Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

4.4 Choosing a model for teaching pronunciation 
Acquiring and teaching pronunciation
78
Box 4.5 Processes in acquiring L2 phonology
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A crucial element in L2 phonology acquisition is transfer from the L1, which
depends partly on the nature of the two phonological systems.
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Nevertheless, phonological acquisition also depends on universal processes
of language acquisition available to the human mind.
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What do you think is a status accent for your L1? Do you speak it?
Focusing questions
RP (received pronunciation): the usual accent of British English given in books
about English, spoken by a small minority in England
English as lingua franca (ELF): English used as a means of communication
among people with different first languages rather than between natives
Keywords
The underlying issue with pronunciation is who the students want to sound like –
which model should they strive to emulate, in the Lang
3
sense of ‘language’ as an
abstract entity? Usually this is taken to be some type of native speaker, an assump-
tion questioned in Chapter 10. The issue of the target affects pronunciation more
than grammar, spelling or vocabulary, as accent shows far more variation between
native varieties of languages; written language may hardly ever give away the
writer’s dialect.
The usual model for teaching is a status form of the language within a country:
you are supposed to speak French like the inhabitants of Paris, not of Marseilles or
Brittany. Regional accents are not taught, nor are class dialects other than that of
the educated middle class. For English the status accents are non-regional: in the
USA Standard American English (SAE), in the UK received pronunciation (RP), both
of them spread across regions, even if SAE is mostly in the north-east USA, RP
mostly in southern England. Hence L2 students are rarely supposed to sound like
Texans from Dallas, Glaswegians from Glasgow or Scouses from Liverpool. These
status accents are spoken by a small minority of speakers, even if many others shift
their original accents towards them to get on, say, in politics or broadcasting.
The goal for teaching British English has long been RP, which is spoken by a small
minority even in England; my students in Newcastle grumble that they never hear
it outside the classroom. The claimed advantages of RP were that, despite its small
number of speakers located in only one country, it was comprehensible everywhere
and had neutral connotations in terms of class and region. True as this may be, it
does sound like a last-ditch defence of the powerful status form against the rest. 
A more realistic British standard nowadays might be Estuary English, popular

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among TV presenters and pop stars; the chief characteristics are the glottal stop [
ʔ]
for /
t/, inserted /r/ in words like ‘sawing’, and the vowel-like /w/ for /l/ as in
/
bjuʔifuw/ ‘beautiful’. So the phonemes and intonation of a particular language
that are taught to students should vary according to the choice of regional or status
form. Most native speaker teachers have some problems in consistently using the
appropriate model; I had to modify my pronunciation of ‘often’ as /
ɔftən/ by get-
ting rid of the /
t/ and changing the vowel to /ɒ/ to get the RP version /ɒfən/ because
my students protested.
An additional problem in choosing a model comes when a language is spoken
in many countries, each of which has its own status form, say, French used offi-
cially in 28 countries, Arabic in 18 or English in 43. Should the target for French be
a francophone African one, a Canadian one or a French one? The English-speak-
ing countries, from Australia to Canada, Scotland to South Africa, each have their
own variety, with its own internal range; outside these countries there are well-
established varieties of English spoken in countries such as Singapore and India,
now mostly recognized as forms of English in their own right, like Singlish and
Hinglish. A global language such as English faces the problem not just of which
local variety within a country to teach, but of which country to take as a model –
if any. The choice of which national model to use can seldom be made without
taking into account the political nature of language, particularly in ex-colonial
countries, a topic developed in Chapter 10.
Overall the student’s target needs to be matched with the roles they will assume
when using the second language. If they want to be baristas in coffee bars, teach
them an appropriate accent (in England Italian might be an advantage); if they are
training to be doctors in London, teach them how London doctors and patients
speak. One problem is native speaker expectation: natives often expect non-
natives to have an approximation to a status accent. Many students in England
have complained to me that they did not want to acquire an RP accent because of
its snobbish middle-class associations. It is up to the teacher to decide whether the
students’ wishes to sound like Michael Caine or Elton John, for example, are in
their best interests.
As we see throughout this book, recently people have been challenging the cen-
trality of the native speaker as a model. In terms of pronunciation, apart from
those living in English-speaking countries, what is the point of making learners of
English understand and use a native standard accent like RP when virtually every-
body they will meet is a fellow non-native speaker? The goal should be an accent
that is maximally comprehensible by non-native speakers, leaving the native
speaker out of the equation except for those who have to deal with them.
Jenny Jenkins (2000, 2002) has been proposing a syllabus for English pronunci-
ation based on what non-native speakers of English as a lingua franca (ELF) need.
In terms of consonants, for example, there is no point belabouring the difference
between /
ð/ ‘this’ and /θ/ ‘thistle’ as it rarely causes any misunderstanding (and
affects only a small group of function words in any case). It would also be helpful
if students were taught the ‘rhotic’ /
r/ used in SAE (or regional English dialects) in
front of consonants /
bɘrd/ and preceding silence /sentɘr/ rather than the non-
rhotic RP, which has no /
r/ in these positions /bɘd/ and /sentɘ/. It is also interest-
ing to note what she does not think is important, such as the difference between
clear and dark allophones of /
l/ in ‘lip’ and ‘pill’, and the intonation patterns,
both of which teachers have laboured over for generations.
Some of her other points are shown in Box 4.6. It should be noted, however,
that these are primarily derived from the analysis of learner English, that is to say
Choosing a model for teaching pronunciation 79

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the language of students, rather than from the language of successful L2 users. If
you take the ELF idea seriously, you need to teach what is important for interna-
tional uses of English, not for talking with native speakers, as we see in Chapter
10, nor just for talking to fellow students in a classroom. For amusement only,
look at my web page Speech Reform, which satirizes spelling reform by suggesting
we could get by in English speech with 11 consonants /
p t k s ʃ ð ʃ m n r w/ and
three vowels /
i e a/.
Acquiring and teaching pronunciation