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!

Review #3, Part 3: "Pronunciation Myths", edited by Linda Grant

Hi! My two previous posts (Part 1 - Part 2) reviewed the first four pronunciation myths, debunked by well-known pronunciation and phonetics specialists in the book "Pronunciation Myths", edited by Linda Grant. This post will mark the end of the review of this enriching, thought-provoking, book. Remember this is an informal review, with a few intrusive observations and reflections of my own.

(Warning! This is a very long post, so you may want to bookmark it for later reading.)

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Myth 5: Students would make better progress in pronunciation if they just practiced more - Linda Grant

This chapter begins with a reference to the film "The King's Speech", and an "inconvenient truth" : "long term speech characteristics can become an integral part of who we are" (Grant, 2014, "In the Real World", para. 5), which is why many people decide, consciously or unconsciously, not to introduce any changes to their accent. Citing Dalton and Seildhofer (1994:72), Grant reminds her readers that  there is no "one-to-one relationship between what is taught and what is learned" when it comes to pronunciation. (And yes, we know that too well!)

The next section discusses aspects which have always been present in the debate around second language pronunciation, such as the role of age. Different studies are described which prove and also refute the effects of the Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967) as far as the issue of accentedness is concerned. Grant believes the research in fact shows that it is social and psychological factors rather than neuro-biological changes that make the utmost difference in the end.

Another construct reviewed in this chapter is Lado's Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. Some studies reported found that students whose L1 was similar to English had more English-like accents, but it was also reported that L1-L2 differences sometimes promote learning (in-keeping with Major's Similarity-Dissimilarity Hypothesis), since these are at times more perceptually salient than similarities. Grant finishes this section by revisiting the concepts of positive and negative transfer, both presented as inevitable processes in L2 pronunciation acquisition.

Grant later examines the role of exposure and use of L2 as a positive contribution to a learner's pronunciation achievement, especially in terms of fluency and comprehensibility. The other big factor was length of residence, though it was proven that it was not as effective as the actual frequent use of L2 outside the classroom. 

The following aspect reviewed by Grant is the role of psycho-social factors in the attainment of L2 pronunciation. Issues of identity, motivation, attitude and inhibition are discussed in this section. Studies reported include those examining the roles of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, issues of allegiance to their own L1 ethnic group, and identification. I personally believe this is THE issue to consider when it comes to success in pronunciation learning.

The author recaps then some of the most important factors related to the attainment of an L2 pronunciation, but concludes that research has not yet established what is the relative impact of each of these variables: "age at the onset of learning, similarities between L1 and L2 phonologies, extent of exposure to and use of the L2, and affective factors (...), aptitude and natural talent". The research reviewed, however, does give teachers some basic information as to what aspects affecting L2 pronunciation can be addressed, and need to be tackled. (See my post on pronunciation goals for my own take on this) 

Grant draws her chapter to a close by providing some practical suggestions: a) set realistic goals in partnership with our learners, giving more room to intelligibility over accentedness, and engaging students in setting their own personal goals; b) set interim goals to sustain student motivation throughout the course. This second point refers to what Wong (1987:8) has found regarding pronunciation achievement: "dramatic changes in student speech in 3 to 6 months are rare". (Well, I would personally have to read the study, because in my context this does not hold true at all. I guess this is true for a particular number of contexts with a specific set of characteristics...But I do grant them that my lessons are entirely pronunciation-based...). I do agree, however, that short-term goals, clear focus on specific features and assessable targets are a great "carrot and stick" for students not to give up. Suggestion c): increase student engagement by individualising assignments. Oh, yes. As I always say, "pronunciation teaching is a craft". There is a lot we can do with our students as a group, but there is an awful lot we need to do with our students on an individual basis. In this respect, Grant includes self-assessment sheets and rubrics for students to grade their own recorded assignments, for example. Suggestion d): ask students to maintain pronunciation logs. Even though Grant mentions examples that affect learners in which learners can use English outside the classroom, it is true that keeping track of the changes, breakdowns and challenges one encounters in the process of learning pronunciation is a great way to see how the process unfolds. I would have loved to have a diary for my Lab 1 course, I would have loved to see how I personally felt about having to "unlearn" my Spanglish accent and my own mental view of what English was like to get to the less Spanglish accent I have now (I have been listening to my Lab 1 cassettes, though...). Suggestion e): Maximise student exposure to English outside the classroom. This set of ideas includes ways in which we can introduce home practice as well using websites.

A final observation includes the importance of giving considerable amount of time to pronunciation instruction in the classroom, thus the need for integration for it to be an  everpresent priority.

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Myth 6: Accent reduction and pronunciation instruction are the same thing. By Ron Thomson.

This chapter warns the readers of the dangers of falling into advertising traps when it comes to selecting your tutors for accent reduction clinics or courses. By means of a few anecdotes, Thomson clarifies that many immigrants fall prey to deceit because they erroneously believe it is their accent that impedes successful communication and/or integration, whereas "L2 learners' perceived need for accent reduction is often the result of factors unrelated to pronunciation".

The premise to this chapter is that accent reduction and pronunciation instruction are different things, and for this, Thomson quotes Derwing and Munro (2009) with their description of three approaches to characterise programs as following a a) business, b) medical or c) educational model. Accent reduction is generally associated with the business model, accent "modification" with the medical approach, and pronunciation instruction with the latter.

The rest of this chapter reviews a considerable number of Google searches and website descriptions of the language used and the underlying assumptions of a few services offering pronunciation instruction or accent reduction services, some of which are compared to programmes that offer "miracle diets" (Lippi Green, 2012), and go unregulated. The review of programmes includes details of materials, costs, instructor qualifications and claims, which show how vast the offer is, and how confusing advertising could be in some cases. The chapter ends with a few proposals, including the need for provision of "ethical pronunciation instruction" that shows understanding of psycholinguistic, social and personal dimensions of foreign accent. Another major suggestion is that teachers "give more attention to pronunciation instruction as part of English language classes" and also to propose language programs to hold "stand-alone" pronunciation courses if possible. The discussion of this section ends with a set of practical tips as to how to avoid "charlatans".

This chapter left me thinking about a huge number of things. I find myself in a context in which I would say we do "accent modification" or "accent reduction", even, but our model is educational in nature, as we train teachers-to-be. Instruction in our context is carried out by specialised professionals, and the focus is mostly towards a native-like accent (pretty much in the same way other subjects attempt to help students to reach a native-like grammar or use of lexis...), while also training teachers to teach for different purposes (or so I hope). I guess we are all truly aware of the claims to the impossibility of reaching a native-like accent -we, pronunciation teachers, I think, are the best pieces of evidence for that, however obsessive we might be about our accents-, but even so, in our teacher-training context, we have many students who want to reach native-like proficiency (and many who do not, of course), and we work with them towards this goal (yes, there is a lot I could say and be critical about regarding this and a million other issues, but not today!) . I have to say I am lucky to be in a group of institutions in which I have the opportunity to do serious pronunciation instruction work and provide one-to-one moments of feedback, in spite of large classes.  As I always say, pronunciation teaching is a craft, it cannot follow a "one-size-fits-all" model, since what works for one student may not work for the other. We can provide tools to the whole group of students, but feedback and fine-tuning practices need to be individualised and I hope this is something I can pass on to my students with my own feedback practices.

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Myth 7: Teacher Training programs provide adequate preparation in how to teach pronunciation, by John Murphy.

This particular chapter is closely related to my current context, as I am a teacher trainer myself. For some reason, I never seem to find a book on pronunciation that will keep me "happy", though there are some good materials out there (my personal favourite being Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin, 1996, 2010) There is always something "missing" in these materials, something that drives my teacher trainees to be good, creative task designers, but at times "poor systematisaters". I try to make it my job to train teachers to actually make the presentation of features right, since after all, no matter how creative a task can be, if the teaching of the feature is not successful or well planned, the whole class plan will very likely fail anyways.

Now, off to the chapter. Murphy begins by retelling a personal experience teaching at a MATESOL course. One of the findings Murphy made in this journey is that pronunciation needs to be taught "within a framework of spoken communication". The author's account serves to introduce the question of confidence and knowledge that teachers may or may not feel they have when it comes to pronunciation teaching.

The research cited by the author includes issues of "teacher cognition" as a fundamental part of what should be the knowledge base for teaching, which includes, of course, knowledge about language, knowledge about second language acquisition, and specialist recommendations about pronunciation teaching. I think Murphy introduces a very important point here, that of the need to dive into teachers' beliefs, perceptions and understandings in order to help them build effective pronunciation teaching practices.

The author includes a table of research reports carried out by different experts and authors in different countries using different instruments, which in turn inform the report Murphy is introducing in this chapter. Some of the key points reviewed regarding teacher cognition include: a) teachers feel unprepared to teach pronunciation because of lack of training; b) there should be a clear focus on the pedagogical aspects of pronunciation teaching; c) previous experiences learning foreign languages have a bearing on the way teachers approach (or not) pronunciation teaching; d) teachers should be introduced to ways of teaching assessing pronunciation for intelligibility, introducing modern technologies and working on integration to the general ESL lesson.

I need to digress again, since this touches directly into my context. I lecture at three Teacher Training Colleges, and in all three, trainees are exposed to a minimum of two, and a maximum of seven (!) periods a week purely devoted to Phonetics and pronunciation, and in the last two years of the course of studies, also to pronunciation teaching. In two of these colleges, teachers have stand-alone pronunciation courses in all four years of training. That is an awful lot (and I am grateful, because it does show in most of trainees' pronunciation), but I sometimes fear these students may not still know how to approach pronunciation in their lessons in spite of all the input. At times, it is just a matter of giving teachers a few tricks and principles to "light the match", (and see the sparks in their eyes appear! Oh, joyful moment!), together with some consciencious reading of pedagogy and acquisition, and a "trip down memory lane" to their own experience learning the accent, but in some other occasions, I find teachers still get really "petrificus totalus" (yes, another HP reference) about this whole pronunciation teaching business. So much to think about....Anyway.

Murphy quotes Borg (2003, 2009) and eight findings on teacher cognitions, which is worth direct citation since they are spot on, in my opinion:

Murphy (2014) in Grant (ed). Amazon Kindle Edition: Position 3272 of 4350

There is another interesting reference, to Gregory (2005) this time, which describes the fact that teachers are rarely given the chance to immediately apply in real classrooms, or even among peers, all the declarative knowledge they attain.

The last sections of  this chapter contain  fantastic remarks for us, non-native speakers of English who have trained as FL teachers. Murphy reminds us that our training in pronunciation as learners will help us understand what our learners are going through. Our own learned accent can be interesting and relevant models for our students, as long as it is intelligible, comprehensible, and only if the teacher is "aware of what some of the more prominent accented characteristics of his or her own speech could be" (oh, yes, I have my own list!)

The chapter presents a few suggestions as to what can be done in training programmes, and also a review of resources for pronunciation teaching and practice which are worth exploring, also listed as an appendix. A second appendix describes sample topics and syllable tasks that can be applied at graduate level. (Not to be missed!)

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Epilogue to the Myths: "Best Practices for Teachers", by Donna Brinton

Brinton opens the epilogue by referring to a personal anecdote that supports her belief that we interpret the stream of speech in the foreign language by referring to our L1 and other languages we may have learned; and also that learners tend to process lexical chunks at the level of syllables/words/phrases, rather than phonemes.

This final section also introduces a very interesting list of "core knowledge and skills needed for L2 teachers to address pronunciation in the classroom", collected by Chan, Goodwin and Brinton in 2013. The list includes conceptual, descriptive and procedural knowledge, and it is truly worth reading (there is a copy of this list, presented by the authors at CATESOL 2013, here).

A second gift to the reader by Brinton: A summary of ideas and "best practices", including: a) the connection and separation of the concepts of intelligibility and accentedness, and a list of features contributing to the former that need to be trained in the classroom; b)  the fact that not all pronunciation features have the same relevance for intelligibility;  c) the finding that segmentals are critical building blocks of the sound system, but they need to be taught in terms of intelligibility needs, and also guided by functional load concerns; d) the tendency that claims that L2 adult learners may not reach an "accentless", native foreign accent; e) the fact that pronunciation learning is different from the learning of grammar or vocabulary, as it involves other modalities; e) the need to recognise the relation between perception and production, which is why it is important to introduce awareness raising activities to build new perceptual categories; f) the awareness that explicit and targeted feedback is truly beneficial; g) success in pronunciation learning depends on a myriad of factors, including age, motivation, identity, exposure, opportunities for real practice outside the classroom , and these need to be considered in our planning; h) L1 does have an influence on our acquisition of L2 pronunciation; i) exposure to authentic language is essential, including an analysis of processes of connected speech, that show the reality of speech "out there".

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And so my review ends. My verdict? Pronunciation Myths  is... a really insightful book, with discussions that probably describe pronunciation teaching issues worldwide, and a few other points and claims that can be questioned if seen from different locations and instructional contexts. A wealth of ideas, tips and tricks. And more importantly, in my opinion, a huge reference list of experimental, bibliographical, educational and also informal research that does not only "preach to the converted" (as a friend always says), but which may also, hopefully, persuade the sceptics, and the fearful.

Some "inconvenient truths" of pronunciation teaching

2015 is coming to an end and once again, I wanted to thank you for following, reading and/or criticising this blog. 

This post is a very brief reflection on some of the many lessons I have learned this year, out of reading good books, interacting with my experienced colleagues, but also, and more importantly, after considering the feedback and success or failure of my best teachers, my students. I don't want to elaborate on these ideas at length, since there is a lot to say about each, but at least I wanted to list them here today. Who knows, I might write a few posts on these thoughts in 2016.

These are some of the "inconvenient truths" that I believe every EFL teacher needs to embrace when it comes to pronunciation teaching:

• Pronunciation is a "messy" matter. Things may definitely go awry, discipline-wise, when we do pronunciation work. Pronunciation tasks may turn out to be "ridiculous" for students, and they will most certainly be "noisy".  The development of these activities requires a lot of control and attention on the part of the teacher, a lot of moving around the classroom to monitor what students are doing; keeping your eyes open for possible peer bullying or ridiculing, and yes, it may be tiring. We may need to decide very carefully on our timing (the last few minutes before the bell goes?) if we have a difficult group, we may need to change seating arrangements, or establish a "safe" routine. We, of course, also need to make sure our students understand why they need to work on their sounds and intonation in the first place. All in all, pronunciation "chaos" is an issue we have to anticipate, but it should not scare us away from integrating pronunciation to our lessons regularly.
• Non-native teachers of English can be good models and instructors. This is something I heard Robin Walker state many times. I think we should never underestimate the process that each of us, non-native speakers of English, has actually been through to build our accents. We can use all this knowledge of our L1 and of what it takes to learn a foreign accent to our and our students' advantage. At times I get a bit cross at teachers systematising sounds only by introducing videos or animations of native speakers producing the sounds. I think that our presence and constant input in the classroom can be a great asset to our students as well, and we can demonstrate the production of the sound ourselves, "live", in many different ways (see my "tips and tricks" post), apart from the introduction of native speaker voices (or other voices, if you are using other L2 speakers as models, which you can read about in the ELFPron blog). There is also a corollary: perception and production may go hand in hand, though we need to ensure exposure to a number of different accents and voices, while perhaps selecting one variety for perception (already a tough issue!).
• Student success depends a lot on psycho-social aspects. As I listed on my post on pronunciation goals, and on my review of the book "Pronunciation Myths", motivation, feelings about the foreign language, rapport with the teacher and fellow students,  they all have a major bearing on student performance. This is something that needs to be acknowledged from the very start, and the more we get to know about students' expectations and views on this, the better. Students need to appropriate the process and the new articulatory moves to make sure there is progress. This is a tough and very complex issue, and I personally need to work it out still.
• Pronunciation is a matter of the mind...and the body (and the heart, given the previous bullet point...). This is quite obvious, you might think. But indeed, we need to remember the implications of working with people's bodies. We are, metaphorically speaking, the "fitness instructors" of our students' speech muscles and organs, perhaps their "physiotherapists", in a way. We teach our students how to become aware of what their organs do, and how to make changes to their speech with different exercises, different "dance" or "fitness" routines to develop their proprioception abilities (You can read a lot about this on Adrian Underhill's blog, by the way!). Plus, giving students feedback on their performance is not the same as making corrections on a written composition, and this requires great care and kindness; it's a skill I personally have been trying to learn for years, and I have not always succeeded in.
• Proper pronunciation teaching resembles the work of a tailor or a craftsman. I have recently realised there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to pronunciation. Part of the systematisation process can be carried out with the group as a whole, but the ultimate fine-tuning processes need to be developed on an individual basis, and this requires getting to know our learners individually, testing different approaches and strategies, giving lots of personalised feedback, and this, means investing quite some of our own time, yes. And it is also a craft for us to learn; I have been doing this for years and still have a lot of questions, I keep discovering a lot of new ways to approach things, and I pretty much suspect that as times change, practices will have to change. So all in all, pronunciation teaching and learning make up a very personal process of discovery, of constant reflection, and as such, it only works if we help our students become aware of the inner workings of their speaking body, help them create different mental images of what the foreign language and its accents sound like, and invite them to ask themselves the right questions to be able to keep up with the times.

And some of my beliefs, omnipresent in this blog:

• Pronunciation can be seamlessly integrated to other areas, content and skills in the ELT classroom.
• Pronunciation work can be fun.
• We need to teach intonation, and do so communicatively, and in context.
• Teaching pronunciation requires, as with other content areas of language, some serious research and study on the part of the teacher.

Finally, two new discoveries I've been trying to develop into coherent thoughts:

• Success in a foreign language pronunciation is partly dependent on our ability to be mindful.  (A podcast-y reflection on this coming up very soon)
• Learning a foreign accent is in a way a process of appropiation. The big challenge is finding and loving our own L2 voice. (Some Harry Potter-inspired reflections on this here)

In summary, I think pronunciation teaching is by far, a greater learning experience for the teacher than it might be for the learner in the long run. I honestly thrive in all the lessons I keep learning, and I hope I can still continue asking myself questions to improve on my practices. And to keep blogging, of course (BTW, it does feel like this...)

Image from: https://missglayiii.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/hp4_17.jpg

I want to wish you all a lovely start of 2016. 'kiːp 'kɑːm ən prə'naʊns 'ɒn

Pronunciation Integration #1: Classroom Language & Routines

My greatest concern as a teacher trainer at the moment is to find ways to help teachers overcome the general lack of integration of pronunciation work into the ELT lesson. There appears to be a widespread indifference to the fact that “efficient communication involving any skill area, or any combination of skills, depends on the speaker’s ability to integrate knowledge of the English sound system with knowledge of grammar and lexicon.” Celce-Murcia et al (1996: 221). I sometimes wonder if we are not just teaching English for writing purposes when I see classroom plans. Why is it that we teach grammar and vocabulary and we don't teach the accompanying, or rather, constitutive, features of pronunciation with these topics? After all, if we expect our students to use these structures in their speech, they should at least know how to pronounce them!

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An interesting anecdote, first. Many years ago, during my first years learning Phonetics at College, I got to informally spend a coffee break with an English lady who was in Argentina as a Cambridge Examiner. She told me that she was really pleasantly surprised at the overall level of English she found in Argentinian teenagers taking their FCE exam, but she thought they sounded pretty contrastive all the time. I asked why, and based on the examples she gave me, I realised she was talking about the prominence given to weak form words by these students: "THERE ARE some children playing in the picture". She said she felt like replying "Well, no one said there wasn't!?".

This is an example of many of the things we do as teachers when we focus on grammar, we are so intent on getting our students to produce the right auxiliaries and forms that we perhaps forget about the spoken side of things. Of course, the issue of weak forms is certainly a feature of debate when it comes to English for Global Communication -as weak forms are out of the Lingua Franca Core-, but I am just reporting on the reaction a native speaker had after hearing students accenting, or using strong vowels on elements which are generally reduced in English. You will decide on the relevance of this comment based on the reality of your teaching context, and your teaching goals.

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This new set of posts is supposed to introduce ways of integrating pronunciation work to the teaching of grammar, vocabulary, reading and listening. Today's contribution will relate to one of the first set of items we teach beginners: school objects/supplies, school subjects, and classroom routines.

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Among the criteria we may use when deciding on what to teach, we may consider frequency of occurrence of a certain feature. If we scrutinise our school syllabus, we may find that a certain sound or intonation feature appears to be recurrent on our vocabulary list, or on our grammar "must-teach" selection.
In this case, a quick look over a list of school objects (just Google "school objects" and a huge number of picture dictionaries, textbook captures, worksheets and even vids will come up!), already establishes a set of tendencies regarding the pronunciation features that make up these linguistic structures. Plus, the teaching of these items ensures perpetual practice and recycling, since classroom objects and routines are part of our lessons every day!

So, without furher ado, find below a few pronunciation areas you may connect to these vocabulary topics:

Plosive attack!

/b/ appears on a number of frequent words: (black)board, (text/copy/note)book, rubber (is this word still used in BrE?),  backpack, bag, binder, briefcase, Biology, bin, (pencil)box, paintbrush.... Though it is not a particularly difficult sound for Spanish speakers, the presentation of these items is a good opportunity to help students turn their Spanish fricatives (or approximants, in some cases!) into bilabial plosives.

Similarly, we may focus on /d/ and /g/: desk, glue, globe, diary, CD player, dustbin, dictionary, garden

Aspiration: there are many school items that are pronounced with aspirated fortis plosives: text(book), table, pen, pencil(case), paper, keyboard, calculator, calendar, hole puncher, tablet, coloured pencils....

Closely associated to this, you may get cases of approximant devoicing: class(room), clip, projector, computer, crayon, screen, stapler, clock, diploma, CD/DVD player, playground

Compound Objects

School objects may also introduce patterns of word stress, particularly compound words. Slippery as compound word rules are, beginning with the debatable CD/DVD player -worth another discussion, since it appears to be changing...do you say 'C\D player, \CD player... I've heard both! EPD and LPD endorse the first-, there are always things we can teach, albeit just lexically or as fixed collocations:

• NOUN 1 + NOUN 2-er/-or N1 acts like an object to the verb embedded in N2: \pencil sharperner
• ADJ+ NOUN long-established compounds vs ADJ + NOUN collocations: \blackboard vs 'black \board  ; 'spiral \notebook, me'chanical \pencil

• NOUN1 + NOUN2 "type of", "place for" combinations: \ink bottle, \rubbish bin

 (For further rules and theory on Word Stress patterns, check Ortiz Lira, (2000))

Stress-ful(l) School Subjects

The teaching of the names of different school subjects and sciences can be a good excuse for the introduction of stress-shifting suffixes (Cruttenden, 2014; Teschner and Whitley, 2010) and  the rule of alternation for the placement of secondary stresses (underlined below), whenever applicable.

-ology: BiOlogy, SociOlogy, AnthropOlogy, EcOlogy...
-ography: GeOgraphy, CinematOgraphy, PhotOgraphy...

Brita Haycraft's "English Aloud" (which I discovered thanks to my colleagues Prof. Terluk and Prof. Iannicelli), has a lovely set of songs for word stress practice, one of which includes a number of school subjects and sciences. Really worth a look!

Rollercoastery Classroom Requests and Offers

Because of its frequency of use in the classroom, some classroom routines can become a great form of "drilling" intonation. Students produce a number of requests and  offers in the lesson, and the use of the fall-rise tone (the "rollercoaster tone", as I like to call it) in those routines in English may be introduced, and practised, through classroom formulaic language.
(I personally recall my first days as a teacher, when I would not allow my 5th graders to go to the toilet unless they applied their English intonation on the question....boy, they learned fast! So cruel of me! --- BTW, Argentinian students of English are very likely to employ rise-falling heads and rise-fall nuclei on these questions, as Prof. Zabala (2011) rightly points out.)

'Can I go to the \/toilet, please?
'Could you ex'plain it a\/gain, please?
'Can you re\/peat that, please?
'Can you 'lend me a \/pencil, please?

You can also teach the accentuation of "I" (i.e. the personal pronoun as nucleus) in those cases students volunteer to do something (provided the rest of the question is Given information, of course):

Can \/I clean the board, please?
Can \/I read, please?

You can always use these questions as reference when you want to introduce intonation in other linguistic structures and combinations.

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This brief post, the first of many, I hope, intends to show ways in which we can integrate the teaching of lexis, grammar, and language skills to pronunciation work.

In this particular case, we linked our classroom objects, school subjects and sciences, and classroom routines to some basic pronunciation and intonation features.

You will decide, in your own context, whether you want to teach these features explicitly, using these language exponents as examples, or whether to present them as constitutive of these items, collocation-like, without further reference to the theory. Whatever the case, once you have presented these pronunciation topics, students will start becoming more aware, and perhaps even concerned, with the way they should treat new vocabulary topics and speaking routines! It can be the beginning of a very interesting pronunciation journey!

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Extra tip: there are many videos, websites and activity repositories you can consult online to teach these school subjects/objects/routines lists. However, many of the audio dictionaries, and even videos that teach the topic, have either synthetic voices or provide an oblique reading of the lexical items and formulae presented. So please be cautious in your selection.

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References

• Celce-Murcia, M., D. Brinton and J Goodwin (1996). Teaching Pronunciation: A Refernce for Teachers of English to Speakers of Oteher Languages. New York: Cambridge
• Cruttenden, A (2014). Gimson's Pronunciation of English. Eighth edition. Oxon: Routledge.
• Ortiz Lira, H. (2000). Word Stress and Sentence Accent. Monografías Temáticas. Chile.
• Teschner, R. and S Whitley (2010). Pronouncing English. A Stressed-Based Approach with CD Rom. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
• Zabala, F. (2011) . El acento tonal circunflejo (L*HL%) en el español rioplatense. En Bombelli, G y Soler, L (compiladoras) Oralidad: Miradas plurilingües desde la fonética y la fonología. Córdoba: UNC.

Coming up with your own pronunciation "tips and tricks"

During these last few weeks I have had the chance of carrying out my favourite activity in my third-year teacher trainee Lab courses: the "tips and tricks video sessions". Basically, the task requires that students devise their own 3-minute teaching pronunciation video tutorial around a feature/contrast assigned to them, and following a number of guidelines. Some of the videos I show for inspiration and to see different styles -apart from those by students in previous courses- include the YouTube tutorials by JenniferESL, Rachel's English and some videos by Clear Speech Mastery, among others. (Note: Perhaps I don't always agree with everything they say, but I think it is good to show different ways of doing things! - Note 2: I have posted two of these video tutorials by my students in my Pronunciation Bites Facebook page.)

Now, one of the requirements of the task includes the presentation of a number of "tips and tricks" to introduce and teach the feature, and I generally ask students to come up with their own systematisation techniques. Many people find this really scary, as they may not have experienced this (or any!) type of pronunciation instruction in their lives as English learners before, so they may feel they have no "models" for pronunciation teaching.

So this blog post is precisely about pronunciation teaching, and it will introduce ways of finding inspiration so that you can devise your own "tips and tricks" for your lessons.

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As we all know, teacher training courses (at least in Argentina....we take it really seriously!) may introduce a lot of technical information. This may result in trainees later either introducing a lot of technical terminology in their primary/secondary school lessons, or directly blocking out pronunciation work. Many teachers feel paralysed about the whole thing and don't know how to go about it. So what do we do with all the knowledge we have? How do we make pronunciation "teachable"?

These are a few steps I personally believe we should follow:

1. Study your feature

Yes, I am one of those people who believes that in order to teach "this little" (thumb-index finger gesture) you need to know "this much" (wide arm gesture). OK, perhaps not sooo much. But there are a number of things you do need to know about the features you are going to teach (I insist, however, that I do not wish you to get "terrified".....):

• What are the characteristics of this feature? 
• If it is a vowel, what do we know about the height and part of the tongue raised, the jaws, the rims, the lips? Is there anything about resonance worth learning? What about its spellings?
• If it is a consonant, what do you know about its voicing, muscular and breath energy, manner and place of articulation? What do the production stages reveal about this sound? Are there any complex spellings? What allophonic variants are there? How is this consonant affected in certain contexts, or due to coarticulation?
• If it is a process of connected speech, what rules and restrictions are there? What features are involved? How does it affect perception and production? What coarticulatory gestures do we need to teach?
• If it is a tonicity feature, what rules are there to teach? Are there any exceptions? How does this set of rules affect meaning-making practices? How is prominence perceived and produced?
• If you want to teach a context for a particular tone pattern, what is the manifestation of this "melody"? What communicative, grammatical, illocutionary contexts reveal a high frequence of occurrence of this tone? 
• If you wish to teach word stress, what rules and exceptions can you trace? If it is a polysyllabic word, what can you predict in terms of the suffixes / prefixes employed? If it is a compound word set, what grammatical information can you collect in order to make sense of the rules?
• Is this feature in your students' own L1? 
• Is it "worth" teaching explicitly then?
• Does your students' L1 have a similar sound/intonation feature? If so, what features do we need to teach? Can we use their L1 as starting point? (E.g.: I can use my Spanish /a/ sound as a starting point to teach /æ/, by drawing my students' attention to the smile, the spreading of the lips, the fact that my lower teeth get "covered or hidden" -in an toothless-elderly-person fashion- by my lower lip and the skin below. My students can try both vowels in front of a mirror).
• Are there any common "tips and tricks" and rules to teach this feature? What do those focus on? How effective are they? (Try them!) What do they fall short of for them to be successful in my context?

Plus, a set of things all ELT teachers should learn at some time or other:  How does pronunciation work differ from other areas and skills of language learning? What different ways are there of doing pronunciation work? How does the whole process of acquisition or learning of our own L1 and an L2/foreign language set of phonological features work? What psycholinguistic theories inform our processes of perception and production of speech?

Knowledge is power. The more you know about your feature, the more confident you will feel, and the more informed your decisions will be. If you carry out Contrastive Analyses, you will be able to be more "economical" in your explanation, just teaching the bits that will be challenging for your students (E.g.: in Spanish, /p/ is also bilabial and plosive, but it is not aspirated. So what you need to teach for /p/ is its aspiration. So don't spend time explaining how the bilabial and plosive aspects of this sound need to be addressed....)

2. Make selections

Now that you know what your feature is and how/where it works, you need to look at your students, and your syllabus, and make the next set of decisions:

Are you going to teach your feature for production, for perception, or both?

If you are going to teach your feature for perception, it would be useful to think about all the processes of connected speech (coarticulations, linking, reductions, elisions, stylisations) it may undergo, to be able to prepare your learners for all the "sound shapes" (Cauldwell, 2013) (and tone shapes!) they may acquire in "the jungle" of real life speech. This is a really challenging area, worth another blog post...in the future.

If you are going to ask your learners to produce the feature (though you will have, of course, to do listening discrimination and ear-training work anyway!), move on to the tips below. Plus, see how and when you will be introducing the spellings for the sound, or the communicative values of the intonation choices you wish to introduce.

3. Explore your own production of the feature

Now that you know some basic technical stuff about the feature and about your students' L1, you need to try the feature yourself. Several times. And use your senses.

"Denaturalise" the production of this feature. How? Be narcissistic: Look at yourself in a mirror, record yourself using your phone/notebook webcam, take pictures of yourself. See what you are doing, how you are doing it, and put it into words, into simple words: "when I produce /æ/ I smile, I can see my upper teeth but not my lower teeth as my lower lip covers them. The sides of my lips are spread backwards. My cheeks get puffy (BTW, the latter is one of my students' discoveries!)."

Make comparisons: What do I look like? "When I say /æ/ I look like a clown; I look like a person sucking a slice of tangerine; I look like an elderly person who has lost his/her lower teeth...."

What does it sound like? Produce the sound/intonation feature several times. Does it sound familiar? Is there any real life sound the repetition of this sound evokes? E.g.#1: a former student who played tennis regularly told me that the LOT sound in isolation reminded him of the bouncing of the ball on the court during the tennis matches. E.g#2: I think of a cat somehow coughing/choking (?) when I produce many /æ/s in succession.

(Credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/6MTIwY3_-ks/maxresdefault.jpg)

What does it feel like? Think about your physical reaction towards the changes and stages in the production of the feature (going slow motion may help!) and once again, put it into words. "I feel as if there was someone stretching my lower lip and my skin to the sides when I go into /æ/). Place your fingers to the sides of your lips (Underhill-style!); rest your chin on your palm and the fingers to the sides of your lower cheeks to feel the downward movement of the jaw.

Also think about your emotional reaction to the sound. Do you look happy when you say /æ/? Are there any "feelings" this sound/intonation feature evokes?

Find reference points: Look at your L1 starting point. What changes do you need to make to get to the L2 quality (or at least go "towards" the L2 quality?). Or what L2 sounds already learned can you use as reference? E.g.: To produce /æ/ I can lower my jaw, if I start from English /e/.

3. Give your tips a sequence, a wording and a set of gestures

You have now got technical info that informs your own production of the sound/intonation feature. You have got a set of multisensory and cognitive tips you can teach, a whole "bag of tricks". (Remember that only one pronunciation tip will not always do the trick. We all have different learning styles, diverse abilities in terms of phonetic coding, and we have different degrees of  awareness of what we do with our organs of speech. Therefore, we need to cater for different styles and "intelligencies")

So now you have to give your tips and tricks some sort of shape. Try to explain your discoveries in simple words, following a clear procedure, and allowing students some time to experience your guided "experiment" with mirrors or mobile phone cams. Use gestures, hand and body movements, "body gym", to accompany your tips. Use reference names or words (colours, animals, celebrities) to refer to the features (E.g.: the "yes, but" tone pattern; /æ/, the "cat", or "black", or "Harry" sound). (BTW, I owe this last "reference word" tip to Prof. Iannicelli, and Prof. Terluk. Plus, I want to acknowledge my former students who came up with "Cat in the Hat", and Harry (from One Direction) as reference items for for /æ/ and created tasks related to these reference words ). Recycle your gestures and tips all year round, as words or utterances with these features re-appear. Remember that a "one-off" systematisation session may not do the trick. Pronunciation is physical, motor, and as such, we need our muscles and our brain to work towards new habits, and we must practise, practise, practise (pretty much like going to the gym!)!

4. Test-drive your tips and if necessary.....recalculate! (GPS-like!)

Once we have got our tips and tricks ready to go, we need to try them out. In my experience, watching the tips "in operation" has helped me see whether my "mental and "physical associations" with the sound are actually transferrable. For instance, my association with the Puss in Boots from Shrek for /æ/ did not find a home in my students, as they could not relate to it, and they would represent their "choking" feelings with other types of noise. (Fair enough! It is a bit crazy, come to think of it!)

So by trying the tips out, monitoring students' reactions, listening to students produce the features, and assessing their output, we can reach a conclusion as to how effective a certain tip can be for a particular group. My best tips have actually stemmed from my most unsuccessful tips! (Recalculating....recalculating...) Paying attention to my students' attempts at producing a certain sound after my instruction, and noticing that the output sounds were not really what was expected, helped me find alternative ways to address the sound features that were not being taken up by my students. E.g.: many of my students focus on the "puffy cheeks" effect of /æ/ but fail to drop their jaws enough, and their resulting sound is the old fashioned [æ] sound, closer to /e/.  At times, then, our tips may help students address a certain aspect of the sound/intonation pattern we are teaching but we may need to find other ways to address other features (in my case, students were not addressing tongue height and jaw-lowering properly, but the lip spreading was appropriate, so  I had to seek new strategies to draw their attention to the features that were missing).

Of course...this can even become a whole research project in itself! "The success of the "puffy cheeks" tip in the acquisition of /æ/ in Spanish learners of English"...:p

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Final Remarks

• Whether you want to teach a native-like variety of English or you go for a more "English as a Lingua Franca" for intercultural communication approach, vowel quality is one feature that has been agreeed needs to be taught. And I would personally suggest that we should all come up with our own "tips and tricks" to teach vowel quantity and quality since these are some of the most "abstract" aspects of pronunciation to systematise -together with intonation, that is (worth another post!).
• I recall Robin Walker hinting at the fact that at first there is no need to reach a 100% accurate target, but we should aim at leaving the L1 "area" towards a differentiated target to build a new interlanguage L2 contrast which can then be fine-tuned. So perhaps we may not get our students to reach an accurate final target or quality at first with our tips, but the moment we make students aware of the differences between their L1 and English as an L2, and we start building proprioception skills, a whole new set of abilities are awakened, which will surely allow for changes at some point in the future. 
• Of course, depending on your context, you will work harder on helping a learner fine-tune a contrast towards complete accuracy, or perhaps just make sure they reach a close quality that allows for a contrast different from their own L1 quality but which makes it all intelligible. (I have a set of expectations with my teacher trainees that I may not always have with other groups of students)
• As we all know, pronunciation teaching is in a way, a craft. What works for one learner may not work for others, and if we want to do our job well, we need considerable time, face-to-face, especially, with our learners, working on the challenges and difficulties of each learner in particular. Perhaps we might need a longer, and more personalised session than for other skills, if we compare the time it may take to grade a written task, versus the time and energy it takes to grade or give feedback on an audio file or a student producing something live in front of us...but it has to be done! 
• As we all know, speaking is a "fleeting" product, and the moment our learners produce their sounds/intonation patterns, they are gone! So, school permitting, recording or videotaping does really allow students to reconstruct their production and have something to cling on for later improvement. I cannot stress this enough! 
• Finally, pronunciation, as we are always reminded, is physical. So we have to work towards the training and awareness of our bodies. Aftet all, we are working on people's articulation and motor skills and not on a written sheet of paper, so we have to tread carefully, find ways around, be respectful, and allow students to see the magic -and not the threat-, of it all.

Hope you have found this post useful. It does look like my own Pronunciation Teaching Manifesto, to be honest!

Report on the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference (#PTLC2015) at UCL. August 5-7th, 2015 - Part 1

I have just attended another fabulous conference, this time, on the teaching and learning of Phonetics at University College London. I was also blessed with the opportunity of presenting my own paper! PTLC takes place every two years, and as with other conferences the papers submitted are subjected to blind review by the academic commitee (hopefully the proceedings will be published soon!). In the meantime, you can read about the conference and check previous proceedings here.

In this post, I will be talking about some of the presentations I would like to comment on (as usual, any misinterpretations are my own). If you want to get a deferred "feel" of what the conference was like, you may want to see the Storify collection of live- tweets that Jane Setter put together (scroll to the very bottom of this post - and yes, there was some hectic tweeeting!)

This first post is on Day 1. 

Day 1: August 5th

The conference kicked off with University of Reading's Jane Setter's presentation of her "flipped learning" experience in her Phonetics courses at graduate and undergraduate levels. This methodology basically consists in making the most of class-time for practical and problem-solving tasks while assigning videotaped lectures and practical tasks with key as homework. There were some interesting references to the well-known Bloom's taxonomy, and also to Dale's 1969Cone of Experience, a thought-provoking approach to types of learning tasks that may contribute to the increase of retention types. Jane discussed the results of her assessment tasks with the flipped and "unflipped" (?) classes, with a marked improvement for students in the former, except for the dictation tasks. (Dictations and decoding tasks are always a problem, if you ask me! This does deserve a whole new post!)

Shawn Nissen from Brigham Young University also reported on a blended learning experience with large Phonetics classes (for Speech Therapy trainees, if I remember correctly) consisting of, among other things, lots of self-paced theoretical and practical tasks with key, leading to online assessment tasks (of which an 80% success grade should be achieved). I found it particularly interesting, and challenging as well, that many of the materials for decoding included audio files containing noise levels, and also disordered speech. There were also some true and realistic remarks worth recalling, such as the fact that Phonetics teaching needs to be orderly and it needs a "unique learning environment"and set of techniques we may not find when teaching other subjects.

Alice Yin Wa Chan introduced some of her own ideas to bring variety into the Phonetics classroom, including the use of water bottles as an analogy to draw students' awareness of the cavities, shapes, amplification in the vocal tract. She also found ways of connecting students' cultural practices (like the use of acronyms to describe their relationship status) to minimal pairs, and a reference to Peter Roach's comparison of allophones to different styles in handwriting.

Gwen Brekelmans discussed the results of her study on a group of Dutch learners of English at University and compared the effects of lack of explicit pronunciation instruction in two groups, one group of learners who had taken their "year abroad" experience, and others who had instruction for two years but were not trained during their third year. Once instruction had stopped for the second group of learners, subjects showed a clear deterioration of their foreign accent, especially in vowels. Those students spending a year abroad did show a bit more improvement. In all cases it was found that pronunciation of English as an L2 did not remain fully stable after instruction (which is exactly what happens with many of my teacher trainees once they graduate, sadly. Lots of pondering to do in this respect. It is definitely something worth giving a thought...)

Eva Estebas made a truly interesting presentation (fitting timely and perfectly with my current personal interests!) on an adaptation of ToBI and the School of London's nuclear configurations to teach intonation and help learners work autonomously at a graduate distance programme (big challenge, if you ask me!). Eva called this special concoction "TL_ToBI" (Tone and Break Indices for Teaching and Learning), and I would say she collected the best of both approaches, focusing on the connections between metrical and tonal structure, and the notation and visual aids for ToBI, and the tune description and nuclear configurations of the British School. Estebas reported an improvement in students' perception and production of English Intonation after employing this new approach.

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Here ends my Day 1 report on PTLC. More on this great conference coming up soon!

In the meantime, take a peek at this wonderful collection of tweets!