Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Use of phonetic script
At advanced levels, students are sometimes helped by looking at phonetic tran-
scripts of spoken language using IPA or by making transcripts of speech them-
selves. As we see throughout this book, it is disputable whether such conscious
awareness of pronunciation ever converts into the unconscious ability to speak,
useful as it may be as an academic activity for future teachers. At the more practi-
cal level, a familiarity with phonetic script enables students to look up the pro-
nunciation of individual words, say, London place names such as ‘Leicester
Square’ /
lestə/ or ‘Holborn’ /hə bən/ (even if a booking clerk once said to me dis-
tinctly /
hə lbərn/ with an /l/ and an /r/).
Imitation
Repetition of words or phrases has been the mainstay of pronunciation teaching: it
is not only Henry Higgins who says ‘Repeat after me, “The rain in Spain stays
mainly on the plain”’; the elementary coursebook New English File (Oxenden et al.,
2004), for example, asks students to ‘Listen and repeat the words and sounds’ and
‘Copy the rhythm’ – whatever that means. At one level, this is impromptu repe-
tition at the teacher’s command; at another, repetition of dialogues in the language
laboratory sentence by sentence. Of course, repetition may not be helpful without
Learning and teaching pronunciation 81

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feedback: you may not know you are getting it wrong unless someone tells you so.
Sheer imitation is not thought to be a productive method of language learning, as
we see throughout this book. It also ignores the fact that phonemes are part of a
system of contrasts in the students’ minds, not discrete items.
Discrimination of sounds
Audio-lingual teaching believed that, if you cannot hear a distinction, you cannot
make it. This led to minimal pair exercises in which the students have to indicate
whether they hear ‘lice’, ‘rice’ or ‘nice’ in the sentence ‘That’s …’. The dangers
include the unreality of such pairs as ‘sink/think’ taken out of any context, the
rarity of some of the words used (I once taught the difference between ‘soul’ and
‘thole’), and the overdependence on the phoneme rather than the distinctive fea-
ture and the syllable, for example. Again, useful if it is treated as building up the
overall pronunciation system in the students’ minds, not as learning the differ-
ence between two phonemes, such as /
i/ and /i/.