Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
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The sound system
The layman who thinks that the stream of speech is merely a sequence of isolatable sounds, which, once learned, merely have to be strung together, is making the same mistake as the person who conceives of language in general as merely strings of words. The truth is that in the area of sounds, as in all other areas of language, structure is all-important. Although separate sounds can be isolated, the characteristics they show in isolation will not be the same as the characteristics they have in the context of neighbouring sounds and the overall structure of the utterance. An oversimplified view of English phonology so frequently leads to a teacher’s and his pupil’s sense of failure. Having practised all the sounds with considerable effort, the pupils are dismayed to find that they still cannot understand some English speakers, let alone speak like them. The teacher must understand the way the sounds of English are systematically used within the sound structure of English, not in order to explain this to the students, but rather so that he can clarify his own objectives in pronunciation teaching. Phonology, the study of the sound system, is as vital to him as phonetics, the study of the physical properties of sounds and their place and manner of articulation in the vocal tract. Pronunciation 51 The speech process consists of conveying a message through the medium of sound. The message is given shape by the vocabulary and grammar of the language, presented in a train of sounds. These sounds are organised in every language so that it is possible to distinguish one message, i.e. one bit of meaning, from another. Sounds used in a language are therefore distinctive so that words can be distinguished from each other when heard just as they can be distinguished when written. The word cat is distinguished from the word sat and from the word cot and from the word cad. In each case the difference of sound which makes the distinction in English is a phonemic difference, and the phonemes involved can be listed: /k/, /s/, /ae/, /o/, /t/, /d/. In English there are 23 consonant phonemes and 21 vowel phonemes (including diphthongs). Most descriptions of the sound system of English show how it uses patterns of phonemic contrasts to distinguish words. The following pairs of messages illustrate, in each case, one phonemic contrast: ‘Pull!’ ‘Bull!’ ‘It’s a pin.’ ‘It’s a bin.’ There are pears in the There are bears in the garden.’ garden.’ In every pair, the interpretation of the whole message depends on the distinction between the two phonemes /p/ and /b/ which are similar in being produced by the release of air giving a slight explosion between the two lips, but are different in that the former does not involve the use of voice which characterises the latter. Whole procedures of pronunciation teaching have been based on ‘minimal pair’ contrasts like these. Useful as they are, however, they often oversimplify matters and ignore further aspects of patterning determined by the context in which the phonemes occur in various utterances. Although the phonemes /p/, /b/, spoken in isolation differ in respect of voicing and can most readily be distinguished thus, the feature of voicing is not always the most crucial aspect. The features of aspiration and associated vowel length are sometimes of greater weight. For many speakers the /b/ may be Pronunciation 52 hardly if at all voiced, but will not have aspiration—an audible puff of air after it—which the /p/ always has in an initial position. Saying pear may suffice to blow out a candle. Not so with bear, no matter how loudly or forcefully it is said. Further, at the end of a word like cap the /p/ is often not released; the lips simply remain closed. The same is true of /b/ in cab. The two words are distinguished, therefore, not by a difference in the articulation of /p/ and /b/, but by a difference in the length of the preceding vowel, which is longer before /b/ than before /p/. Within any one dialect of English, such facts about the use of the phonemes form a system which is generally referred to as the allophonic sub-system of the general phonemic system of English. Allophonic variations such as those described above, together with facts like the non- aspiration of /p/ after /s/ (spin will not blow out a candle), are true for all dialects of English. But allophonic variations like the substitutions of the glottal stop for /p/ varies according to the dialect, and may be found in words like hopeful (frequent in RP) or Wapping (in Cockney), which sound as if the /p/ has been left out. Native speakers are not aware of the way in which they vary the phonemes, and may emphatically deny that they do so. They are to a large extent influenced by the spelling. Teachers in English schools frequently try to exact a pronunciation which is based on the written forms and is quite unrealistic in fact. Such matters as the use of /r/ between idea and of in the idea of it, or the dropping of the / h/ in I don’t like him, are observed as standard by phoneticians but denied by the layman. The teacher of English to foreign students must be careful to base his pronunciation teaching, especially the recognition practice, on real speech with its allophonic variations. He will be hindered by the spelling system, and this is one strong argument not only against reading aloud for pronunciation practice, but also against the use of a phonic alphabet. The latter does give a more consistent picture of the phonemes of the language, but it ignores allophonic variations just as much as the ordinary spelling system does. The structure of the sound system involves not only the vowels and consonants, the segmental features, but also stress and intonation, the supra-segmental features. Pronunciation 53 Stress—or emphasis, or loudness, or force—functions Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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