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!

Some "inconvenient truths" of pronunciation teaching

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

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

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

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

And some of my beliefs, omnipresent in this blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pronunciation Integration #1: Classroom Language & Routines

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plosive attack!

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

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

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

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

Compound Objects

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

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

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

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

Stress-ful(l) School Subjects

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

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

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

Rollercoastery Classroom Requests and Offers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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References

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

Coming up with your own pronunciation "tips and tricks"

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

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

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

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

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

1. Study your feature

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

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

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

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

2. Make selections

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

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

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

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

3. Explore your own production of the feature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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 2

My previous post briefly commented on the sessions I attended at PTLC 2015 on Day 1. I am now going to report on a very busy day at the conference, Day 2, before it all flies away from my short-term memory and all my teaching duties take over! 

(My usual disclaimer: all misinterpretations of the presentations are my own, and totally unintentional)

Day 2: August 6th

The opening plenary was by Dr. Eleanor Lawson, who struck me as sooo knowledgeable and so young! She made a fascinating report of a few studies on Scottish postvocalic /r/, and what different types of measurements (impressionistic, MRI, UTI) contributed to the study of coarticulation. The presentation continued with the description of the whole development process for these two amazing online resources: Seeing Speech and Dynamic Dialects. It was, simply, an amazing presentation.

And after that, we had the fabulous experience of trying ultrasound imaging on our own tongues! 

Trying my Spanish alveolar trill! :D Sooo exciting!

The second session of the day started with a very entertaining presentation of teaching ideas for laboratory phonetics by Timothy Mills, Karen Pollock and Benjamin V. Tucker from the University of Alberta. One of their techniques involved getting students to create their own "Frankeintracts" of the vocal tract, making use of any material of their choice (apparently some students even attempted models that could actually utter sounds!). Other very interesting activities consisted in the students' plotting of their own vowel formants and a few designs of tests for the perception of neutralisation of items such as "latter/ladder". 

Mercedes Cabrera-Abreu and Francisco Vizcaíno-Ortega were up next (represented by Mercedes on this ocassion), and their presentation was a discussion of their classroom assessment tasks for their courses on acoustics, and the results obtained. From spectogram and waveform recognition tasks to the actual hand-drawing of spectograms, students were assessed on numerous aspects of acoustic phonetics, with different levels of success. I found the tasks particularly interesting (and difficult, given my really basic knowledge of acoustics!), and this presentation opened my mind to a other ways of testing.

I, Marina Cantarutti, was the following presenter. I discussed a very humble classroom experience on intonation teaching through speech genres (the lecture genre, in this case) and on my students' treatment of tonality, tonicity and tone in connection to thematic structure in a pre- and post-instruction tests. I have basically found that my students actively assigned different degrees of relevance to the various thematic elements in the text given by either conflating Themes and Rhemes in the same IP (lowering the relevance and possible contrastive value of the thematic element) or by treating them obliquely. I also made a point that contrary to my own expectations, students initially produced more cases of transfer from Spanish in terms of their treatment of focus, rather than of tone.

After lunch, two attempts at a group picture, and a tour round the labs and the library, we were all ready for more.

The whole #PTLC2015 bunch! (Credits: PTLC, FB page)

Smiljana Komar from the University of Ljubliana introduced her results in perception tasks for the fall-rise tone. She found some interesting cases of mistaken perception of fall-rises for falls, and then for rises. Her findings in a way appear pretty similar to the ones I believe we would find over here in Buenos Aires, if we tried the same tests, which makes the whole thing really intriguing, given that we have different L1s!

Yusuke Shibata, Masaki Taniguchi and Tamikazu Date presented an experience with junior high teacher and students, connected to notions of tonicity and focus. They have found these features to be highly teachable, and they expect to be able to "persuade" and also train teachers towards the active integration of pronunciation and intonation work at schools.

Junko Sugimoto and Yoko Uchida carried out an analysis of the government-approved ELT books in Japan in search of pronunciation tasks and training. They have found that there were activities connected to vowels, consonants and well as articulatory explanations and resources on phonics and Katakana. In my opinion, the books they analysed presented a number of very interesting contents and tasks, and they far exceeded the number of activities and pronunciation training available in the EFL textbooks that we have on this side of the world.

Nikola Paillereau presented a comparison between some specific Czech and French vowels as produced by students acquiring French as L2. The focus on this presentation was the assessment of L2 vowels using a piece of software called VisuVo -which, unfortunately, is not open to the public yet-, which was designed by the presenter and a collaborator . The program allowed for measurement and plotting of vowel formats and comparison of other variables across speakers and in an intra-speaker manner. 

Rungpat Roengpitya discussed the design of different Phonetics courses at different departments at her university in Thailand. I found it particularly interesting that the inclusion of Phonetics for training in some medical sciences, such as Dentistry, was aimed at helping the future professionals become aware of how they can improve a patient's quality of life by knowing how their intervention may affect speech.

Pekka Lintunen and Aleksi Mäkilähde (represented by the former on this occasion) carried out a very interesting study regarding what students prefer, like and find motivating about the Phonetics courses they attended. Their survey revealed that students find accents and intonation topics more engaging than other themes in the course. Part of their study also assessed whether students' view of Phonetics as highly benefitial to their future career had changed, and in most cases, students agreed that Phonetics was necessary for their professional development. There were a few caveats and self-objections that the presenter made to the survey and its delivery, but it was overall a very interesting, and easily replicable study, worth further thought!

The closing prenary was by Professor David Deterding, and it was aimed at discussing misunderstandings and the role of pronunciation for intelligibility. We participants had a lot of fun decoding many instances of English as an L2/FL speech from different locations (Brunei, Nigeria, among a few others), and in the end, it turned pretty challenging to make sense of many words. (This may seem quite obvious and ordinary for people teaching in multilingual environments, but in my teaching setting, where most of my students' L1 is Spanish and where English is only used in the classroom, activities like these really open up your mind!) . Deterding's talk included a review of the Lingua Franca Core, and some comments regarding attempts at revised versions in different environments. Apart from the well-known objection to stress-timed rhythm as a feature making speech less intelligible from an international perspective, there were a few comments regarding the role of consonant clusters in the blurring of comprehension at word level. Event though David did not perhaps tackle upon this explicitly in his talk, later personal communication made it clear that of course, we need to make a distinction between aims we may have regarding perception, and those for production. We all agree that perception and exposure to all accents of English, including "international Englishes" is essential if we want our language teaching training to be enabling and empowering for communication.

***

This is the end of Day 2 (because, of course, I will not report on the wine-tasting session!). Just in case: I'm just the messenger here, so I am merely reporting on the sessions, and adding a few comments, but of course, any objections or remarks on the presentations should be addressed to the authors themselves (do note that I have, in most cases, added links to the speakers' institutional affiliations!).

 I'll be wrapping up my discussion of PTLC on my next post on Day 3, which will probably be out during the weekend. Thanks for bearing with me!

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

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

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

This first post is on Day 1. 

Day 1: August 5th

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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!