the one that entertains me the most is precisely this ING + Noun rule, as it can lead to funny combinations, which have been illustrated in Haycraft (1994)'s funny pictures of a WALKing STICK (a stick that is walking) or a READing LAMP (a lamp that is reading!), for example, and likewise, below:

Image credit: clickypix

So a "SLEEPing pill" is a "pill for sleeping", whereas a "SLEEPing PILL" is what you see in the picture. ING+Noun combinations are single-stressed when they can be paraphrased with "for" (ING is a gerund), and double-stressed when they are paraphrased with "that" (then the ING form is a participle). So our ING+Noun combinations could be quite problematic at times, such as in SLIDing DOOR, which may be incorrectly associated with "a door for sliding" instead of a "door that slides".

There are some other patterns that may bring about some trouble for us in that they can present single- or double-stressed versions, and these are:

ADJ + N (typically double-stressed)

N + N (typically single-stressed)

Even though there are other tricky combinations, I am going to focus on these, since they are the most commonly found combinations in different vocabulary sets.

Adjective + Noun patterns are typically double-stressed, as they act as collocations. However, there are some combinations that have evolved from the individual meanings of their components, such as GREENhouse and The WHITE House, and which act collectively as nouns, and happen to be single-stressed. Another similar group is that of adjective + noun epithets, such as BLACKbeard or REDhead, which are called "bahuvrihi" compounds (Bloomfield, 1930), paraphrased as "a person having X" (more examples here). These compounds are exocentric, as we cannot consider any of the items to be a real head, nor in a relation of hyponymy. But then we have equally complex compounds beginning with "high", or "hot", which may present single- or double-stressed versions: compare HIGH coMMAND vs HIGH jump, or HOT poTAto vs HOT line. In general the rule is that if these combinations can be paraphrased as collocations, or as defining relative clauses, they tend to be double-stressed.

Noun + Noun patterns work differently, and we can perhaps make the following (very broad, exception-filled) generalisations:

My own summary of rules based on Ortiz Lira (1998), Teschner and Whitley (2004) and Zenobi (1987, 1992)

There are, of course, other key combinations, such as double-stressed phrasal verbs versus single-stressed prepositional verbs; or double-stressed acronyms versus single-stressed acronym+noun combinations. Adverbs, adjectives and verbs are frequently used to make up combinations, most of which are double-stressed, though not always.  Ortiz Lira (1998) makes a comprehensive review of most compound word stress patterns, which I strongly recommend.

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Getting your vocabulary sets ready for word stress work

After we have selected a theme, we can start brainstorming all the words that come to mind and that we may want to teach our students in connection to the topic. We may collect our own list of items with the same pattern by consulting picture dictionaries (I looove the Oxford Duden, myself), but thanks to the Internet, we now have some online alternatives, with sound, even!

• Merriam-Webster's Visual Dictionary
• Language Guide.  (I like this one, though I have to admit I find some of the recorded versions a bit doubtful, as some readings are oblique and produce double-stressed versions of some otherwise single-stressed compounds)
• English Picture Dictionary
• Online Picture Dictionary
• Online Picture Dictionary II
• And of course, the links to vocabulary posters you may find through Google Images.

You can also find theme-related videos on YouTube. I generally give my students this video on kitchenware, but you can take your pick out of the many themed vocabulary lessons available:

As we collect our list, we may put together all the compound word items to find common patterns. As non-native speakers of English, we may have many questions, which is why I suggest checking the stress pattern with a pronunciation dictionary (LPD or CPD, the Oxford Learner's Dictionary) or online, Forvo, or YouGlish, as usual.

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Some (very broad) generalisations

Once you have your list of items, you may find that there are certain stress patterns which get repeated. I include a few generalisations below, but of course I invite you to make your own lists and collections!

The City

In general, shops and buildings tend to be single-stressed, as N1 "type of" compounds  or ING+N combinations(SHOE shop, BOOKstore, SHOPPing centre). There are some interesting double-stressed adjective + noun combinations, such as peDEStrian CROSSing. Street names finishing on "street" will be single-stressed, but all others will tend to be double-stressed: OXford street vs OXford CIRcus. Proper names of buldings -except those finishing in "building" will also tend to be double-stressed: emPIRE STATE building, vs TOWN HALL.

Public and Private Transport

Most words connected to public transport tend to be "type of" combinations: RAILway station, TRAIN ticket, TUBE map, AIRport. However, a quick glance through the Tube map of London may reveal lots of interesting double-stressed placenames: COVent GARDen, CHARing CROSS. Parts of the car include "type of" compounds and ING+N combinations: WINDshield, STEERing wheel.

Food and Drink

You will find a number of double-stressed compounds in menus, and the single-stressed exceptions as well: toMAto juice vs toMAto SOUP. However, I have heard some dodgy compounds in Britian, including CHOColate CAKE (yep, apparently both single- and double-stressed compounds are possible) and SAUSage roll.

Technology and the Internet

Many electrical appliances happen to have ING+N or N+N-er/-or combinations, such as WASHing machine, and VACuum cleaner.

Many electronic devices are made up of acronyms and acronym+noun combinations: CD and CD player, for example.

The world of the Internet is made up of many phrasal verbs: LOG IN, SIGN UP. There are interesting Adverb + Verb combinations which change their stress as verbs or nouns, DOWNLOAD vs DOWNload, for example.

At School

School objects are generally "type of" or "instrument" compounds, also N+Ner combinations: PENcil case, PENcil sharpener, HISTory book.  School subjects may be double-stressed as acronyms (e.g.: P.E.) and/or adjective+ N combinations: SOCial SCIences.

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These are but some of the topic areas you may be introducing in your lessons. Working on compound word stress is yet another form of building students' awareness of how accentuation works in English, and how the overall melody of English is built. As I always say, the pronunciation of a word is constitutive of the lexical item, which means that we need to introduce these points in some way if we intend our students to use these words orally.

Hope you have found this post useful to see yet another way of integrating pronunciation work to vocabulary teaching. Happy compounding to you all!

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Acknowledgements: I want to thank my 2011 Phonetics II students who first alerted me to these word stress-vocab connections (remember our Learning Guide.org word stress lessons!) and to this year's UNSAM students whose lovely end-of-course projects inspired me to draft this post. 

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References

Ortiz Lira, H (1998). Word stress and sentence accent. Cuaderno de la Facultad Nº 16, Serie Monografías Temáticas. Santiago: Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación 

Zenobi, N. (1992). A Basic Guide to English Prosody for Spanish Students at Teacher Training Schools. Compiled by Alicia Gil and revised by Laura Mermoz. Buenos Aires: Instituto Superior del Profesorado Dr Joaquín V González.

Teschner, R., and S. Whitley (2004). Pronouncing English. A Stress-Based Approach with CD-ROM. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Pronunciation Integration #4: Selecting your pronunciation content

After some blogging silence caused by writing deadlines, burnout and a lot of belated grading, I  am back! I would have liked to write a more complete post today, but I thought I might put down a few lines on how to select the pronunciation features to teach in your lesson. I am currently covering this topic with my teacher trainees, and I believe it is a good moment to allow these experience-based reflections of mine to reach the written form! I guess I will be writing a more academic, citation-filled, aesthetically pretty post in the future. 

What do we need to consider when planning what pronunciation content to include in our lessons?

Well, a huuuge number of questions are in order (as usual!). Even though I expect to provide teachers with a somehow friendly guide as to how to make a responsible, yet effective decision, I would not want to trick them into believing that making this choice is an easy matter. So here we go!

When we say pronunciation content we are, in fact, referring to a large number of features, which I have tried to summarise in the chart below:

a) First, there's the pronunciation goals question (see previous posts on this): is your institutional/class setting aiming at  low accentedness, or  mutual intelligibility? 
If your group requires that your learners' accent reveals little of their L1 because they need to communicate in professional settings with native speakers of English and you need to do accent reduction, for example, then you have a longer list of things to consider, perhaps, as you will see below, since the inventory of features of teach may be larger. 
If you are doing English for International Communication, that is, English as the means to interact with other non-native speakers of English, the initial selection of features to teach may, in part, be inspired by Jenkins' (2000) Lingua Franca Core (see the blogs by Patsko & Simpson, and the site by Robin Walker to learn more about this). Note: in my very humble opinion, I would not treat the LFC as a conclusive list, because given your students' needs and starting point, you may want to introduce other features as well. Plus, there is always the question of what makes mutual intelligibility, as different L1s may perhaps pose different challenges regarding intelligibility with each other in English as a FL. (In this respect, you may remember the project by Nobuaki Minematsu I discussed in my PTLC15 report here)

b) Next, there's the most important source of information to consider, your students! Carry out a needs analysis (which may make you reconsider your answer to a) ) and/or a set of diagnostic tasks (if possible, recorded as an audio file), that may help you see where your students' areas of difficulty lie. Diagnostic tasks can give us a lot of information regarding our students' starting point, but they need to be designed carefully. You may want to make sure you do so by considering these points:

• in order to have a more global view of your learners' strengths and weaknesses, you need to design a task that will enable you to test the same skills/content across the board, for example a reading-aloud task of a well-prepared passage (Note: Careful! Reading skills pose their own challenges), or a guided questionnaire with words/expressions you expect your students to use. You can write a dialogue or short passage (dialogues work better, in my opinion, as chunking is less problematic and situations are easy to perform) with enough variety in spellings, clusters, word stress or sentence accent examples to make sure you can even somehow "quantify" your results and test what you really want to test (validity). (It is essential that you go over the list of difficulties that learners of your L1 may have when using English to make sure you test the right things. See: "Contrastive Analysis" below, and check Ashton and Shepeherd, 2012; Kelly, 2000; Mott, 2011). You can then design a table/grid to see how each of your students tackled the problem areas or "traps" in their reading.
• a semi-spontaneous speaking task is unbeatable when it comes to testing what our students' starting point is. We can ask our learners to introduce themselves by following guiding questions, or telling an anecdote, or reacting to a picture or stimuli. These less controlled tasks will give you clear a indication of their interlanguage errors and already-acquired features. As a result, you should have a more or less accurate snapshot of your learners' starting point, individually.
• and/or you may want to carry out interactive tasks for pairs of students to role-play. Working with a partner helps students to lower their affective filters and may, to a certain extent, also soothe "recording anxiety". These tasks allow you to see how students  interact by employing their interlanguage accents and communicative competence.

(Of course, you should always be aware that your task and the recording activity themselves may induce shyness, as well as other performance difficulties or disfluencies.)

c)  Then, naturally, you will need to take a look at your (pre-set) syllabus and textbook. No, I am sorry to say  I am not implying that your textbook will in any way help you decide. With just a few exceptions, pronunciation tasks in textbooks (sorry, authors and publishers), are very poor, IMHO. But your textbook may have a lovely Word List at the end with the key lexical items you will be teaching . It will also list the grammar you will have to present. It has a tapescript section with the material your students will hear in spoken mode. It presents a number of reading materials with structures and vocabulary your students will be working on.

If you work at one of those places where the syllabi are "imposed", you may have been provided with a tentative syllabus, which will surely list the lexico-grammatical features to be attained by your class (and hopefully, if you are very, very lucky, perhaps some reference to what pronunciation features to teach). And if you take all the lexical and grammatical content, comb your reading and listening texts, and check the oral genres and spoken functions you will be covering....you will have an awful lot of information as to what pronunciation features you will encounter, albeit indirectly, lesson by lesson!

How do we use this information?

Now that you know what features your learners as a group may need to cover, and what individual challenges you need to work on, as well as what linguistic content you will have to teach, you can start making further decisions, which will depend on a number of factors, listed below in no particular order:

• Contrastive Analysis: even though it has been undermined, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (Lado, 1957) does provide us with a good way of anticipating which areas may bring about trouble for our learners, given the differences between English as L2/FL, and their own L1. For instance, in Spanish /p/ is not taxing at all, as there is a match in the place and manner of articulation in both accents. However, aspiration does need to be taught for this sound. So making a contrastive analysis of features will already narrow down the list of features you may need to tackle.
• Similarity-Dissimilarity: the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1992) also helps us re-visit our list of features by aiding us in the identification of those features that may perhaps take longer to acquire by L2 learners of English and may get fossilised, and thus, may require constant recycling and remedial work. For instance, sound /d/ in English may be perceived as similar to Spanish by learners, and as a result, fossilisation of Spanish [d̪] for English may be more common than for other sounds. 
• Frequency of occurence: I am not necessarily here considering the frequency of occurrence of the features in English (though it does certainly help to select what to spend time on!), but the frequency at which a certain pronunciation feature appears on your syllabus of linguistic content and skills. E.g.: Weak and strong forms are inevitably related to all tenses in English, since auxiliaries are ubiquitous. The velar nasal /ŋ/ is everpresent in continuous tenses. (See other posts on pronunciation integration here). Scanning your textbook's word list per unit will also give you an idea of what sound, spelling-to-sound rule, or suffix appears more often. Looking at what linguistic actions and functions you will be teaching (e.g. requesting, giving advice, etc), may help you see what intonation patterns can be of use.
• Functional Load: The concept of functional load (Catford, 1987) can also contribute to our decision as to what features should be taught for intelligibility purposes based on contexts where they are contrastive . We know, for example, that sounds /ʃ,ʒ/ are only distinguishable in a really small number of words (just 4 minimal pairs?), which is why this combination in contrast has a low functional load. Word Stress, on the other hand, is to be prioritised (Derwing and Munro, 2015), as its functional load in distinction is important. Note: even though the theory claims that pairs like /d,ð/ have a low functional load, Spanish speakers, because of the allophonic split in comparison to English, will definitely need to be made aware of the distinction. So this particular criteria, in my humble opinion, needs to be taken with a picnh of a salt.
• Systematically, incidentally or "collocationally"? The previous criteria may help you decide what features you may want to systematise properly and in detail, following a set of stages (ear training --> presentation--> guided and feer practice), and which features you may want to teach or correct "in passing" as a result of  mispronunciation or miscommunication while carrying out an activity. You will also need to decide if you want to teach the feature for students to start applying across the board, that is, by teaching the right spelling-to-sound rules, or pragmatic functions of intonation, for instance, or if you want to present it as a "collocation": that is, the feature accompanying the word or phrase (see my post on the intonation of viewpoint adjuncts).  For example, we know /ʒ/ is not a very ferquent sound in English, which is why you may teach it when you teach the word "usually" (which we introduce quite early in elementary courses when teaching the Present Simple!). You can always extend the application of this new feature by referring back to the previously-taught collocation; e.g: so when you find the word "visual", you remind students of "usually" . 
• For perception or for production purposes (or both)? As we know, thanks to Richard Cauldwell, perception and production need different models, and the way we handle phonetics is indeed different in both models. We need to decide what we want to help our students to produce, and what we need to teach to train their perception and enhance comprehension. We may have to systematise some processes of linking, co-articulation, assimilation and elision for students to produce, but these elements will definitely find a better home in our listening lessons.
• Teachability: this is the most difficult criterion to define. I believe that teachability needs to be defined by the group of students we have (age, motivation, phonetic coding ability, previous exposure and instruction) and our teaching context (time constraints, possibilities for extra practice, possibilities for further exposure...). We do know, however, that everything can be made teachable if we are creative enough and if we do enough research (sometimes based on our own trial and error experiences in the classroom).

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Some final remarks:

I generally tell students that we have a sort of "moral duty" to teach pronunciation. Our instructional context may not always demand that we do, but if we are teaching the language, and we are training users of the language (and not just "writers" of the language), we have to teach the phonological features accompanying the lexico-grammatical content we introduce. Otherwise, we are somehow cheating our students. Or so I believe.

Teaching pronunciation effectively is about being selective. I have listed a set of criteria to choose what to teach, and when planning our lessons we need to take a "leap of faith", and decide to leave a few features out for next years' teacher to handle (hopefully!). We cannot cover it all (as we don't do with lexis, or grammar), and we shouldn't either. Decide what to be "incidental" or "collocational" about, and what to systematise in greater detail.

If you are selective, and make the most of integration techniques and choices, then you should not have any excuse not to do pronunciation work! You are doing pronunciation as you do grammar, vocabulary, reading or listening! (And you keep your coordinator, parents, and international exams happy as well as fulfilling your "moral duty" as a language teacher!)

Finally (for now, at least), success in pronunciation -this wonderful motor-cognitive skill-, is dependent on continuous practice. We need to provide constant prossibilities of recycling, re-noticing pronunciation features in new and old contexts, and we have to ensure continuous remedial work. Our body has memory, indeed, but we need to reactivate it as frequently as possible. And so we need to do when it comes to spelling rules, or to the abstract meanings of  intonation, for example.

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Once again, hope you have found this useful. (If you need to cite this article, please check the "How to Cite this Blog" tab on top). Good luck in your feature selection!