Pronunciation Integration #3: Word Stress & Word Formation

We all have our pet peeves as teachers. I have always dreaded international exam mock sessions, myself. I found those lessons to be endless, with my students filling in sheets and sheets of tasks piling up on my desk. Automatism in all its glory. (Mind you, I have tried for years to make exam preparation fun, significant, relevant, but when the moment for "exam rehearsal" came....it was just sheer torture for me). 

Anyway. One day, some six years ago, while browsing through exam sheets, something really, really obvious hit me: there is so much work on pronunciation we can do with our Use of English paper! I just realised this was my big chance to mix my two greatest sources of "suffering", and overcome this annoying feeling: I decided I would take those word formation exercises (Part 3 of FCE 2015 exam, for instance) to introduce Word Stress to my students. Oh, yes, English word stress! *sigh*

In other words, when we teach affixation (one of the many features of vocabulary), we can introduce, we should introduce, some features of word stress. In particular, we may plunge into the stress-fixing, -neutral or -attracting features of English suffixes. Affixation is one of the many links between pronunciation and vocabulary teaching, as was made explicit in a few pronunciation teaching books, like the volume edited by Jones (2016), and the beloved manual by Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (1996, 2010). 

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Important detour. A little bit of theory. Before we go any further, let's discuss  one of the ways in which we can define levels of stress/unstress in words. Cruttenden (2014) and Ortiz Lira's  "Word Stress and Sentence Accent" (1998)  define four levels of prominence that we can represent through inerlinear "tadpole" notation:

Levels of prominence. Based on Ortiz Lira (1998) and Cruttenden (2014) 

Tadpole interlinear notation.

(Note 1, elementary, Watson!: Stressed syllables are generally characterised by a change in pitch, and by generally being louder, and longer. These syllables obviously have a full and  strong vowel.)

(Note 2: Ortiz Lira (1998) has done a great job of explaining the differences between three tricky terms: stress, accent, and prominence. It is interesting to note that both him and Cruttenden include in their description a level of unstressed syllables treated as  "minor prominences"  only because of their full vowel quality, but not fully "prominent" in other ways ...though perhaps quantity may also be of interest here....)

This "word stress mess" that English is subject to is, in part, a result of the several linguistic "invasions" that have shaped the English language through history. There are two main tendencies operating in English word stress, one towards early stress (Germanic, Anglo-Saxon) and one towards late stress (Romanic, Latin). These two forces are always in tension, and etymology does not always help. As a result of this, in English we have secondary, and even, tertiary stresses early in the word when the main or primary stress falls on the last two or three syllables of the word: 

prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃn, ˌɪnfəˈmeɪʃn

As you can see, there is also another important tendency in English  to avoid "stress clash" and keep an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables whenever possible. At times, as in "pronunciation" and "information", this alternation is pretty mathematical: 1234, 1234, but this is not always the case. (See Ortiz Lira 1998 for a comprehensive list of stress patterns in polysyllabic words). So English word stress is a mess, yes, but there are a few rules we can cling to.

Now, as it happens, we can, to a certain extent, predict word stress in derivations (note that inflected forms are not subject to changes in stress). We can divide suffixes into three groups:

So if we know the stress pattern in the root, we can have an idea as to where the primary and secondary stresses may fall once a certain suffix has been appended to the root by knowing the behaviour of the suffix and also considering the tendency for alternation. (For a extensive discussion of affixation and stress, check Cruttenden, 2014 and Teschner and Whitley, 2004, and one of the appendices in Ashton and Shepherd, 2012). 

When we approach the teaching of word formation in the classroom, then, we should help our learners to become familiar with the rules associated to each suffix. What is more, we also need to aid them in creating a sort of "auditory template" for different word stress patterns. The last part of this post addresses this last point.

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Around the same period of my "integration" discovery at secondary school, two of my colleagues were working in their Lab 3 courses with this great book series by the great Brita Haycraft, called English Aloud. Among many creative tasks, there are a few brilliant songs aimed at teaching word stress and suffixation, like the one I post below:

From: Haycraft, B.(1992)  English Aloud. Heinemann.

You can see the that Haycraft has included a "shSHsh..." pattern in the song (which is a sort of Bossa Nova, in fact!) to illustrate the stress pattern at the end of -ATION words. You can build our own battery of "noises" to "musicalise" the pattern. You can tap your feet on the floor, nod your head, clap hands or snap fingers to mark the different levels of stress. You can train your learners to hear the "beats" in their minds, the sort of "ringing effect" that stress has in our heads. 

You can also devise your own language, as Hancock (1996) has brilliantly done with his "DAda" language game (which we all love!). 

You can also resort to other Total Physical Response (TPR) activities to represent levels of stress, in what I like to call the "Equalizer game":

Credit: http://orig15.deviantart.net/7602/f/2011/054/f/0/f05bbbb5e1b31309a1a514c748f8ea5a-d26kux4.jpg

1.  Make a row of chairs, one for each syllable in the words you are going to produce. 
2.  Each student adopts the identity of a syllable, and stands in front of a chair. 
3. When you produce a polysyllabic word, students representing unstressed syllables should sit down, and those who are on "stressed" chairs, should stay up. 
4. Then each student produces the syllable that corresponds to them (and this makes a good opportunity to reflect on weak and strong syllables, by the way!)
5. All students produce the word in unison.

This game can also be used for peer-assessment for both perception and production skills: you can ask a student to read out a word, and you can get the students by the chairs to represent the pattern produced by this student. The student's version can be compared to the teacher's, or to an audio version of the file, and corrected, if necessary.

Apart from representing the words you have uttered, you can work on melody-to-word perception by providing students with lists of words to be associated to certain patterns. You can hum or DAda word stress patterns for students to fill with actual words, so a possible task question could be:

Visual reinforcement and manipulation of objects tends to be very helpful as well to make these features "tangible". Many of you may be familiar with Judy Gilbert's "rubber band" technique to mark vowel length, which is useful to mark stress in some contexts (careful with pre-fortis clipping, though!). You can use the "tadpole" notation, or consider other ways of graphically illustrating stress patterns in words, such as plasticine balls or bars, or  an abacus:

Credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Abacus_34437.jpg

If you are feeling insecure about your own placement of stress as a teacher (no worries! we all feel that way!), you can use the recordings in the two most popular pronunciation dictionaries (LPD or EPD), or any online dictionary with sound recordings, for that matter. Forvo and YouGlish may also come in useful, though you may need to do some fact-checking first.

Finally, there are many songs in English that exploit rhyme with different suffixes, and you can also use them to teach word stress, since they can contribute to the building of auditory memory or images of these patterns. One of the most entertaining songs I have found is "When you are Old", by Tom Lehrer, very useful to discuss -ity endings:

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These are some basic ideas to integrate the teaching of word stress to the introduction of word formation patterns in the English lesson. I hardly need to stress the importance of word stress, but if you need convincing, Gilbert (2008) has included this wonderful quote in her booklet on her Prosody Pyramid approach:

The stress pattern of a polysyllabic word is a very important identifying feature of the word . . . We store words under stress patterns . . . And we find it difficult to interpret an utterance in which a word is pronounced with the wrong stress pattern – we begin to “look up” possible words under this wrong stress pattern. (Brown 1990:51 as cited in Gilbert 2008)

Checking a word formation activity from an international exam mock in your class may turn out to be a fantastic opportunity to do pronunciation work, so I hope you, like me, will find a way out of boredom or fear by trying these tasks with your students!.

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A Note on References: If you wish to learn more about the books I have referred to, click on all the authors' names on this post. The only material I do not have a link to is:

Ortiz Lira, Héctor (1998). Word Stress and Sentence Accent. Monografías Temáticas No. 16. Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación. Santiago de Chile.

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!

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.

Pronunciation Integration #2: Intonation and Viewpoint Adjuncts

As I may have hinted in previous posts, my greatest passion within the world of Phonetics and Phonology is intonation. At times, I read blog posts and articles that stress the fact that intonation appears to be "unteachable" or "unnecessary", and it really makes me fiery (Yes, I have Italian genes, so at times "I cannot keep calm", as the meme goes). I personally believe that in order to make something "teachable", you need to read about it, listen to people using the feature, question the half-truths in textbooks at times, and think about your learners' L1 and their possible difficulties with that particular L2 pronunciation feature (check out my post on "tips and tricks" to read more about this). 

I honestly think that intonation does have a very strong bearing on the teaching of grammar for spoken communication, and today's post will focus on one of the many areas we can connect grammar, vocabulary and intonation. (You can find a first attempt at a connection between these on my previous integration post, by the way!)

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This blog post will discuss one of the possible contexts for intonation integration: the intonation of expressions to preface your opinion: viewpoint adjuncts. I insist on this quite a lot in my pronunciation courses, and this is because of two main reasons. The most interesting thing about this linguistic context is that it enables immediate use in the classroom, as it is an essential component of speaking proficiency and everyday interaction, not to mention the fact that we teach these expressions to train students for international examinations. The second aspect to bear in mind is that most of these expressions have a fixed intonation pattern, and we can actually teach them as "collocations", drilling the repetition of the melody as attached to the phrase, as if we were learning a line from a song.

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Viewpoint Adjuncts are forms of expressing one's opinion, stance or take on something. They could appear in any part of the clause, but because of their saliency, this post will focus on the presence of these elements in thematic -that is, initial- position. In Systemic Functional Linguistics, these are seen as Modal Adjuncts (Halliday and Mathiessen, 2014:109), when these are introduced in initial position they act as  a sort of frame, a preparatory condition, a filter, through which to look at the upcoming opinion. The following point of view, which is of course the core of the message, may present content which may threaten the participants' face (Linguistic Politeness theory, see Brown & Levinson, 1987), the social image they may be trying to uphold for themselves. Therefore, the presence of these modal/evaluative adjuncts act as a form of "preparation", at times, a "disclaimer", even, for the message which is about to be presented. In other words, you make it clear to the listener that what is coming is not to be taken as the truth, but as a point of view, and that you are leaving the door open to discussion or disagreement. On the other hand, these expressions may act as a sort of "insurance policy" for you, a means of saying, "don't say I haven't warned you" if the opinion that follows is somehow too radical, or offensive.

Now, why such a long preface to the topic? Well, it is important to understand the effects of the introduction of these expressions from a pragmatic perspective to understand the contribution that prosody makes. Another strong belief of mine is that in order to teach intonation, you have to really understand the functional aspect of language, and Pragmatics and Discourse and Conversation Analytical approaches are most helpful in this respect.

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In General British, most of these viewpoint expressions tend to be presented with a fall-rise tone (I may be wrong, but I have heard rises on them more widely used in General American accents). As you may know, the fall-rise is generally implicational (Wells, 2006 and earlier work by other phoneticians), and from a social perspective, it creates convergence, by building solidarity, togetherness and intimacy between participants (Brazil and Sinclair, 1982 and others), favouring an "us"-perspective to the matter at hand, instead of an authoritative take on it. So from the point of view of the development of the argument, an initial opinion adjunct includes an unspoken assumption (or implicaton) that what you are introducing just holds true as a point of view, and that it may, perhaps, introduce a position which others may find debatable. It is a means of hedging your message (and thus, orient to the Cooperative Principle) and thus, in a way, softening the imposition of your opinion.

The most interesting effect, however, is not the use of the fall-rise, but the choice of nucleus. More often than not, these expressions take the nucleus on the pronominal element: "I", "me", "my". As you may remember, the accentuation of pronouns tends to make for a strong contrast (except, perhaps in cases of fixed or idiomatic tonicity, see Wells, 2006, chapter 3). Part of this disclaimer we introduce through opinion expressions is, in fact, built by the accented pronoun.

In our Riverplate Spanish, we may use truncated rise-falls in this leading position. This tone, although processed as a referring tone (Granato, 2005) by us native speakers in this position, may sound slightly divergent to L1 speakers of English (added to the fact that according to many British and Americans, we "porteños" do sound quite imposing most of the time to their ear!).

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In order to present this topic in the EFL lesson, we may carry a thorough search for these expressions in our listening passages or textbook materials (also check the resources below), draw our students' attention to the "roallercoastery" (i.e. fall-rise) intonation employed in them, and introduce it as a sort of melody to be repeated, or sung along. Even though we know we may not so readily "feel" intonation, as we may do for segments, we may play with extremes and feel our larynx going up and down for the higher and lower points in the fall-rise. We may play with the expressions, singing the different notes and levels making up the contour in slow motion, one by one before speeding up and linking the notes. We may use a piano app on our mobiles, or on our PC (http://virtualpiano.net/), and play the notes! (I am grateful for this idea to Prof. Perticone and Prof. Zabala, who I first saw use the piano for intonation teaching)



We may, of course, first elicit the "highlighted" words, the words someone being "hit", the words that we feel echoing in our mind after listening to the expression, that is, the nucleus, the last and most important accent in the intonation phrase (mostly presented as louder and longer, at times, depending on the pitch movement attached to it, it could be higher, but this is not always the case, of course).

These are a few resources online that teach opinion expressions (without, perhaps, the necessary focus on intonation which you as a teacher can add to them!). In some of these videos, as the expressions are presented in a vacuum, more oblique renderings than those we expect may be found.

• BBC Learning English (Many thanks to my Lab3 student Victoria C. for this finding!): http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/specials/2011/05/110503_press_freedom_special_audio_page.shtml 
• IELTS Speaking: https://youtu.be/yxIPellKqaw
• Expressing Opinion - EngVid: https://youtu.be/Kxi4v9w299I

After the presentation of expressions, we may create contexts for use, which is not difficult to do. We may give students some thought-provoking quotes, shocking headlines, or puzzling images, and elicit their opinion, asking them to use the phrases. Other students may act as "monitors", trying to assess whether the patterns are being used properly on the task. Similarly, we can ask students to apply these expressions may on debates and mock exams, and if your school allows it, students may record their production, play it back, and self-assess their intonation patterns. It may also help to ask students to record the expressions in isolation on their mobiles, and play them as a sort of reminder when they need a "model" of the auditory image to imitate.

***

Disclaimer #1: As with everything, linguistic rules are always open to variation, and this is, of course, due to a number of factors, including social, geographic, situational, even stylistic. Oblique renderings of a text may introduce different tonality, tonicity and tone choices than those we expect. That is, we may find speakers accenting "opinion" in "in my opinion", we may even hear people using falls on these expressions, not to mention the frequent presence of the level tone.
So rules like the use of the fall-rise and the accentuation of the personal pronoun could be presented as one way of helping learners cope with the chaos of speech so as to produce a "safe choice", which is, after all, that is what we try to do as EFL teachers when we teach speaking.

***

Disclaimer#2: There are, of course, other forms of introducing opinion which may not take pronouns, or which may perhaps not even highlight the "us" aspect of the relationship, such as the use "of course" (see Brazil, 1997), mostly heard with a fall (or of course, with a level tone). The divergent use of these expressions needs a separate kind of analysis and has to be handled with care, as phrases of this kind may perhaps make students sound a bit too imposing ....unless, of course, we are teaching them ways to argue, or quarrel in English, in which case you may freely do so!

***

Hope you have found this humble post useful, and that you can apply the ideas in it as early as....tomorrow!

***

References

Wells, J.C. (2006) English Intonation. An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP.

Brazil, D. and J. Sinclair (1982). Teacher Talk. Oxford: OUP

Brazil, D (1997). The Communicative Value of Intonation in English. CUP: Cambridge

Halliday, M.A.K and C. Mathiessen (2014). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 4th Edition. Routledge.
Brown, P and S Levinson (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: CUP.

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!

Report on the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference (#PTLC2015) at UCL. August 5-7th, 2015 - Part 3

This is my last report on PTCL 2015. My two previous posts discussed Day 1 and Day 2, including links to all the live tweeting and the programme, so you can visit this page to read about them, and about other events I have reported on.


I have tried to link to the author's webpages/institutional affiliations whenever possible so that you can contact them, or Google their work and learn more about what they do.


(Once more, just in case, I would like to remind you that any unintentional misinterpretation of the work on the presenters is my fault, so my apologies to you for any errors!)

***

Day 3 of PTLC kicked off with Andrej Stopar and his study on Slovenian speakers of English and their perception of four vowels, one of which was the "pretzel" (loved it!) vowel /æ/. Surprisingly (for my context, that is), his perception tasks rendered better results for /ʌ/ and /ɜ:/ over /e/ and /æ/.

Janice Wing Sze Wong discussed the results of her high variability phonetic training study on English vowels 1 and 2 with her Cantonese-speaking students. Her analysis was mostly acoustic, and based on formants 1 and 2, and on duration (which I thought highly relevant for this pair of vowels!).


Josefina Carrera-Sabaté, Imma CreusBellet and Clàudia Pons Mol presented a fantastic set of resources to learn Catalan: El Sons del Català and Guies de pronunciaciò del Català . They have done a great job with the websites, which have really enticed me to start learning Català!

Pavel Trofimovich, Sara Kennedy and Josée Blanchet presented a truly inspiring paper on speech ratings on fluency, comprehensibility and accentedness for learners of French as L2. I have been Googling their research papers, as they have done really interesting work on interlanguage issues in terms of phonology and phonological awareness, among other things. They have made some thoughtprovoking observations regarding the segmental, suprasegmental and fluency aspects that may have affected the raters' assessment of their samples of learner speech: accentedness ratings were lower when intonation choices were accurate and pitch range narrower; and the same features had a positive effect on fluency and comprehensibility, added to longer speech-runs and fewer hesitations. I would personally be interested in replicating this study in my context, somehow.

Shinichi Tokuma and Won Tokuma brought the conference to a close with a very interesting study on the perception of /p, b/ and robustness in terms of babble noise for Japanese learners of English. Among other things, they have found that improved L2 perception in their subjects was inversely related to the signal-to-noise ratio of the stimuli, and that /p/ was more robust to noise in all their experimental conditions.

We had a great "bonus track" session, right after lunch, with Nobuaki Minematsu from the University of Tokyo. He delivered a fantastic presentation on World Englishes and intelligibility. His talk discussed the basic difficulties we may encounter when trying to grasp the complex idea of what mutual intelligiblity really is and entails, especially in terms of its diversity. His ongoing project is aimed at finding a way of measuring intelligibility objectively (via matrixes and a few really complex ways entirely beyond my engineering-blind mind!) and somehow predicting possible intelligibility problems between speakers of different L1s communicating in English, based on a collection of misunderstandings and miscommunication. It was an excellent conference close.


A huge "Thank you!" to the organisers for a fantastic and welcoming conference. I felt at home at the lovely Chandler House at UCL and I hope I can stay in touch with all the wonderful people I have met, or encountered once again after 5 years. I am really grateful.

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As I mentioned earlier for my experience at IPrA, it is a real blessing to be able to attend and take active part in these international events every now and then. The networking is incredible, and the whole conferencing thing is a fascinating learning and mind-opening experience. As I always say, if the world does not come to you, you should "go to the world". At times your local context, however great, cannot provide you with the learning experiences you need, so salary and life-permitting, I will try to continue furthering my learning paths in my beloved Buenos Aires, and abroad, and sharing all my experiences with you.


Hope you have enjoyed my attempt to bring the world to you, wherever you are reading this from!

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!