Podcast-y reflection #3: Pronunciation Teaching and Mindfulness

This is a very brief reflection, recorded in a slightly mindful moment, about the contributions that mindfulness could make to pronunciation teaching, or at least, why I believe it is important to consider including this practice of "being present" in our lessons.

It is just a "reflection in passing", perhaps presenting more questions than answers, and inviting you to come up with your own tips and conclusions. For me, this is just the beginning of a huge number of thoughts and ideas that go round and round in my head (endlessly, like a Mary-go-round...).


Note #1: I have misplaced the stress in the word "concrete". It should be /ˈkɒŋkriːt/ (LPD, 2008). I have also mispronounced a very, very important word, "proprioception". It should be /ˌprəʊp ri‿ə ˈsep ʃən, ˌprɒp-, -əʊˈ•-/ (LPD, 2008).
(There must be a few more "errors", but I noticed I was not getting these correctly the moment I uttered them....mindful?)

Note #2: In the recording I mention Adrian Underhill and William Acton. Click on the names to access their websites and hear what they have to say regarding pronunciation teaching!.

Note #3: There are lots of resources on the Web regarding Mindfulness. These are just two links you may consult just to get started:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/mindfulness
http://www.mindfulnet.org/page2.htm


Have a nice week!

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.

***

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

***

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!

Pronunciation, Phonesthesia and Realia: The case of the STRUT vowel (Part 2)

In my latest post, I compared General British STRUT and its variants to Riverplate Spanish /a/. I reviewed some articulatory and also acoustic features, and I also went over some basic notions of Speech Perception theories. I established that many of my Riverplate Spanish learners may associate English /ʌ/ with their Spanish /a/ "magnets" and may, thus, find the differentiation between both vowels challenging, both for perception and production.

(BTW, apparently, the differentiation between English /ʌ/ and other vowels appears to be quite an issue for many speakers of English as an L1 or L2, as Ettien Coffi (2014) reveals in this paper from the Proceedings of the 5th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference - page 11 onwards)

In this post, I would like to present some of the tips & tricks I have collected over the years (and I will try to acknowledge my colleagues' contributions whenever I can!). My claim will be that many "tips" do the job when they help create an image of the L2 sound which may help the learner steer away from their L1 quality, and that this may not necessarily just be reliant on making the right articulatory movements.

This is why some of my suggestions will draw on creating "mental images" through the contributions of Phonesthesia, and Realia; images which should appeal not only to visual aspects, but also auditory, and emotional resources.

***

A few definitions first:

Realia refers to the introduction of real-life objects in the classroom, to make the learning experience of certain concepts and routines more vivid. This technique also enables students to engage all their senses and learning styles. We can introduce actual objects, or we can create virtual situations that may allow students to experience similar emotions and actions as those recreated in the real situations.

(You can get some teaching ideas on using teaching aids in the TEFLSurvival blog, and the BusyTeacher website.)

Phonesthesia refers to the analysis of "sound symbolism". It basically studies how clusters of sounds may center around lexical sets that express similar meanings. So for example, in the Dictionary of Sound by Margaret Magnus, you can find a number of STRUT words that could be related to "puffy things":  plush, fuzz, fluff, cuff, muff, ruff.

This reminds me of a poem by Tony Mitton, called "Fluff"

What's this here?
A piece of fluff.
I don't know where I get this stuff.
I'll blow it away
with just one puff.
Huff!
There. That's enough.

So the combination of vowel /ʌ/ and the /f/ quality, reminiscent of blowing, creates this "puffy" effect of fluff and makes the poem lovely for oral performance, and effective! 

***

As a College student, I had a hard time fine-tuning my STRUT away from my Spanish /a/. I was given instructions, I  knew I had to drop my jaw, but still, it sounded pretty much like my own Spanish /a/. (Mind you, my friend and colleague Prof. Francisco Zabala has found that the STRUT quality as an allophone is present in many Spanish combinations of "a" + sound /x/, as in "caja".)  And I see my students at Teacher Training College producing a similar type of Spanish /a/ sound. So after a few tries, after watching native speakers of English produce their STRUT sounds, analysing the way this jaw-dropping takes place for this sound, I came up with the first articulatory tip that worked for some of my students:

"Keep to the railings of the mouth". I asked my students to imagine that each of the two sides of their lips, or the corner of their mouths, had a vertical railing, and that there should not be any smiling, as it would defy the railings of the mouth, and that the articulatory movement should be downwards, not sidewards. I could not help thinking of these special types of puppets ventriloquists use:

Image credit: David Noah. Flickr:https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidnoah/5170268541/

With this idea in mind, in one of my lessons, students were asked to place their fingers in the corners of their mouths in the puppet-like manner above, and look at themselves in a mirror/front facing camera of their mobile phones while producing STRUT words, trying to avoid a smile (which was tough, as they were having fun!).Therefore, this sound became the "puppet" sound (and for older Argentinians, this was the "Chirolita" sound, after a well-known ventriloquist in Argentina).

This articulatory tip did the trick for many students, but yet, not all of them really got to acquire a close quality; many students still produced a much fronter, or sometimes, opener vowel.

So I resorted to phonesthesia, and I thought of a few words I associated with the STRUT quality. By repeating the STRUT vowel to myself in isolation, I came up with these words (and a few others, after trying the marvellous Sound Search tool in the Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary CD-Rom!)

• Things falling and making noise: thud, plunge  
• Unpredictable, shocking: abrupt, blunt, rough
• Pushing, stabbing(?): thrust, chuck, cut, nudge, punch, butt

(BTW (deviation alert!), as a Miranda Hart fan, I could help laughing at myself while repeating these words!)

So with some groups of students, I tried playing around with the words above, getting into the mood of things "falling" or happening "abruptely", which acts in much the same way the downward movement of the jaws does, like a small "bite", even.

Encouraged by the success of this tip for some students, I started thinking about the realia of "emotions", the "tone" that this sound evoked in me, and I could not help feeling "dull", "disgusted" or "miserable", as with these words:

• love
• money
• you suck!
• duh!
• yuck!
• f*#k

And I said to myself (and forgive the vulgarity of it all!), "what makes you suffer? Love, or money?". So I asked my students to think about their most "miserable" feeling, place themselves in that "sad place" (a bit like many actors do), "pull a miserable face" and go for /ʌ/ . 

Credits: http://i3.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4311979.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/Kim-Kardashian-and-Kanye-West-arrive-for-a-dinner-at-Hakkasan.jpg

(I have a confession to make: I sometimes ask my students to produce the f-word. It works! Perfect STRUT qualities EVERY time!)

When using this strategy a few years ago, a student came up with the memory of losing a match as a kid, and remembering his father's disappointed reaction (a very sad place to go to, if you ask me!). So we worked on that emotion, and we created a situation in which a very stern father or mother would push their son or daughter to win a race. And I came up with this terrible (!) poem/song, with a "run, run, run" chorus to the melody of Pink Floyd's "Run like Hell". It does sound like a bitter and very dark poem, but as a dramatic technique, it did the trick!

In one of the lessons where I tried the poem, students worked in two teams, with one group acting as an audience, singing the "run, run" Pink Floyd chorus, and a second group "mumbling" the words of the poem as they all pictured the race and their son running. The "little play" that resulted of this poem reminded me of Hermione in the audience uttering the Confundus charm and Harry saying "Come on, Ron" in a sort of low murmur (Deviation alert #2!):

***

Somehow this idea of a "miserable" STRUT sound has been the most effective tip to help my students provide a version of /ʌ/ that drove them closer to a quality different from their Spanish /a/, and also from the "Happy, cheerful, /æ/" and the "Relaxed, cute, awwww-like, /ɑ:/":

***

As with everything, you can find your own way of adapting these tricks for your own lessons, taking into consideration the "classroom management" factor, because let's face it, pronunciation work may create a bit of a mess in the classroom!

And of course, as Adrian Underhill claims, multisensory pronunciation learning is the key. Building one's own proprioception, and supplementing this with mental, auditory and emotional images should, in some way or other, contribute to the uniqueness of our learners' styles and processes. As I always say, what may work for one student may not necessarily work for the other! (Another piece of evidence for the "messy" nature of pronunciation work, sorry to say!)

***

Final thought: It is funny that many of the nice things of life may also take STRUT, and they don't seem to "fit" with with sound. What shall we do about 

love, fun, feeling chuffed, abundance, bubbles ...and maybe, money?

I leave that to you!

#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 #3: "Accentuate: Bringing Pronunciation to the Fore" Part 1

"Accentuate: Bringing Pronunciation to the Fore" event by IATEFL's PronSIG and NATECLA.
Read the programme of the event here.

As an anticipation to my next blog post with my views and takes on the presentations I have managed to watch live, find a taster of the talks and the Twitter discussion below:


Crystal & Crystal: "Dealing with Accents"

Hancock: "Doing things with sounds Practical pronunciation activities for your classroom"

Young: "The Silent Way approach to teaching pronunciation, illustrated using French"
Messum: "What to Teach Before you Teach Sounds"

Underhill: "Proprioception in learning new sounds, words and connected speech"

Concurrent Sessions
Tatiana Skopintseva "Pronunciation Gymnastics for Non-Native Presenters in English"
Simon Andrewes "Accentuate the positive: positive approximation and the lingua franca core"
Linda Ruas "Radical phonology": protest chants - a meaningful context for improving sounds and suprasegmentals
Paul Carley:   "An UnhappY Vowel: Is our Transcription Fit for Purpose?"
Cornee Ferreira "What to imitate? Between the native-speaker model and the lingua franca core."
Charlotte Haenlein "Ideas for embedding pronunciation work in everyday classroom topics at lower levels"
Judy Kirsh & Karen Dudley "Pronunciation for integration: stress, rhythm and intonation"
Catarina Pontes "Putting sounds together: practical pronunciation activities for the English classroom" 
Wayne Rimmer "Designing pronunciation materials"

Analysing "errors": My "shame" list

When I first considered writing this blog, I thought of it as an answer to all my quandaries during my lessons. I was thinking of my students first, in fact. But now that I've embarked on this blogging adventure, I have noticed that I find my own processes fit for analysis, and that I can forge a better path for my students if I retrace my steps as a learner. Well. To be honest, I don't think I've ever stopped being a learner, myself.

This is why this blog post is going to address another of my obsessions with pronunciation which is part of my Evernote Moleskine notebook, travelling with me in my mobile and my bag. I humorously, and dramatically, call it....

The SHAME list!

Image credit:"De Paso Arte"

My "shame-on-you!" list includes a number of words that I have mispronounced systematically (or still do, at times!) (Now, I am not going to reveal his name, but there is a friend and great colleague of mine who also keeps one of these..... ;) ). This post, then, will examine some of my versions of these words, and an attempt at an explanation for my mispronunciations.

Warning! The words "error", "mistake", "mispronunciation" will appear a number of times in this post for the purposes of discussing some of the common views on this aspect of the learning process. I try to adopt a positive view towards error, try to be analytical towards it, and that is the spirit of this article.

***

A bit of theory first. There are different categorisations of "mistakes" around, and one of the views on "error" I first found attractive while a student at College was that outlined by Julian Edge (1989), in his book  Mistakes and Correction. In a nutshell, what I particularly liked about it was this division between:

• slips: those "mistakes" made due to lack of proper attention, which, if pointed to, the student can self-correct.
• errors: those mistakes we make which include features that have been systematised by teachers but which have not yet been "internalised" or "appropriated" or "automatised" by us; 
• attempts: those mistakes which involve the student's experimentation with features that have not been taught, or the overapplication of rules into other contexts.

This leads me into another view that considers the source of error. This great article from Macquairie University explains this very neatly, and I would also like to make a point of some of these categories here:

• Transfer from L1 errors: we all know that we tend to interpret foreign sounds from the filter of our L1 phonology, and as I have discussed in previous posts, the closer to L1 we interpret a foreign sound to be, the more likely we will have more difficulty in learning it (Flege, 1987 and others). Many interlanguage mistakes, then, imply the production of an L1 sound for an L2 quality which we consider to be approximate, or just because it is the only quality we have "at our disposal".
• Spelling-to-Sound errors: these can be fully blamed on the irregular spelling of English (especially if the student uses a transparent, phonetic language as L1), and of course, you can then curse (or enjoy!) the history of English! (I've been reading a great book by David Crystal on this, highly recommended!). Students may merely apply an L1 sound to an L2 spelling looking similar to an L1 spelling, or interpret an English spelling he/she knows about into a context where in fact it is not associated to the sound in quesiton: bʌtcher for /ˈbʊtʃə /, for example.
• Hypercorrection errors: this consists in the overapplication of a rule that does not fit into a context the student believes it should apply to. My secondary school students, for example, apply the /ɪd/ ending in contexts with sibilants, through analogy of the third person singular suffix rule: [wotʃid] for /wɒtʃt/.
• Performance errors: this refers to the errors that may be "instilled" by the challenges of a particular task, that is, lack of weakening by some students when reading aloud, or overchunking when producing spontaneous speech, etc.

A note on another error-related issue. The transfer vs developmental debate: This is a very interesting way of looking at errors. As we have seen before, there are many common mistakes that reveal that the student is actively making hypotheses as to what the language "sounds like", and these cannot be truly seen as transfer/interference errors. At times we are so used to hearing some of these, that we fail to see that several mistakes are actually attempts towards a sound that may bring about difficulty. Take the sound /dʒ/, quite rarely at times used in Spanish as an allophone of /ʒ/ (Yes, another debate as to whether /ʒ/ can still be taken to be the phoneme used for <y, ll> spellings in Riverplate Spanish over [ʃ] or the other way round. Long story! No time to draw on this here!). The video of a local celeb, Susana Gimenez, shows different renderings of the word "you" and some (not all, though) have [dʒ]:

(Sorry about this!) Now. When our students say [ʃip] for "jeep", they are not necessarily transferring this from Spanish, as a true instance of transfer would probably be something like [xip]. This pronunciation which makes our students' rendering of "jeep" homophonous with "sheep" reveals that our learners feel this sound is different and approximate it to a quality they may be more familiar with.

A hypercorrection mistake in this respect may be our students' use of [ʒ] for /ʃ/, as when they say "shopping" as [ʒopin], for example. This is becoming a bit of a sociophonetic feature, as I can easily identify some features of the social background of those students who generally pronounce this this way.

OK. Back to my own errors, then. My own "shame list".

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 The horror! :p  List 1: [eɪ] for /æ/
The words below stayed fossilized in my interlanguage for a long time. They surely responded to my overapplication, hypercorrection of the /eɪ/ for "a" rule:

*eneɪmel, teɪpestry, eɪbbey (!)

for General British /ɪˈnæməl̩, i-,  ə-/, /ˈtæpɪstri, -ə-/, /ˈæbi /
(Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD) (Wells, 2008), English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD, 2011) edited by Hartman, Roach and Setter )

There was a sort-of famous song by a local rap band, here, called "Abbey Road". I guess I will have to blame them (ha!) for my serious mispronunciation of this placename while in London in 2010 (felt sooo ashamed!):

In the opposite direction, I remember having problems with the word apron, which I produced as [ˈæprən ] instead of /ˈeɪprən /, and [ˈæprɪkɒt ] for /ˈeɪprɪkɒt, -rə- /  .

List 3: Word Stress
Again, I guess some of these errors stem on either the hypercorrection of the Teutonic tendency towards early stress:  ˈcoincide,  inˈnovative or the overapplication of my perception of the French tendency towards late stress: maˈssage, misˈchief, emploˈyee . I could have also "fallen pray" to the influence of American English.
The proper word stress according to the cited versions of LPD and EPD goes:  /ˌkəʊɪnˈsaɪd, -ən- /, /ˈɪnəvətɪv, -veɪ-, ɪˈnəʊvətɪv / (Wells 2008 has an interesting poll on the pronunciation of this word!), /ˈmæsɑːʒ, -ɑːdʒ /, /ˈmɪstʃɪf / (EPD accepts /tʃi:f/) , /emˈplɔɪiː, ɪm-, əm-/. In this latter case, my own version is accepted /ˌemplɔɪˈiː/ but as the last entry in both pronunciation dictionaries.

List 4: [ʌ] for /ʊ/
Another case of hypercorrection in the words mʌstache, pʌssycat  for /məˈstɑːʃ, mu-/, /ˈpʊsikæt/. In the case of "moustache", American English influence may also be "to blame".
Many of my students also struggle with the word bʌtcher for /ˈbʊtʃə / and  cʌshion for | ˈkʊʃn̩ |.

List 5: Miscellaneous
A few other words I find myself at odds with, include: tournament, handkerchief, gauge, drawer, demise.
I was relieved to see in the dictionary that the first two words also accept my versions:  [ˈtɜːn ə mənt], [ˈhæŋkətʃi:f] and I guess my perceived "error" stemmed from making a spelling-to-sound connection. In the case of the second word, I believe it is the spelling that initially led me into an /i:/ sound.
My versions for the last three words: *[gɔ:dʒ][drɔ:ə][dəmi:z] for the words /ɡeɪdʒ/, /drɔː/, /dɪˈmaɪz /. I guess these three are mispronounced due to different reasons. In the case of "drawer", I thought it was a homophone of the "one who draws", so my analogy backfired here. For "gauge", I don't remember finding another <au> spelling being pronounced in this way and its etymology does not help me at all (I should maybe check the Phonology of Old French!?), so my knowledge of spelling-to-sound connections was used logically, I guess. In the case of demise, I guess it would probably have to do with the fact that the "-ise" ending is generally /aɪz/ in verbs, not nouns, where this ending is generally  /i:z/. So, in spite of applying the rule correctly, I have not pronounced it correctly (such is...English!)

Hope that some of these items of my "shame list" have helped you wonder about the source of your own mispronunciations! (At a very high level of obsession, you'll understand!)

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To err is human, and "native" speakers of English also engage in frequent pronunciation "errors", and these are reported in some very interesting articles. Some views are really extreme and defo beat my own personal passion, let me tell you!

"8 Pronunciation Errors that made the English language what it is today:" - The Guardian . HERE
"100 Most Often Mispronounced Words in English" HERE
"More than 80% British People Can't Speak Properly" HERE
"17 Everyday Words you may just be Mispronouncing" HERE

Any pronunciation pet-peeves out there? Post them on the "comments" box!