#IATEFL2015 Online Coverage #2: Interview to Luke Meddings

Part of the IATEFL Manchester Conference 2015 online experience included interviews with many delegates and presenters. In a previous post, I reviewed an interview with David Crystal. I would like to briefly comment on the 6-minute conversation a British Council presenter held with Luke Meddings this time. As usual, my own input, in a different colour.

Being 12,000 km away, I did not get to see Meddings' talk, which I was told was hilarious, but I would be happy to hear or read about it online, if anyone out there wants to report on it! (There's a brief reference to his talk and other pron talks in Mark Hancock's blog, BTW)

The interview with Luke Meddings, available here, begins with some points of reflection about the way we feel when we speak another language, the idea of being "frozen up", filled with anxiety, fearful of making mistakes. As the interviewer points out, at times it is this fear or anxiety that may lead us to focus on form, and forget meaning. This is something I generally notice with my advanced students at College: they are so concerned with sounds, or even with their own intonation patterns, that it just sounds as if they are reading "patterns" (as one of my colleagues says), reading a set of marks on the page, totally devoid of meaning. I was just thinking of David Brazil's (1980, 1997) notion of oblique orientation here. And not because my students, necessarily, use many level tones, but because their approach is oblique, even when using fall-rises, or rises! Their concern with form and accuracy is stronger than the expression of meaning and the need to address an audience. Moreover, I generally notice many learners making appropriate choices of tone and nucleus in their reading aloud experiences who fail to get the message across! And this, again, is connected to some features that I sometimes fear we may neglect when teaching pronunciation, and even when teaching speaking skills in general: the contribution of paralinguistic features to the overall meaning, and mood, of a text. 

The approach that Meddings suggests appears to address some of these paralinguistic concerns, as he takes up the idea of "impersonation" through body language and gesture, as well as breath and volume control, as a "key" to pronunciation. From what the interview shows, Meddings appears to have got the "hang" of voice quality and articulatory setting features of different people, like the Queen, or John Lennon, and even makes use of chewing gum to aid his impersonation. I remember students talking about impersonation techniques for English learning used in some English institutes in Buenos Aires. Students were asked to pick a celebrity they liked on their very first day, and they adopted this "second personality" throughout their studies. So one of my students was "Ginger Rogers", and that is what she was called by her teachers during her lessons, for six good years! In spite of the fact that this student did not entirely approve of the method, she said that this approach made her feel safe, as it was "Ginger" who was making mistakes, and not herself. Interesting.

Part of Meddings' premise is that we should learn to "let go", as pronunciation is physical and feedback can get on our skin. Once again, there is an invitation for learners to "find their own way of speaking English their own way". I have been thinking about these issues for quite some time, issues related to the "ownership of your interlanguage accent", to the challenge of "finding your own voice", and I have decided to put some of these ideas into a podcast-like post, coming soon, called "Your Accent, Your Patronus" (Yes, another Harry Potter reference! <3).

All in all, the interview gives us a taste of Luke Meddings' style, and it is always enriching to see other ways of doing pronunciation work in the classroom.

Conference Report #1: III Jornadas de la Didáctica de la Fonética (UNSAM, August 29th, 30th - Sept 4th, ENSLV JRF)

I attended a truly enriching event two weeks ago: a conference on the teaching of Phonetics, called " III Jornadas de la Didáctica de la Fonética", at Universidad de San Martín and the "Post-Jornadas" at "ENSLV Juan Ramón Fernández".
This post will be an attempt at reporting some of the highlights of the conference, at least according to my own personal interests. The pictures of the slides are a bit blurry but you can enlarge them by clicking on them, at least.

The conference started with a recorded interview to Alan Cruttenden by Mgtr Roxana Basso, which tackled points such as the use of the label "General British" and the motivations behind that choice (which I'd seen Jack Windsor Lewis explore years ago here) and the current associations in the media with RP. Mgtr Basso also discussed the future of the so-called Estuary English, to which Cruttenden, as many such as Prof Wells have done, agrees it will not become a future standard or "replacement for RP" as some people have claimed. Some interesting bits that were mentioned that make instruction and priorities for pronunciation teaching different from the ones ELF may propose were related to the role of word stress and hesitation pauses, which help learners become "native sounding", if that is the aim. There were quite a number of interesting views in these 20 minutes, and I could not take them all down, but the videoconference by Basso-Cruttenden will be made available online soon, so I'll link to it HERE once it is online.


The opening panel was brilliant, and I particularly enjoyed the presentations by:

• Alejandro Renato, who is working on an "intonation map" of Argentinian accents of Spanish using Sp-ToBI, from a connectionist perspective of perception. Renato mentioned the complexities behind the study and systematisation of intonational features, including the effect of sonority and duration, for example, in the measurement and meanings of contours, the need for a consideration of a "microtonal" dimension, and the multiplicity of dimensions operating and the amount of different layers of info encoded in a single contour. Brilliant remarks included the fact that human processing time is not lineal, as we work on different "temporal windows". There was also a critical review of ToBI.

• Leopoldo Labastía, made a fantastic presentation on the ways we mark foreground and background information in Spanish and English through tone and focus (in my humble opinion, the best talk at the conference):

•  María Emilia Pandolfi, an expert in the Phonology of Italian, discussed different activities to make pronunciation work more significant, communicative and contextualised.

On Friday afternoon, I made the most of the talks by:

• Francisco Zabala, friend and brilliant colleague, who discussed ways of teaching Phonetics I from a top-down perspective. He has found that making students aware of stress, the contrast between content and function words, and the overwhelming presence of schwa, together with a few rules of thumb regarding spellings, can ensure student success in transcription and pronunciation.

• Marisol Hernández,  teacher and actress who discussed some ideas to relate our pronunciation work to drama, and made a point of how talking another language is a way of "staging something through our bodies" 

• Gonzalo Espinosa, Alejandra Dabrowski, Leopoldo Labastía from Universidad Nacional del Comahue reviewed the functions and intonation of cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences in English and Spanish and showed some great integrative materials for the Language and Phonetics lessons. I was truly inspired by the way they have managed to design instructional materials which place prosody in context and lead students towards using intonation naturally.

• Adriana Cáldiz et al from Universidad Nacional de La Plata who reviewed different theories relating politeness to prosodic choices.

And later, I also made my own presentation on
ways of teaching the prosodic configuration of instructional discourse, based on my 2013 research and on the type of work I have been doing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Discourse Intonation in the last two years, with my Lab 3 and 4 and Phonetics 2 courses.

Saturday morning was also interesting, with inspiring talks by 

• Andrea Perticone, another colleague who has a great brain for Phonetics, particularly everything acoustic. She presented her preliminary findings on the way we hear tones, and particularly on what happens when there are "non-prototypical" tones, in our context, those tones that go beyond the "mould" presented by O'Connor and Arnold, which dominates our teaching of tones from an imitative perspective. There were thought-provoking remarks on micro-prosodic effects that need to be considered for pitch measurement (pitch scaling, intensity, duration, the temporal dimension) which ToBI may not consider; issues of stylisation and compression, and allotony. Looking forward to hearing more on this, it was great!

• Lucía Rivas and  Miriam Germani from Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, who are also working on the prosodic configurations of genre from a SFL perspective (they are like my intellectual soul-mates!). They discussed their experience teaching intonation and discourse, and the need to get away from mere taxonomies to engage in discourse analysis proper, not only discussing linguistic but also paralinguistic features of text ypes.

• Diana Martinez Salatín, who reported on an experiment relating pronunciation to transcription errors from interlanguage phonology theories.

There were also talks by colleagues from UNLP and UNCo stressing the importance of doing contextualised, significant dictation and pronunciation practice with authentic materials.

I missed the talks by Miriam Germani on Storytelling, and Ana Irazábal (Phonology FB page editor!) called "Funology", which I would have loved to attend, but concurrent sessions are like that.

***

On September 4th, the "Post Jornadas" took place at Lenguas Vivas Juan Ramón Fernández. My colleague Francisco Zabala made a presentation on the connections between phonetics and listening in our context of speakers of Riverplate Spanish learning English, and he reviewed some of the issues that affect comprehension and intelligibility. There were also some live comprehension experiments which proved how complex the whole process can be.

Almost a century of English pronunciation teaching in my country!

The next speaker was Patrick, a language assistant from the US, who commented on Upspeak, and some findings from the original paper on "Jeopardy" by Linneman. The presenter also made connections with political discourse and presented his own hypotheses on the matter.

Finally, another presentation by Andrea Perticone. This time, she discussed some connections between the Gestalt (notions of figure and ground) and issues of focus and tone in English, with clear examples and illustrative videos, very useful for learners. (And my intelligent phone run out of its unintelligent battery, which is why I don't have any pics, I am afraid :( )

***

Whenever I attend a conference, I generally feel excited about the networking, even more thrilled to learn new things, but I also cannot help feeling a bit miserable when I find that most of the research I do is self-imposed, non-funded, and that attending conferences generally means asking for the day off and getting that money discounted from my salary because the red tape in the City of Buenos Aires for us in tertiary education is just so impossible. 

Anyway, I believe this conference was brilliant, as I have found like-minded people doing work on prosody more even than before, and to see we all come from different places and traditions and still see eye to eye, and that we all "dared" trod the path of intonation and meaning, which many people fear so fiercely, was just inspiring, and I am really grateful for the experience.

So here's the bunch of us, like-minded Phonlings from ISP JVG, ENSLV JRF, UNCo and UNLPam phonetising over food! Obviously!

 ***

It is always the case with concurrent sessions that you miss out on a lot of presentations you would ehave liked to see, so I am not reporting on all the papers, obviously. If you are curious, the whole programme and presentation titles are available HERE. And I have made a summary of my live tweeting below:

Summer School in English Phonetics: 4 years later. An exploration of my own intonation.

To anyone who's embarked on the world of ELT, visiting London is both a must and an excursion into some sort of fairy tale. It came quite late for me, being 29 and having been teaching English for 10 years, but money and fear are never to be underestimated. Or maybe they should.

Anyways. I'd been dreaming of visiting the UK, and of studying Phonetics at UCL, and one day in May 2010, after having talked to hubby about it weeks on end, he "forced" me to enrol. The next day, he was dragging me to the tourist agency, against all my fears, to get my plane ticket. And this is how it all started (BTW, I will always be thankful to Leo for this, <3, and for so many other "pushes".)

The Summer Course in English Phonetics (a.k.a SCEP) is a two-week course in University College London, and it is organised into a general strand, and an IPA strand (a group of candidates for the IPA certification who train for the exam and sit for it at the end of SCEP). The course includes general lectures on pronunciation, intonation and their didactics, as well as tutorials in smaller groups according to your professional/academic profile. For us with a previous thorough training (and obsession) in Phonetics, many things were mostly revision (though the lectures were truly clear and didactic, I would like to lecture like that myself!) and I myself was a bit disappointed at not seeing much of my passion, Discourse Intonation (which I wrote on the feedback sheet! Couldn't help it!), but the whole experience was brilliant, particularly, the tutorials and ear-training sessions.

Me on the first day, upon entering the Cruciform Building. Excited, to say the least!

The course director is the renowned phonetician Michael Ashby. We all know he is more than knowledgeable, but I also want to stress that he is a really kind, generous person, even when I, cheekily, asked for a change of group (I had been placed in a group of teachers who did not know about the IPA, and it had probably been my fault as I had not given further details about my background in the application). I will never forget that first day when I approached him, and, unknowingly, used a really low fall whgen sayin "Excuse me". He sensed from my intonation that bad news were coming, and I did not notice at first that a more polite intonation was appropriate. I felt sooo ashamed, and he was so kind about it all. I am so careful with my "Excuse me"s now....
(I now always pester my students with the "right"(?) "more appropriate" (?) "least face-threatening"(?) intonation of social rituals (Paul Tench devotes chapter 10 in his 2011 book to them).

Manuela and I with Michael on the last day. Before that, I had been given a tour of the Chandler House Library. I was dazzled.

In spite of my intonation (and yes, I do want to sound like a native speaker, I am afraid), I was lucky enough to be given a place at the groups led by none other than Jack Windsor Lewis, and Jane Setter.

Jack Windsor Lewis. What can I say?

With Jane Setter. Glad to see strong women like her in the Phonetics field!

It was a true privilege to be part of those groups and to meet such fabulous classmates from all over the world. It is quite strange, when you are abroad, and especially if you come from a country which is not truly multicultural (OK, that can be questioned now), you lose track at times of how your habits, your way of dressing, or greeting, or addressing other people, may not be taken the way you expect them to. I now listen to my audio files from SCEP, and I hear myself as "pushy", even "smug", when I probably didn't mean to be so. And I guess my awareness of intonation has changed now, but I wonder what I came across as at that particular moment, especially when asking questions, to the people around me.

I wonder how much of our interlanguage intonation can be "damaging" in building rapport with native and non-native speakers of English. I believe that if you have a good "control" of the sounds of L2, inaccurate intonation may even make it more shocking or create the wrong effect. I think this also applies to other paralinguistic features, and I guess some of us Latin Americans with Italian blood can be "loud" as well. This is me, back in 2010, and I can't help feeling I was a bit "cheeky" and "abrupt" in my way of presenting these questions, both in terms of wording, the speed and maybe mostly because of my divergent intonation (sorry about the sound quality):



I was listening to BBC 4 this morning, and I came across this programme, "Gardeners' Questions Time". I paid special attention to the questions by the participants (I've been doing so in other open forum shows as well), and I do hear some noticeable differences (I can grant you that there may be age differences, an altogether different context, but still, this appears to be a nice example for me of the way I would like to sound when presenting a question, both vocab and intonation-wise):


It's funny how when you use English quite frequently (40 teaching periods a week!) in a non-English speaking environment and you listen to English at home (BBC, London Heart, Smooth Radio and TV series), some things become more "natural", and you achieve "gut" feelings and reactions to other people's performance in English. This can also be a disadvantage, but I find that nowadays I am more sensitive to the perception of convergence in both wording and intonation of my students. (I am not necessarily passing any judgment on this, but this is how I feel). At times, as for my example above, it is hard to "pin down" what it is that makes me feel I may sound "pushy", and I find this same "quality" in the way some Argentinian teachers of English here talk as well.

***

Now. Back to 2010. Lots of interesting lectures at SCEP introduced me to people I had not read before (shame on me!) such as Beverley Collins, whose textbook I now use with my Phonology I students, Geoff Lindsey, whose blog I follow devoutly, Tim Wharton (the pragmatics-prosody link I was looking for!), and my favourite accent at SCEP, Bronwen Evans'. There was a great lecture by Eva Estebas Vilaplanas, and her book on pronunciation is a great asset for Spanish speakers seeking to improve their pronunciation of English.

And of course, John Wells was there, he delivered a lecture on Accents and some of the dictation sessions, and I made the most of Question Time to ask questions about his book on Intonation and the latest edition of the dictionary, both extremely popular in my country (Luckily, as the questions were written down, my intonation would not sound "impertinent". Phew!).

With John Wells.

So all in all, if you feel like brushing up your knowledge on Phonetics or learning more about it, or getting some good feedback, I would recommend attending SCEP. It is not just about meeting and networking with the "big names", it is mostly about bonding with wonderful people who can help you see how wide and large the world is, and how a simple passion as pronunciation can bring people together (or apart, if you use divergent intonation as I did!). (Speaking of past traumas....back to blog post 2, right?!)

***

Of course, during my two weekends in London in August 2010 and in the afternoons, I just hopped on and off the Tube /tʃu:b/ to visit the landmarks. I was puzzled by the Englishes I heard in my daily interaction with people while shopping or seeing the sights, or commuting, and my own stereotypical view of the "oral London" was reshaped by this trip. My fascination with accents had begun. (More on this, on another post!)

***

Magic occurs when you travel, and as my cousin says, when you are away on your own, you are kind of "naked", and still, you don't fear to show who you are. This is what happened to me. As a woman entering my 30s, this "me-time" allowed me to open up and make new friends, and be myself. One of those great friends is Manuela, another Argentinian, and who remains a close friend, even though we live 1000 kms away from each other and have not met face-to-face again since 2011.

Manu and I holding our certificates! :D

And life has given me the chance of meeting Angelica  and Jan again this year on my trip to Barcelona and to the UK, and I am so glad we can still stay in touch.

Our fabulous group. I still remain connected (thanks to Facebook!) to Angelica, Anabela, Jan, Manu and Veronika.

***

If you want to read more about prosody and perceptions of "pushiness", politeness, and connections between communicative functions and tone from a discoursal or psycholinguistic perspective, here are a few selected references:

Intonation as an interface between language and affect - Didier Grandjean , Tanja Ba¨nziger and Klaus R. Scherer http://cms.unige.ch/fapse/neuroemo/pdf/Grandjean_ProgressBrainResearch2006.pdf

Couper-Kuhlen, E. 17. Pragmatics and prosody: prosody as social action.Handbooks of Pragmatics, 491.

Culpeper, J., Bousfield, D., & Wichmann, A. (2003). Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(10), 1545-1579.

Culpeper, J. (2005). Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show: The Weakest Link. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 1(1), 35-72.

Tench, P (1996). The Intonation Systems of English. Chapters 4 and 5.