18 Updating the pronunciation model: focus on vowels
Joanna Przedlacka
Jonathan
Jonathan
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Speak Out! 72: Publication: February 2025. Copy deadline: 1 November 2024
Speak Out! 73: Publication: September 2025. Copy deadline: 1 May 2025
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From the joint coordinator
Dear Pronthusiasts,
Back in April, several of us in the PronSIG committee travelled to Brighton for the annual conference, and of course, for our PCE event themed around low-tech low-resource pronunciation teaching. We had an inspiring day with lots of opportunities to chat and network. Across the rest of the conference beyond PronSIG events, it was clear to see that certain themes were being discussed more than others. One theme in particular was getting a lot of attention – can you guess? Of course, it was Artificial Intelligence. For some, the amount of discussion AI in education is generating may be a little worrying, but for others it’s an exciting new development. Whatever your feelings might be, we hope you’ll consider joining us in our upcoming online conference on October 12th titled Will the AI revolution remove the need for pronunciation teaching?
This theme was voted on by PronSIG members online and it will be free for you to attend as a benefit of your membership. But don’t fret if you’re not in a UK-friendly time zone. Each session will be recorded and available to you after the conference to watch at your leisure. Regardless of how you plan to attend, you must register. To do so, please head to page 69 for details and for the PronSIG members’ discount code.
As soon as we returned home from Brighton, our thoughts were already on our next PCE day. In 2025, this will be held in Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh and will be accessible both online and in person. We’re happy to confirm that we have now finalised the theme: Games and gamification in pronunciation teaching: Bridging theory and practice. This theme was inspired by the book ‘Pronunciation Games’ by Mark Hancock. Unbelievably, 2025 will mark 30 years since the book’s publication and we thought there could be no better time to revisit the idea of game play for pronunciation practice, as well as some of the ideas and theory behind it. Watch this space for more details on the event as we confirm them in the coming months.
Aside from these two conferences, we have plenty more events planned for this year, so keep an eye on your inbox for updates in our coordinator’s emails and through the monthly IATEFL Ebulletin, as well as on our website and social media.
Before I finish, enormous thanks are due to Speak Out!’s co-editors Kristýna Červinková Poesová and Tarik Uzun who have expertly curated another excellent issue for us to enjoy, as well as to all of our authors, and to copy editor Mojca Belak.
Happy reading!
Gemma Archer
From the editors
Welcome to the 71st issue of Speak Out!
The issue you are about to read offers varied and hopefully enriching content. In the opening paper, Alex Baratta examines the theme of accent diversity from a less commonly explored perspective – the impact of teachers’ regional accents. His research suggests that non-native students’ reactions to teachers’ regional accents are rather positive possibly because of their unawareness of stereotypes attached to these accents. Unknown accents appear to spark students’ curiosity.
The following two papers revolve around what to teach in our pronunciation classes. Joanna Przedlacka reminds us of the need to update the pronunciation models we use, and she illustrates it on vowels within Southern Standard British English. Jonathan Marks provides us with a complex and exhaustive description of English consonant clusters. Not only does he draw our attention to possible difficulties the simplification of consonant clusters may cause to non-native listeners, but he also speaks about pedagogical implications for both learners and teachers.
The next two papers focus more on how to teach pronunciation. Olle Kjellin discusses the role of choral repetition in pronunciation teaching from a neurophysiological perspective. Drawing on his experiences as a language teacher, he presents nine principles and examines their applicability and benefits for classroom pronunciation instruction.
In the last article, Ana Cecilia Cad and Florencia Giménez explore the potential of using an online educational gaming platform to teach English plosives and fricatives to Spanish L1 students in a university setting. The study examines the platform’s effectiveness in terms of its suitability for learning pronunciation, its role in boosting student motivation, and students’ perspectives.
This issue also features reviews of two books and an event. Romina Muse presents two Emo Pron Stories by Stella Palavecino. Jonathan Marks reviews Mark Hancock’s PronPack: Word Recognition for Listeners. Ana P. Biazon Rocha provides an overview of the IATEFL PronSIG Showcase Day held at IATEFL 2024 in Brighton. Make yourselves comfortable and enjoy the reading!
Kristýna Červinková Poesová and Tarik Uzun
From the committee
Welcome to Speak Out!’s committee column in which I would like to summarize my webinar entitled Teaching pronunciation for listening, unplugged held in July 2024 and attended by approximately 90 participants. It was hosted by Victor Soares, who together with Taylor Veigga run PronSIG webinars. I first started to explore the topic during my Delta course as my Spanish students truly struggled with listening. Specifically, they failed their listening exam preparation tasks and they also heavily relied on subtitles when watching films and TV shows.
In the first part of the webinar, I explored the close link between pronunciation and listening. If we do not know the spoken form or the multiple spoken forms of a word or utterance, we will not understand it if we hear it. Unfamiliarity with pronunciation features can impede learners’ decoding ability, which was illustrated using examples from listening tests.
In the second half, I suggested using student-centered adaptations of dictations, such as dictogloss and micro-dictation. In short, dictogloss is a faster dictation; the teacher reads a text or plays a recording multiple times without allowing students to transcribe every single word. Next, they reconstruct the text in groups. Figure 1 briefly presents the benefits of Dictogloss.
Figure 1
Benefits of dictogloss
On the other hand, micro-dictations are isolated sentences which can be read multiple times so that students can transcribe what they hear. Figure 2 outlines how micro-dictations work and comparisons with dictogloss.
Figure 2
How micro-dictations work
Both techniques can increase phonological awareness. Through frequent practice, students can improve their ability to decode the speech stream in the future. There is no need to create extra materials for these dictations; we can simply use the audio from our course books, teacher anecdotes, as well as authentic materials such as songs, videos or interviews.
In the Q&A session at the end of the webinar some of the participants asked whether they could use the activities in 1:1 classes and that is absolutely possible though it may not be as engaging. Others commented that these techniques can be more suitable for intermediate and higher levels. Finally, I suggested that teachers experiment with these techniques, so that they make their own personalised evaluations and conclusions.
To sum up, dictogloss and micro-dictations are low-preparation, student friendly and highly beneficial activities that can help students improve their decoding skills. Members can access the recording on the IATEFL website
Rachel Tsateri PronSIG social media coordinator
Exposing language students to accent diversity through teachers’ regional accents
Alex Baratta
When we consider the teaching of foreign languages, speaking is of course an important skill. Learning to speak with confidence in the target language, using grammatical constructions and appropriate lexis, and understanding the importance of contextual factors are, collectively, highly relevant to developing one’s speaking skills. Another important factor is pronunciation, tied to accent. While foreign language students might wish to mimic native speaker accents, notably those deemed to be prestige varieties, what are the implications for stigmatised teachers’ accents in the language classroom, those which do not reflect prestige? In such cases, the accent(s) – and speaker(s) – might be perceived as less ‘professional’. This article discusses this potential linguistic impasse concerning the accents of language teachers yet set against the need to prepare language students for the real world of accent diversity.
Attitudes to accent
From a purely linguistic point of view, accent is nothing more than a series of sounds. No phoneme is inherently one thing or the other, and therefore, no combination of sounds/phonemes is inherently sexy, ugly, trustworthy, and so on (Baratta, 2021). However, from a societal point of view, attitudes toward accent are based on attitudes toward the speakers; if a certain group of speakers is stigmatised – whether based on race, ethnicity or class, for example – then so is the language they use. Likewise, Received Pronunciation (RP) is still regarded to some extent as reflecting a prestige form of language in terms of its phonological make-up (Kerswill, 2006; Snell & Andrews, 2016; Baratta, 2018), though a more modern variety of RP is referred to as Standard Southern British English (SSBE). The notion of accents having prestige reflects a political construct, not a linguistic one, however. RP became symbolic of linguistic power and hence, a form of linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991), based on its use by those with economic power. Again, a lack of inherentness is key to the linguistic reality, but the societal reality concerning accents is one which
often involves snap judgements made of a speaker’s various attributes (e.g., friendliness, intelligence) once they open their mouths.
Considering the issues which can emanate from certain accents, we might ask what the implications are for such accents – and the accent holders themselves – in the context of foreign language teaching? Such accents may indeed be largely unfamiliar to many language students and so any negativity toward these accents might be realised on a more immediate level, tied to (initial) difficulty in comprehension (van Gelder, 2019), and not, for example, reflecting negative stereotypes of the accent/speaker per se. Reflecting more specific stereotypical notions based on accent, however, Kaur (2014, p. 6) found that a variety of EFL students from various L1 backgrounds referred to the US accent as ‘standard’ and ‘cool’, but also judged it as ‘show off’; the British accent was likewise judged as ‘snobbish’ by some, ‘classy’ by others. The specific types of British and American accents selected, however, is not made clear. Arguably, the accents probably reflected those which EFL students are most familiar with, such as SSBE and General American (Howlader, 2010; Wong, 2018; Baratta & Halenko, 2022), as opposed to, say, Liverpool English or New York City.
This issue is not tied solely to EFL teaching, nor is it tied to British accents of course We can look further afield to other contexts of language teaching to see how accent will always be relevant. Its relevance is not just based on the teaching of pronunciation and speaking, but reflective of societal attitudes regarding which accent(s) is deemed most suitable and ‘professional’ for language teaching. In Spain, accents tied to Andalucia in the South are often judged negatively (Snopenko, 2007), likewise the Bavarian accent in Germany (Heblich et al., 2022), and the Seoul accent is often deemed to be ‘standard’, with accents tied to the port city of Busan less so (Jeon, 2013).
The negativity toward certain accents is often based on specific stereotypes ascribed to the speakers. In the UK context, for example, broad regional accents in particular are associated with the working classes (Trudgill, 2002), which in turn leads to negative judgements in which quite often, presumed class level and region of origin mesh in the interlocutor’s mind, with judgements made in terms of social prestige and attractiveness (Coupland & Bishop, 2007). For example, working-class Liverpool accents often lead to judgments such as the speaker being aggressive and involved with criminal behaviour, such as thievery (Belchem, 2006; Honeybone, 2007).
Thus, what might the implications be for foreign language teachers - here, EFL teachers - who have accents which reflect negative societal stereotypes? One
potential issue is whether or not the teacher gets through the front door in the first instance, with evidence that teachers with certain accents are deemed to be unprofessional for the teaching of language (Baratta, 2016; Baratta, 2018). An example concerns a British teacher being interviewed for a teacher training program, who was told by the interviewer that due to his (the teacher’s) broad Lancashire accent, the interview would be stopped unless he modified it in some way (Baratta, 2018). There is further evidence that certain accents are proscribed in employment contexts, deemed to be, simply put, a bad fit (Lippi-Green, 1997; Moore et al., 2016; Donnelly et al., 2019; Levon et al., 2021), with the Sutton Trust (2017), for example, referencing broad British accents as, partly at least, a hindrance to entering professions such as banking, as part of a suggested overall lack of appropriate presentation skills.
It could be argued that certain accents are simply preferred for the foreign language classroom on the basis of perceived ‘standardness’; this means that many other accents are left out. The by-product of such linguistic exclusion is that many native speaker accents are unfamiliar to language students, which can affect students’ listening abilities when coming into contact with such accents. It is due to this that many might believe that certain accents are inherently hard to understand. Any difficult in comprehending accents, however, is due to unfamiliarity with them, precisely based on a lack of exposure in the first instance. Thus, to help familiarise students with the various accents that can be heard within a specific language, it is imperative to start with the classroom.
The language classroom is a safe environment, the real world less so. That is, students in the classroom have time to think and ponder the teacher’s questions, as part of, say, role-playing exercises using the target language. In the real world, which could involve contexts as varied as asking directions or ordering a meal, there is often no time allowance provided to allow the student to pull out their dictionary and look up the correct response. Nor do language students wish to have the speaker repeat themselves in case they were not understood by the student the first time. Thus, the language classroom acts as a practice environment for the reality of communication outside the classroom. As such, it is once again stated that exposure to accents in the language classroom is needed, in order to prepare students for when they communicate with a great variety of native speakers. This is not just for EFL students in Britain of course but globally, as accent preference, and prejudice, is not tied to just one country, the implications of which have arguably led to exclusion of certain accents used within language classrooms.
Moreover, for non-native speakers of a given language, it is arguably the case that accents which are unfamiliar to them, including those which are stigmatised, might be responded to very differently. A non-native speaker of Spanish might not be able to distinguish different accents of Spanish in the first instance. But even if a student can distinguish a Madrid accent from a Seville accent, or a Spanish accent tied to Spain per se from an accent representative of Cuban phonology, the differences in sounds might be regarded as just that – differences – and nothing more. This is perhaps due to ignorance of the stereotypes that accompany certain accents. Nonetheless, it is this kind of accent differentiation – that which differentiates accents but without any prejudicial notions – that is the ideal.
In summary, then, it is entirely necessary to expose language students to multiple examples of native accents in the target language. Such exposure can also help students to consider accent-based prejudice and, ideally, avoid such, by recognising ‘different’ sounds as just that – nothing more than sounds. While not everyone will agree with the second point, I doubt that many teachers, if any, would disagree with the first, regarding the need for accent exposure in the language classroom. At this point, I refer to a study I undertook with a colleague on the subject under discussion – English teachers using regional accents in EFL classes.
English EFL teachers with regional accents
The study (Baratta & Halenko, 2022) collected the perspectives of twenty studentteachers enrolled on an undergraduate TESOL programme in a Northern English university (from here on referred to as ‘teachers’, to distinguish them from the EFL students they had taught). The teachers’ programme focused on the teaching of EFL and involved teaching as a practical component of the degree programme for a tenmonth period. The teachers all had self-reported regional British accents, with the majority tied to England (18 participants), and the other two teachers had Welsh accents. Of these eighteen English accents, fourteen accents represented the North of England, such as Lancashire, with the remaining four accents representing the Midlands (two participants) and the Northeast of England (two participants). Though the accents were largely tied to the North of England, then, all the accents had one commonality: none of them represented SSBE, which is, as argued, the British accent that EFL students are largely familiar with. In terms of teaching experience, seven teachers had experience teaching EFL in the UK, but the majority of teaching involved overseas locations representing more than a dozen countries, such as Korea, UAE, Spain, Poland and Thailand. The data was collected through semistructured interviews from the teachers with the purpose being to discover how the
teachers’ accents were perceived by their students, as reported to us by the teachers themselves.
Developing familiarity with teachers’ unfamiliar accents
The majority of students’ responses were positive regarding the teachers’ regional accents, as explained to us by the teachers. Specifically, fifteen teachers from the sample of twenty participants explained that their EFL students expressed positive attitudes toward their accents. Instead of associating the accents with any negative connotations, the data show that the unfamiliarity raised their interest. The unfamiliarity can be represented by phonological giveaways (Baratta, 2021). As will be explained later, such ‘giveaways’ refer to sounds which serve to, very often, immediately identify a speaker to a given region, whether at the country level (e.g., ‘an American accent’) but more specifically, at the level of city region within a country, to even include localities within a city. In short, phonological giveaways make accents what they are.
The phonological aspects tied to Northern English accents, which led to students’ unfamiliarity, and interest, reflected such giveaways as heard in words such as bow and bus. The first word, as realised in the Northwest in particular, might be represented as [bə:] or [bo:]. The second word would be heard in the North overall as [bʊs]. One teacher expressed that students would ask him to say the word lunch precisely due to his Northern accent [lʊnʧ], with other teachers asked by their students to say Coca Cola, with the ‘o’ sound representing the more Northern realization of [o:]. Students were reported as laughing at such Northern/Northwestern production but not, as the teachers made clear, as an example of ridicule. Rather, students’ laughter was reported as an example of sheer curiosity and enjoyment with an unfamiliar accent. One teacher in fact used the word bow as a reference to the bow on a Christmas tree, as it was the Christmas period at that particular time of teaching. Her students did not understand her pronunciation: [bə:]. As such, she adjusted her accent to RP for this one word: [bəʊ]. From this, the students also laughed but again, as explained by the teacher in question, this was suggestive of their interest in accents that they had not otherwise heard before within EFL learning.
A sample of teachers’ comments, in relation to their students’ reactions to their accents, is provided below (Baratta & Halenko, 2022):
Students would ask me to say things like lunch and start laughing. I thought it was quite funny.
It’s not what they are expecting, and they are interested to find out more.
Students loved my Northern English accent. They often imitated it and made a joke which was nice and a good sort of talking point.
They’re curious why I speak like this and other teachers don’t. It introduces that there are other accents and it’s a good topic in the classroom.
For students it was really refreshing and something new for them. They definitely picked up on that and were always asking questions.
The kids are really curious and interested to know where I’m from because I don’t sound like the other teachers (p. 5).
While the comments above are coming from the teachers’ accounts per se and not directly from their students, there is no reason to doubt the teachers’ perspectives as they are based entirely on classroom interaction and experiences with their students. Second, there were examples of negative comments regarding teachers’ accents, suggesting an objective attitude overall when asked about students’ reactions to, and perceptions of, teachers’ accents. This is seen in terms of students who expressed difficulty in understanding Northern phonemes. Five students expressed this, to include two students who had nonetheless engaged with the teachers’ accents as described above. In this case, the phonological giveaways in question are /o:/ /ə:/ /e:/ /ʊ/. The first two phonemes can be heard alternatively, in words such as go [go:] [gə:]; the third in words such as face [fe:s], and the fourth in words such as bus: [bʊs]. The phoneme /a/ as heard in words such as bath [baθ] is a giveaway, but at a broader level, as it reflects Northern English pronunciation as a whole, and is not tied specifically to any region within the North per se.
The engagement demonstrates how any initial confusion or lack of clarity regarding an unfamiliar accent can lead to greater engagement given time, precisely because a student has, in effect, learned to identify a ‘new’ native speaker accent. This indicates growth in one’s journey as a language student. Indeed, an important way for language students to reach this point begins in the language classroom itself, as argued, a means to better prepare students to understand a variety of accents tied to the language they are studying. This has arguably been achieved with many of the students reported in this study, with additional comments suggesting a neutral stance (questioning which is the ‘correct’ British accent) and an additional positive theme tied more broadly to British accents overall. Another teacher explained that “the British accent is kind of romanticised through Sherlock and Harry Potter so students want that accent. That’s how they see British English and they want that. It’s the commercial side of it.” (Baratta & Halenko, 2022, p. 5).
Implications for the language classroom
As I have made clear, language students, certainly those who are of a certain proficiency level, should be made aware of the phonological implications for various accents that represent the target language. This can include accents within the country itself, such as Spain, but also include other countries’ accents where Spanish is also spoken (e.g., Argentina). I am certain language teachers do not need me to tell them how to accomplish this, so the following suggestions are simply that, and based on my own experiences as to what can work in terms of accent teaching (in my case, an American teaching EFL, but residing in the UK). Nonetheless, there is valuable and relevant research on this subject (Červinková Poesová & Lancová, 2022), arguing for the need for awareness of accent variation within teaching contexts.
As a linguist, I focus on what I have termed phonological giveaways, as referenced earlier, specific sounds in specific contexts which serve to identify a given accent, broad varieties even more so (i.e., those accents that exhibit these tell-tale sounds). This is a first step for my students. Examples are provided below, consisting of regional English accents and the pronunciation of certain words, taken from Baratta (2021, p. 514):
From this brief sample, students come to learn that word-final velar stops /k/ spoken with a broad Liverpool accent are realised as velar fricatives: /x/. This is the sound as heard in the Spanish j, and this alone could lead to increased engagement for Spanish EFL students in particular. Likewise, students come to learn that the diphthong /eɪ/ becomes a pure vowel in Yorkshire speech (or is certainly associated with that part of England): [e:]. There are phonological giveaways for every language, and varieties within, and these can be demonstrated in class by language teachers, even more so if the teachers themselves have a given accent which is otherwise unfamiliar to students. As the table above indicates, pronouncing the same words but in different accents can be especially effective, at both revealing the telltale sounds of given accents, and also how different accents compare to each
Table 1 Presentation of phonological giveaways
other. Other examples might include words such as coffee, which, in a Mancunian, General American and a New York City accent would be respectively realised thus: [kɒfɪ] [kαfi] [koəfi].
From this starting point, YouTube is also a great resource for demonstrating regional accents, whether as heard on TV shows/films, or even online tutorials, where language enthusiasts demonstrate accent varieties for the viewer. I leave it up to the readers to consider their own ideas, to include perhaps the most immediate: demonstrating themselves a variety of accents for their students, whether teaching Spanish, German or Korean. It is up to the teachers whether or not to go further and explain to students what the stereotypes are for certain accents, good or bad. Ultimately, few languages, if any, are one size fits all, and this certainly applies to accent. As such, we need to go beyond the immediate confines of ‘classroom accents’ and expose students to a few more varieties, not to the point of linguistic overload (Baratta, 2019), but not to represent a monolithic accent either, for languages which are anything but.
References
Baratta, A. (2016). Keeping it real or selling out: The effects of accent modification on personal identity. Pragmatics and Society, 7(2), 291–319. https://www.jbeplatform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ps.7.2.06bar
Baratta, A. (2018). Accent and teacher identity in Britain: Linguistic favouritism and imposed identities Bloomsbury.
Baratta, A. (2019). World Englishes in English language teaching. Palgrave Macmillan.
Baratta, A. (2021). Varieties of ‘standard accents’ among teachers in contemporary Britain. World Englishes, 42(3), 507–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12561
Baratta, A., & Halenko, N. (2022). Attitudes toward regional British accents in EFL teaching: Student and teacher perspectives. Linguistics and Education, 67, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101018
Belchem, J. (2006). Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool exceptionalism. Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press.
Červinková Poesová, K., & Lancová, K. (2022). Developing Unbiased Teacher Identity in Pluri-Accent Reality: Research-Based Classroom Activities. Research in Language, 20(1), 35–51. https://doi.org/10.18778/1731-7533.20.1.03
Coupland, N., & Bishop, H. (2007). Ideologised values for British accents. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11, 74–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00311.x
Donnelly, M., Baratta, A., & Gamsu, S. (2019). A sociolinguistic perspective on accent and social mobility in the UK teaching profession. Sociological Research Online, 24, 496–513. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418816335
Heblich, S., Lameli, A., & Riener, G. (2015). The effect of perceived regional accents on individual economic behavior: A lab experiment on linguistic performance, cognitive ratings and economic decisions. PLoS ONE, 10(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113475
Honeybone, P. (2007). New-dialect formation in nineteenth century Liverpool: A brief history of Scouse. In A. Grant & C. Grey (Eds.), The Mersey sound: Liverpool's language, people and places (pp. 106–140). Open House Press.
Howlader, M. R. (2010). Teaching English pronunciation in countries where English is a second language: Bangladesh perspective. ASA University Review, 4(2), 233–244.
Jeon, L. (2013). Drawing boundaries and revealing language attitudes: Mapping perceptions of dialects in Korea. [MA thesis, University of North Texas]. UNT Digital Library. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc271835/
Kaur, P. (2014). Accent attitudes: Reactions to English as a lingua franca. Procedia -Social and Behavioral Sciences, 134, 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.04.218
Kerswill, P. (2006). Migration and language. In K. Mattheier, U. Ammon & P. Trudgill (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society (pp. 2271–2285). De Gruyter.
Levon, E., Sharma, D., Watt, D., Cardoso, A., & Ye, Y. (2021). Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England. Journal of English Linguistics, 49(4), 355–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/00754242211046316
Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent. Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States Routledge.
Moore, J., Higham, L., Mountford-Zimdars, A., Ashley, L., Birkett, H., Duberley, J. & Kenny, E. (2016). Socio-economic diversity in life sciences and investment banking. Social Mobility Commission.
Snell, J., & Andrews, R. (2016). To what extent does a regional dialect and accent impact on the development of reading and writing skills? Cambridge Journal of Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2016.1159660
Snopenko, E.A. (2007). Stigmatizing language: The case of Andalusian. [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles]. UCLA Library.
The Sutton Trust (2017). Four-fifths of senior figures in finance think presentation at interview affects disadvantaged people’s chances of getting a job.
Trudgill, P. (2002). Sociolinguistic variation and change Edinburgh University Press.
van Gelder, J. (2019). The effect of EFL learners’ attitudes towards native English accents on listening comprehension and comprehensibility [Master’s thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra]. e-Repositori. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/43017
Wong, R. (2018). Non-native EFL teachers’ perception of English accent in teaching and learning: Any preference? Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 8(2), 177–183. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0802.01
Alex Baratta is an applied linguist, researching language and identity, linguistic prejudice, and linguistic rights in educational settings. This includes accentism in British teaching, and the need to recognise international students’ Englishes (e.g., China English) and their implications for assessment. Alex has been published in prestigious journals such as World Englishes and has presented his work at leading international conferences. Email: alex.baratta@manchester.ac.uk
Updating the pronunciation model: focus on vowels
Joanna Przedlacka
Nowadays, greater numbers of L2 users speak English in international settings and so it follows that most conversations take place between second language (L2) users of English rather than non-natives communicating with natives. Accordingly, pronunciation teaching has been changing to better meet this need. Audiovisual materials increasingly include native regional accents and English as L2 accents. The Lingua Franca Core (Jenkins, 2002) list of pronunciation features recommends we prioritise those features which are crucial to achieving intelligibility in situations where nobody shares an L1. This shift is positive. Exposure to a variety of accents reflects what happens in the real world, raises awareness that English is not a single, uniform system and serves to equip learners to understand different accent varieties.
While variety in materials is beneficial, at the same time some kind of model has to be set for the sake of clarity. I agree with Cruttenden (2014), who in his latest revision of Gimson’s textbook suggests that this may be either Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American (GA), or one formed by an amalgam of features from native speaker standards, which “may be further altered by reducing the number of contrasts between sounds and changing the usual (…) realisations of sounds (…) to form a possible international English lingua franca” (Cruttenden, 2014, p. 316). In Europe this target accent is frequently RP or a variety close to itStandard Southern British English (SSBE), which labels a standard variety without social class connotations and also has a broader scope than RP.
The reasons for using SSBE as a reference are several: it is well described and codified in dictionaries and teaching materials and it is often heard on the UK TV and radio news broadcasts, although increasingly alongside other varieties. As for the oft-raised objection that it is spoken by a minority, with the diversity of varieties in the English speaking world, the same holds true for any accent, yet we do need a reference framework. When we teach a variety, we primarily teach its vowel and consonant inventory, i.e. the system of contrasts, which the learners need to master in order to understand the L2 and for their speech to be intelligible. However, the system of vowels comes with their particular qualities and if we decide for SSBE as our model, we should teach its updated version.
The point I want to raise in this paper is not what model to choose, but that the model needs to be up to date. As teachers, we are aware that languages change and that this change happens relatively fast, but due to the length of publishing process among other things the materials do not always keep up. The audio materials and the suggested phonemic transcriptions could at worst be decades out of date. If we find ourselves in a dilemma such as whether to update or not to update and if so, how much, my response to the first question is in the affirmative. Ideally, we want the students to hear the kind of speech in the classroom that they encounter outside it. We also want them sound contemporary.
Examples of phonetic changes
Below I describe some examples of phonetic changes in the SSBE vocalic system. I use Wells’ (1982) lexical sets keywords to represent English vowel groups. For example, the GOOSE set represents the words that contain the same sound in the stressed syllable, regardless of spelling i.e. food, goose, blue, through, shoot, nuisance, human. Phonetic change is where the timbre of a given sound changes, without any effect on the system. In lay terms, the outcome of phonetic change is that the new version of the vowel or consonant in question sounds different and may be taken by the listener to be, for example, old fashioned, trendy or associated with a region or a group. Lexical-distributional changes i.e. gradual shifts from the use of one phoneme to another over time (as in ‘ogle’ being more frequently pronounced with GOAT rather than LOT) are not covered in this paper.
GOOSE
In the case of GOOSE, the term ‘fronting’ although established, is somewhat a misnomer, as it may imply that the shift to more front vowel qualities is recent. But ‘fronted’ or in fact central variants are now mainstream, having been around for decades. They were in fact first observed a century ago, by Daniel Jones, who noted they were present “to a certain extent in the speech of Southerners of education” (Trofimov & Jones, 1923, p. 65), and centralisation was later observed by Gimson (1962). In his phonetics blog, Sidney Wood notes that the back realisations are prevalent in 19th century recordings.
In GOOSE words the back vowel /uː/ tends to be more central or even front [ʉː ~ ɨ ~ ʏ]. Back realisations are still present (chiefly before dark /l/) but they are infrequent, with most contemporary SSBE variants being central or for some speakers in some contexts front. Lindsey captures this succinctly saying that “many non-natives hear this clearly and accordingly attempt to imitate it using the u of French rue or the ü of German über which is a fairly reasonable attempt” (Lindsey, 2019, p. 24). This
phonetic change is not unique to RP or SSBE, but has been happening in many regional varieties within the UK (Harrington et al., 2008; Jansen, 2012) as well as in US (Hall-Lew, 2011; Stanley et al., 2021) and Australian English (Cox, 1999).
TRAP
The ‘ash’ /æ/ symbol which represents TRAP, the vowel in back, thank, bad, plait in some dictionaries and textbooks is not synonymous with its mainstream phonetic quality. Like with every vowel there is a lot of contextual and individual variation, with the range between Cardinal Vowels 3 and 4 [a ~ æ ~ ɛ], but since WW2 TRAP has been lowering and its open quality [a], close to Cardinal 4 is now established in the speech of the majority of RP/SSBE speakers (Cruttenden, 2014). Many English learners have difficulty with producing the [æ] quality as their vowel systems do not have anything similar so aiming for the ‘ash’ quality they substitute it with [ɛ]. The good news is that if they use a low vowel with [a] quality found in most vowel systems, they will sound native like, contemporary and intelligible.
SQUARE/NEAR/CURE
In descriptions of SSBE, these vowels are classed as centring diphthongs, i.e. vowels where the change of quality is towards the centre of the vowel space, ending in a schwa. In almost all older and some more recent textbooks they are represented as such i.e. with the /eə ɪə ʊə/ symbols. The SQUARE vowel has undergone monophthongization and in contemporary English speech it is a monophthong of the [ɛː] quality, a long equivalent of DRESS. Cruttenden lists (2014, p. 80) this as a change that is almost complete, i.e. typical of the large majority of general SSBE speakers.
NEAR and CURE have over time behaved in a similar manner, i.e. tending towards monophthongs [ɪː ʊː] respectively, though the situation here is slightly more complex. Their monophthongal realisations are more recent innovations, not yet present in the majority of speakers. This intersects with the fact that many of the CURE words, especially those in common use e.g. sure, poor, cure, secure have long been pronounced with /ɔː/. The lower frequency CURE words such as lure, Ruhr are less likely to have a monophthong.
What is happening may be classed as a systemic change in progress i.e. the loss of centring diphthongs from the inventory, but as far as teaching implications are concerned, this is again good news for the learner, as the centring diphthongs have proved to be notoriously difficult to get right. To attempt them now would result in sounding largely outdated.
happY
The happY vowel is part of the weak vowel sets i.e. those that occur in unstressed syllables. In open final syllables in words such as city, happy, Chelsea in older dictionaries and materials it was represented with the KIT symbol to indicate its quality. For most middle aged and younger SSBE speakers the vowel is now tenser, for example the word city has two different vowel qualities /sɪti/, while the transcription /sɪtɪ/ represents pronunciations used by the older RP speakers or regional variants. This is reflected by the use of /i/ in major pronunciation dictionaries (Roach et al., 2006; Wells, 2008). The shift away from the KIT quality is not limited to the happY contexts, but also occurs in closed unstressed syllables, e.g. in suffixes such as -ity, -ate, the use of schwa is more common than /ɪ/. Examples include sincerity, candidate /-ətɪ -ət/.
Teaching implications
It is often the case that non-native speakers of English use outdated pronunciations, and as a result they do not sound like native speakers of the same age but someone of their parents or grandparents’ generation. This is an unwelcome side effect of learning from outdated teaching audio materials and lack of awareness on their or their instructors’ part that this is the case. Not updating our models, materials and practical exercises, we do students a disservice. While the intelligibility of their old fashioned pronunciation will likely still be high, the acceptability less so. Teachers can mitigate this outcome by improving their own as well as the students’ auditory discrimination skills and pointing out the differences that might have undesirable connotations.
In his textbook, Cruttenden (2014) discusses lowered acceptability of learners whose pronunciation is a mix of different regional features. He also cautions against using allophones that are too conservative or affected. As for the former, I am less inclined to agree. A large proportion of English speakers, whether native or non-native have hybrid accents as a result of living in different places, mixed pronunciation instruction and international friendship networks. Such accents are part of a speaker’s life story and are generally positively received. In contrast, sounding outdated is often viewed as comic and incongruous. If we choose a native pronunciation model, it needs to be contemporary for our students. Updating materials need not require a lot of time and effort, but a basic knowledge of phonetics, a good ear and a commitment to draw the students’ attention to the differences between the old and the new.
References
Cox, F. (1999). Vowel change in Australian English. Phonetica, 56(1/2), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1159/000028438
Cruttenden, A. (2014). Gimson’s pronunciation of English (8th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/978020378496
Gimson, A. C. (1962). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. Arnold.
Harrington, J., Kleber, F., & Reubold, U. (2008). Compensation for coarticulation, /u/fronting, and sound change in standard southern British: an acoustic and perceptual study. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123(5), 2825–2835. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2897042
Hall-Lew, L. (2011). The completion of a sound change in California English. In Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. ICPhS Organizing Committee. 807–810. http://www.icphs2011.hk/ICPHS_CongressProceedings.htm
Jansen, S. (2012). High back vowel fronting in the north-west of England. In S. Calamai, C. Celata, & L. Ciucci (Eds.), Proceedings of ‘Sociophonetics, at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication’. Edizioni della Normale. 29–32.
Jenkins, J. (2002). A Sociolinguistically Based, Empirically Researched Pronunciation Syllabus for English as an International Language. Applied Linguistics, 23(1), 83–103, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/23.1.83
Lindsey, G. (2019). English After RP. Standard British Pronunciation Today. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04357-5
Roach, P., Hartman, J., & Setter, J. (Eds.), (2006). Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Stanley, J. A., Renwick, M. E. L., Kuiper, K. I., & Olsen, R. M. (2021). Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English. Journal of English Linguistics, 49(4), 389–418. https://doi.org/10.1177/00754242211043163
Trofimov, M., & Jones, D. (1923). The Pronunciation of Russian. The University Press.
Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wells, J. C. (2008). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.). Longman.
Wood, S. Phonetics blog https://swphonetics.com/articulation/accents/sbe/rp/rp-19011930/rp1901-1930thoughtgoose/
Joanna Przedlacka is Lecturer in Linguistics at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. She has lectured phonetics for clinical, fieldwork and ELT purposes and is an experienced EFL teacher. Joanna’s interests are sociophonetic variation and diachrony of sound systems. She believes that an auditory ability to distinguish sounds is a key skill for pronunciation instructors.
Email: joanna.przedlacka@phon.ox.ac.uk
Secret lives of consonant clusters
Jonathan Marks
The motivation for the title of this article is twofold. Firstly, although consonant clusters can impede learners’ ability to understand and be understood, they are often neglected even by teachers who do pay attention to difficulties posed by individual consonant phonemes and the contrasts between them. Secondly, although it is easy enough to find accounts of clusters that occur in English – e.g. Knowles (1987), Marks & Bowen (2012), Roach (2009) – and lists of English clusters that are especially challenging for speakers of particular L1s – e.g. Swan & Smith (2001), Walker (2010) – clusters often behave in ways we might not expect, or even notice, and thereby pose challenges for learners that we may not fully understand, or even be aware of. Events in the lives of clusters also cast light on some of the mysteries of English spelling, and on processes of language change.
What’s a cluster?
A cluster is, simply defined, a sequence of two or more consonant phonemes with no intervening vowels, but of course nothing is so simple that it cannot be made a bit more complicated. The definition is sometimes deemed to apply only to such sequences inside a syllable – e.g. /st/ in stop or /ps/ in tops – but not to those across syllable boundaries; the narrower definition means, for example, that the sequence /ps/ does not qualify as a cluster in topsoil or top side. For teaching purposes, however, it seems most practical not to make this distinction, and instead to consider any sequence of consonant phonemes as a cluster, since learners need to negotiate them all, in speaking and listening, and in any case it is not always easy to determine exactly where the boundaries between syllables lie.
Teachers sometimes confuse the term ‘cluster’, a feature of pronunciation, with ‘digraph’, a feature of orthography: a sequence of two consonant letters representing a single phoneme – e.g. <sh> and <ck> in shock. Conversely, a cluster may be represented by a single letter – e.g. /ks/ in box
Two’s company, three’s a crowd … but how many’s a cluster?
Languages differ greatly in their cluster inventories. English is fairly rich in clusters, though less so than Slavonic languages, for example. Syllable-initially, two- and three-term clusters are common – e.g. train, strain, though the range of possible
three-term clusters, in particular, is highly restricted. Syllable-finally, many words have three- or four-term clusters, at least in their citation forms – e.g. opts, texts /teksts/. Across syllable boundaries, even longer clusters are possible, at least in theory – e.g. George the Sixth’s throne potentially contains the six-term cluster /ksθsθr/.
In practice, however, in ‘used language’ (Brazil, 1995), such long clusters tend to be simplified by the elision of one or more of their constituent consonants – try saying George the Sixth’s throne with all the consonants pronounced! This is an extreme, and perhaps unlikely, example, but shorter, more frequent potential clusters are similarly reduced – e.g. in the fraction five sixths, the word sixths is typically pronounced /sɪks/, possibly with an elongated final /s/ but otherwise identically to six
A particularly common type of cluster reduction, as was noted by Brown (1977, p. 62), is that /t/ and /d/ between two other consonants are more often elided than pronounced – e.g. nex(t) month /kstm/ > /ksm/ or stan(d) still /ndst/ > /nst/. One consequence of /t/ and /d/ elision is that present and past forms of regular verbs may be indistinguishable, e.g. talk(ed) for an hour /ktf/ > /kf/ or raise(d) the matter /zdð/ > /zð/.
From a speaker’s point of view, cluster reduction eases articulatory effort, but from a listener’s point of view, it results in loss of information about words that are being uttered, which expert users of English can usually compensate for without effort, but which can be problematic for learners. Further examples of cluster reduction will be given below.
Someday my prince (my prints?) will come
By an opposite process, resulting from imperfect synchronisation of articulatory gestures, clusters are sometimes extended through the insertion of an additional consonant – e.g.:
By this process, glimse developed into glimpse, and ham + stede became Hampstead
The precarious existence of schwa
Schwa is the most frequent vowel in English, and its natural habitat is the ‘squeeze zones’ of speech – ‘those parts of a speech unit which contain non-prominent syllables, where words […] are squeezed into soundshapes that can vary dramatically from the citation form’ (Cauldwell, 2013, p. 25) – where it lives under the constant threat of being squeezed out of existence. Elision of schwa generates consonant clusters and reduces the number of syllables in words. In some cases the elision has become standardised and incorporated into the citation form – e.g. the spelling different suggests three syllables /ˈdɪfərənt/, but the usual pronunciation has only two: /ˈdɪfrənt/. In other cases, pronunciations with and without schwa co-exist as stylistic variants, e.g. suppose – s(u)ppose with the cluster /sp/, terrific – t(e)riffic /tr/, certificate – c(er)tificate /st/, celebrity – sleb /sl/, history – hist(o)ry /tr/, or politically correct – p(o)litic(a)lly c(o)rrect /pl/ /kl/ /kr/. A few such words have unofficial spellings which indicate schwalessness – e.g. spose, triffic. The reduction from celebrity to sleb necessitates a change of spelling from <c> to <s>.
Sometimes elision of schwa results in a sequence of non-syllabic consonant plus syllabic consonant – e.g. some (unstressed) /sm/ or traditional /trˈdɪʃnl/. In the word necessary, the sequence /səsə/ is often reduced to an extended /s/: ‘nessssry’. Some words show a spectrum of pronunciations in different speech styles from /ə/ + consonant to syllabic consonant to non-syllabic consonant in a cluster, e.g.: police /pəl/ > /pl/ > /pl/ or Hungary /ɡər/ > /gr/ > /gr/ (the rightmost version being identical to hungry).
Much less frequently, an unofficial ‘epenthetic’ schwa can make a guest appearance as a result of a slight delay in the transition between two consonants in a cluster, thereby adding a syllable to the word – e.g.: film /ˈfɪlm/ > /ˈfɪləm/ or the football chant Eng-e-land! This process of schwa epenthesis is how thorough developed from through, for example.
All the examples of clusters given so far are ‘legal’ clusters, i.e. ones that form part of the official cluster inventory of English. But, of course …
…if something’s illegal, it doesn’t mean that people don’t do it
Elision of schwa also creates a teeming underworld of ‘illegal’ clusters: unlawful assemblies of consonants that disregard the laws of English cluster formation, such as the following initial clusters:
/ft/ ph(o)tography
/fn/ ph(o)netics
/fð/ f(or) the time being
/fs/ f(or) some reason
/pt/ p(o)tato
/bn/ b(a)nana
/km/ c(o)mmunicate
/kn/ c(o)nnection
/kp/ c(a)pacity
/kθ/ c(a)thedral
/tm/ t(o)mato
/tg/ t(o) go /td/ t(o) do /prn/ pr(o)nunciation /ksð/ ‘c(o)s that’s …
/vr/ (I)’ve read it
/zm/ (a)s (a) matter of fact /zðw/ (i)s th(e) water hot?
Experienced listeners to English are skilled at extrapolating plausible meanings from sketchy phonetic information, assuming in the final example above, for instance, that Is the water hot? is actually what they heard, rather than an interpretation of what they heard, but they may fail to appreciate why learners, being less experienced listeners, might be flummoxed by such an utterance, perhaps not realising that it is intended as a question, and struggling to interpret the beginning of the utterance /zð/ so that they pay insufficient attention to ‘water hot’, words which may in any case be obscured by a pronunciation such as [wɔ:ʔhɒʔ].
The history of legal and illegal clusters
As we know, the demarcation line between what is deemed to be legal and what is not is drawn differently not only in different places but also in different periods of history, and clusters are no exception to this. For example, the syllable-initial cluster /kn/ was legal in English until the 17th century, and the letter k was pronounced in words such as know and knot; the spelling of these words has never been updated to reflect the change in pronunciation. The same applies to the spellings wrong, write etc., which are relics of the former cluster /wr/. Other such relics include the b in lamb, plumb, the gh in eight, daughter, the n in hymn, autumn, the t in castle, fasten and, in non-rhotic varieties, the r before another consonant in words such as form, market (as well as r in word-final position).
Until the 14th century, plurals, third person singular present forms and regular past tenses ended in /əs/, /əz/ and /əd/; elision of /ə/ (except after /t/, /d/ and sibilants) legalised previously illegal clusters such as /mz/ (e.g. seems) and /ŋd/ (e.g. hanged). A few of the older forms with schwa still exist in use as adjectives – e.g. aged, learned
When two languages meet
When English speakers pronounce words from other languages which contain nonEnglish clusters, there are various possible outcomes. Firstly, the cluster is preserved, e.g. /bw/ Buenos Aires, /pw/ Puerto Rico, /vw/ bon voyage, /vl/ Vladivostok, /ʃw/ schwa, /sf/ sphere. Secondly, the cluster is simplified by elision, e.g.: /mn/ > /n/ mnemonic, /ps/ > /s/ psychology, /pt/ > /t/ pterodactyl, /ks/ > /z/ xeno(e.g. xenophobia), /ts/ > /z/ zeitgeist, /ts/ > /t/ tsetse. Thirdly, the cluster is simplified by epenthesis, i.e. the insertion of a weak vowel, e.g.: /tb/ > /təb/ Tbilisi or /nk/ > /nək/ Nkrumah. Finally, one element of the cluster may be syllabified, e.g: /nd/ > /nd/ Ndola.
Some languages are almost or entirely devoid of clusters, while many others have much smaller inventory of clusters than English, and English clusters are a challenge especially for learners whose L1 is cluster-poor. In dealing with English clusters, such learners tend to adopt either of two of the above strategies: elision or epenthesis. A striking example of the contrasting outcomes of these two approaches (from Jenkins, 2000: 142) is provided by these two pronunciations of product: [pəˈrɒdʌkʊtɔ] (Japanese speaker: epenthesis) and [ˈ pɔdʌk] (Taiwanese speaker: elision). In both cases, the clusters /pr/ and /kt/ are disassembled, but in the first version all the phonetic information in these clusters is preserved, although redistributed, while in the second version, part of it is obliterated. So it comes as no surprise that in the interlanguage interactions reported by Jenkins, the Japanese version was found to be intelligible, whereas the Taiwanese version was not.
Learners are initially predisposed by their L1 to use either elision or epenthesis, but those who start out favouring elision tend to use epenthesis increasingly as they become more advanced, no doubt discovering by experience that this strategy is more likely to benefit intelligibility. Jenkins (2000) recommends that word-initial clusters, which are particularly important for intelligibility in EIL (English as an International Language), should not be simplified, but that simplification of word-final clusters is more acceptable. Research summarised by Levis (2018, pp. 86-99) suggests that there is a great deal of variation in how learners actually deal with clusters, affected by many factors including L1, gender, proficiency level and degree of attention to speech.
Implications for learners: the bad news and the good news
Jerome K. Jerome writes in his novel Three Men on the Bummel “English spelling would seem to have been designed chiefly as a disguise to pronunciation. It is a
clever idea, calculated to check presumption on the part of the foreigner; but for that he would learn it in a year.” (1900, p. 61).
Not only do learners need to know that not all the letters they see in the spellings of words will correspond to sounds they hear in those words – this applies to words such as knock, daughter, castle, different, island, salmon, subtle, psychology – but also that not all the sounds they see in dictionary transcriptions of words will, either. So they will often need to consider whether ‘reasonable hearings’ of the ‘sound substance’ they perceive (terms from Cauldwell, 2018) make sense in context. For example, neck’s weak is a reasonable hearing of /neks wi:k/, but it will need to be disqualified as an interpretation in the context ‘Right, then, same time /neks wi:k/’.
Similarly, the following may all be reasonable hearings of an utterance:
1 I raise a/the matter.
2 I’ll raise a/the matter.
3 I raised a/the matter.
4 I’ve raised a/the matter.
In this case it might not even be clear from the context whether 2 is a more likely interpretation than 3 or 4, for example, and there might be a need to ask for clarification.
While cluster reduction works against learners’ listening comprehension by obscuring word identities, and sometimes also grammatical information, it works in favour of their own pronunciation by providing them with articulatory short cuts. Instead of struggling to pronounce /ðz/ in clothes, for example, they can use the same pronunciation as close and trust the context to do the rest; if, however, the struggle for /ðz/ results in /kləʊðəz/, this will have the possible benefit of preserving all the phonetic information in the word.
Jenkins (2000, p. 143) suggests that for intelligibility in ELF:
• epenthesis is in general preferable to elision
• but sounds in initial clusters should never be elided;
• final clusters can be simplified by elision;
• /t/ and /d/ are the best candidates for elision in final clusters,
• but if /t/ or /d/ is the final consonant in a word, it can be elided if the following word begins with a consonant but not if it begins with a vowel.
Such suggestions are a valuable starting point, but need to be continuously tested in different contexts of use. Shockey writes that “… in every speech act there is a fine balance between the natural tendency of the vocal tract to underarticulate and the
need to maintain adequate communication.” (2003, p. 75). Any interaction between speakers of different L1s in different contexts may require a reassessment of exactly where that ‘fine balance’ is to be found.
Suggestions for teachers
Teachers and learners in multilingual classes have the potential advantage, depending on the mixture of L1s represented, that problems of intelligibility arising from different treatments of clusters, like any problems of intelligibility, are likely to occur, and to need to be negotiated, in the course of classroom interaction.
But of course most English classes in the world are monolingual. There follow a few suggestions for approaches teachers might take, especially with classes of learners whose L1 has a small cluster inventory, to help learners understand how clusters can compromise intelligibility in ELF and what they can do to negotiate instances of reduced intelligibility resulting from this cause.
To help with awareness-raising:
• Introduce learners to the principle that clusters are often modified by dropping or adding sounds. Lead them to discover which of these strategies they tend to use (and which clusters they pronounce without modification).
• Provide learners with transcripts of short stretches of English speech by speakers of various L1s. Ask them to identify potential clusters and then to listen and note whether the speakers pronounce all the potential consonant sounds in the clusters and, if not, which sounds they drop or add. (I often hear teachers talking about, and see them writing about, the importance of ‘exposing learners’ or ‘giving learners exposure’ to different varieties of English. But I think exposure per se is unlikely to be sufficient, and this suggested activity type is a way of going beyond ‘exposure’ and priming learners to notice particular features of different varieties.) Ask them to discuss which strategy – dropping or adding – is more helpful in maintaining intelligibility. Point out the particular importance of not reducing initial clusters.
• Once they have had some experience of this procedure – over a period of weeks, perhaps – they can be asked to listen to further such recordings without a transcript, to transcribe short passages that contain potential clusters, and then discuss which clusters (if at all) impeded their understanding, and how those clusters were realised.
• Provide practice in distinguishing members of minimal pairs, if plausible ones exist, in listening and in production – e.g. sport centre vs. support centre. To help with production:
• Redrawing word boundaries – e.g. asking learners to say fulls-cale instead of full-scale if initial /sk/ is problematic for them.
• Helping learners to assemble clusters in a piecemeal fashion – e.g ream > tream > stream
• If the initial consonant of a cluster is extendable, asking learners to extend it until they are ready to say the next – e.g. sssssmile, ffffflower. They can then gradually reduce the initial consonant to its normal length.
Can clusters tell us anything about the future of English?
Clusters are inherently unstable and subject to modification by variation in the strength, timing and position of articulatory gestures. Instability in clusters generates initially random variations among speakers, which can:
• persist as random variation – for example, one English speaker I know consistently uses schwa epenthesis in the word umbrella, pronouncing it as four syllables: /ʌmbəˈrelə/;
• spread throughout entire speech communities and establish themselves as new norms (English spelling is littered with the cast-offs of this process);
• develop into systematic variation between sub-groups of a speech community – e.g. the initial cluster /hw/ has been reduced to /w/ in some varieties of English but not others, notably Scottish, Irish and some American varieties; such varieties distinguish between wine and witch with /w/ and whine and which with /hw/, for example.
Such variations, together with innumerable other initially random variations in pronunciation, grammar and lexis, whether language-internally generated or induced by language contact and cross-language transfer of features, gradually drive differentiation into recognisably different dialects and, eventually, separate languages. Is this destined to be the fate of English, as more and more speakers around the world contribute more and more variation?
It has been predicted that English will splinter into varieties that will forfeit mutual intelligibility to the extent that they will logically have to be recognised as different languages. This would certainly be consistent with a fundamental trend in language history. But times have changed, and the current situation of English is unprecedented. Thousands of years ago, in the days of Indo-European migration, it was perfectly possible for two sub-groups of speakers of a language to separate, go their own different ways and never have any further contact with each other.
This is unlikely to happen to English nowadays – the inter-connectedness of the world, and the concomitant need for mutual intelligibility, is a constraint on differentiation. But on the other hand, the influence of language contact, with speakers of so many different L1s using English, is a constraint on conformity. At the very least, tolerance of differences and willingness to work as speakers and listeners to achieve mutual intelligibility and, if necessary, to ‘negotiate meaning’ (an old mantra of the Communicative Approach) are needed, and dealing with consonant clusters is one of the many components of this work.
References
Brazil, D. (1995). A Grammar of Speech. Oxford University Press.
Brown, G. (1977). Listening to Spoken English. Longman.
Cauldwell, R. (2013). Phonology for Listening. Speech in Action.
Cauldwell, R. (2018). A Syllabus for Listening – Decoding. Speech in Action.
Jenkins, J. (2000). The Phonology of English as an International Language. Oxford University Press.
Jerome, J. K. (1900) Three men on the bummel. Arrowsmith.
Knowles, G. (1987). Patterns of Spoken English. Longman.
Levis, J. M. (2018). Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108241564
Marks, J., & Bowen, T. (2012). The Book of Pronunciation. Delta Publishing.
Roach, P. (2009). English Phonetics and Phonology: A practical course (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Shockey, L. (2003). Sound Patterns of Spoken English. Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470758397
Swan, M., & Smith, B. (Eds.). (2001). Learner English: A teacher’s guide to interference and other problems (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Walker, R. (2010). Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford University Press.
Jonathan Marks is a founder member and former coordinator of the PronSIG. He is the author of English Pronunciation in Use Elementary (CUP) and co-author of The Book of Pronunciation (Delta Publishing). His survey review of recent books on pronunciation teaching, entitled Pronunciation: from Cinderella to Achilles Heel … to Golden Age? appeared in ELT Journal 76(4) in 2022.
Email: jonathanmarks@wp.pl
Choral repetition – the neurophysiological opportunist’s way
Olle Kjellin
Ultimate attainment in foreign- and second-language pronunciation depends on many individual and circumstantial factors, and rigorous classroom research on pronunciation practices is difficult to perform and evaluate. Empirically, however, many teachers have found that choral practice turns out to be very efficient. There are certain basic neurophysiological functions of the central auditory system that are common to all human beings with very little individual variation and that may shed some light on the effects of choral practice. Based on these insights, this article wishes to unveil nine thoughtworthy reasons for specific choral practice and also offer a detailed classroom protocol primarily for the first few weeks of a language course but also useful in 'renovation' classes at all levels. In a nutshell, this protocol involves ample listening and speaking exercises with a great multitude of repetitions alternately in unison and solo of whole phrases with a primary focus on speech prosody and with constructive feedback by the teacher after each repetition. After these few weeks of Quality Repetition, pronunciation will require much less attention later on.
#1: "Practice makes perfect" is neurophysiologically true.
Neural networks corresponding to memories and all their connected associations are immediately formed in response to the stimuli that arrive into the brain. The robustness of long-term memories is directly related to the number of repetitions. Just like walking on a lawn, paths will arise wherever we walk most frequently and nowhere else. What is more, faint paths may easily become overgrown unless walked upon again. When neurons containing actin, a protein that is also involved in muscular movements, overhear passing signals from other neurons in the densely packed brain, the actin forms knobs called spines on some of its branches (Fischer et al., 1998). If the stimulus is not repeated, the new spines will disappear. If the stimulus is repeated sufficiently many times, the spines may form permanent synapses and even develop more branches and wire together all neurons that happened to be involved in that particular event. The results are long-term
memories. The saying ‘repetition is the mother of all learning’, thus, is neurophysiologically based. Such wired-together networks may be re-used in total or in parts in the formation of yet other networks, and hence assist in recall, cueing, and mental associations of all kinds. All this is the neurophysiological rationale for multimodal multi-repetitions in any learning process. These neuroplastic processes are identical throughout life from before birth until the last breath, meaning that if we are dissatisfied with the results of learning a new language, it is not our age that is to blame but our method of learning (Marinova-Todd et al., 2000). In other words, there is no shortcut to learning and long-term memory, only repetitive work. According to the detailed review by Ericsson et al. (1993), deliberate, tenacious, daily practice with immediate feedback seems to be the best way to expert performance. They found no genetical evidence of talent.
The more we practise, the more branches and synapses are formed. The time-lapse video of actinic spine formation (Fischer et al., 1998) shows learning on the scale of branches of neurons. The dense abundance of criss-crossing neurons and possible places for new synaptic connections in the next video presented in the footnotes is quite remarkable (Lichtman, 2014).
Well-automated motor skills are stored as procedural memories. Procedural memories are unforgettable: we cannot unlearn how to swim, ride a bicycle, or speak our first language (L1). In some experiments, it took up to 15 minutes of practice for the central nervous system to automate a new skill (Raichle et al., 1994). But in real life, it may require more daily repetitions to be well consolidated into procedural memory. Children in the process of acquiring their L1 actually practise a lot though less conspicuously and for many years rather than days or weeks.
#2: Choral practice takes advantage of the direct neurophysiological effects of hearing on the speech organs.
Hearing is an indispensable prerequisite of spoken language acquisition. There are direct neural connections from the primary auditory centres in the temporal lobes to facial motor areas in the frontal lobes (Weber & Ojemann, 1995). So-called mirror neurons, or imitation neurons, in the frontal motor areas responsible for voluntary oral and facial movements have also been found to be active during listening to speech (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). The auditorily invoked motor activity is fairly identical to the activity that would have been required in order to actually produce the same speech sounds. This particular auditory pathway bypasses comprehension pathways, so its influence on the speech organs is immediate, reflex-like and very strong. It is so strong that if you look at a person who is listening very attentively to
what you are saying, you will see slight lip movements matching your own lip movements, as if they already knew exactly what you were going to say. Speaking along with someone with as little delay as possible (shadowing) is even faster than production (Skoyles, 1998). Also, everybody has surely had the experience of listening to a hoarse speaker and feeling an urge to clear their own throat. Similarly, in a chorus, such audio-motor reflexes will force everyone to speak like the teacher. Choral practice can even help aphasia patients speak (Judd, 1988)
This audio-motor activity for speech is coupled to neural networks in brain areas involved in memory and attention. The net function is a kind of pattern recognition mechanism, by which the incoming speech is matched with and understood in relation to the listener's own speaking experience. If corresponding speaking experience is lacking, listening comprehension in a second language (L2) will not work well. This audio-motor link also is the fastest feedback loop controlling one's own spoken L1 output and, consequently, is equally required for the L2, but it will hardly work at all without proper practice. Choral practice specifically and bidirectionally strengthens this audio-motor pathway, which is so crucial for spoken communication.
#3: Choral practice trains prosody particularly effectively.
Prosody, the rhythm and melody of speech, is pivotal, not only for a fluent spoken communication but, in the first place, for the very acquisition of a spoken language (Gerken & McGregor, 1998; Ruben, 1997). It should thus be considered a priority in the language classroom, particularly at the beginner level. If we sing a song in a choir, we will probably find it quite difficult to sing in any other tune than the rest of the choir, and almost impossible to sing in another rhythm and tempo. If we want to learn a new song, we will surely prefer first to sing along a number of times together with someone who knows the song already. The alternative, listen first and sing then, will be much more difficult. The same thing, of course, applies to speaking chorally when learning a new language. In the present author's experience as a language learner as well as a teacher, the ‘listen and say after me’ method is inefficient while ‘let us say it together’ is efficient.
#4: Choral practice multiplies student-talking time.
An eternal problem in language pedagogy is the heavily biased relation between teacher-talking time (TTT) and student-talking time (STT). Investigations have found that TTT constitutes about 70-90 percent of the lesson time, with the rest of the lesson undemocratically shared among the students (Trotman et al., 1999). It is
indeed essential that the teacher provides abundant input of the target language for learners. On the other hand, it is essential that students get a chance to speak in the target language as much as possible. This paradox can be solved by choral practice. The teacher utters the target phrase alone seven or so times to enable the students to grip the whole phrase into their working memory. Then the teacher and the students speak in unison some 15-25 times or more (depending on the difficulty), and so they keep alternating as long as the teacher deems necessary. Also, solo exercises should be frequently intercalated and alternated with whole-group choral practice. In this way, both TTT and STT are greatly increased at the same time, which makes the method very time efficient. So, if done with due diligence during the first few weeks of a beginning course, then pronunciation exercises will not require very much time later on. Teachers' fear of not having enough time for choral practice is unfounded.
#5: Choral practice provides immediate feedback for the whole class simultaneously.
Immediate feedback with ample praise is essential to keep motivation high. This will not only reinforce correct responses but also help learners identify and correct mistakes quickly. To achieve maximum effect, it is best to deliver the feedback within seconds, i.e., within the normal time span of working memory. Note that this time span is naturally prolonged with experience. Previous knowledge facilitates new learning. Vice versa, it means that the beginning learner has a much shorter working memory for words and sounds than most teachers are aware of. Therefore, teachers should adjust their feedback timing for beginner level students to ensure optimal learning for them.
#6: Choral practice gives shelter to shy students.
Psychological inhibition is often grounded in feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. After a good round of choral practice, students will likely feel more secure and accomplished. The shy students in particular will begin to experience increasing levels of confidence and security which they may not have felt before.
#7: The basic phrases become calibration phrases for all other phrases.
Pronunciation is a surprisingly small part of a language. There are typically a couple of dozen speech sounds in English and a manageable set of key prosody principles that learners need to grasp for effective and successful speech. Any arbitrary
collection of phrases or short dialogues, corresponding to less than a page-worth of written text, will typically provide examples of all there is to learn about prosody and pronunciation in any particular language. Whatever collection of phrases we happen to choose is irrelevant - any page will make equally good examples of, for instance, Standard Southern British English (SSBE) prosody and pronunciation. Look up any word in your SSBE dictionary, and it will only be pronounced with SSBE vowels, SSBE consonants, and SSBE prosody. The speech habits from well-automated calibration sentences will irresistibly be transferred to all future learning. This often comes as a surprise to both teachers and students alike. But there is little point in moving on to the next lesson in your textbook, until the previous one is mastered. And that mastery, to any level of perfection desired by the learners themselves, is quickly and rather irresistibly achieved through deliberate choral practice. Perfect is possible (Markham, 1997).
#8: Repeated choral practice provides a statistical mass effect.
Statistical learning has been found to be an important factor in L1 acquisition (Saffran et al., 1996; Saffran & Kirkham, 2018) With the multitude of repetitions as suggested here, with immediate feedback, most L2 learners too will get an intuitive understanding for what is correct and not, and for when they transgress the boundaries between phonemic categories. Complete packages with word order, morphology and idiomatic phrases will slip into the learner's memory and remain there (Seidlhofer & Dalton-Puffer, 1995). The path-in-the-lawn effect. As implied above, neurons are like statistical mini calculators that accumulate almost everything they tally. This is basic neurophysiology like everything else in the human body, and the processes outlined in this article work in the same way for all persons at all ages and for all types of learning. The individual differences on this level are not large enough to significantly influence the ultimate outcome of the learning endeavour in most cases. Much more important is the type of instructions we get, our previous knowledge, and the way we practise.
#9: Extensive choral practice may work as an emulation of L1 acquisition.
There is no shortcut to a new language. One will always have to start with its very tools: prosody, pronunciation, and basic word-order rules. This is how L1 acquisition has evolved through millions of years (Gerken & McGregor, 1998): prosody the first year; pronunciation and basic grammar for 4-5 years; advanced grammar, pragmatics, writing, and reading for another 10 years - and the rest of our lives. Mother Nature is usually wise, and obviously there is something smart with her
natural ways, because every normal L1 acquisition attains a perfect result by definition. Choral practice is one possible way to emulate that for L2 acquisition. I have also experienced this myself on learning the pronunciation and basic sentences of many foreign languages. Read more about the neurophysiological basis of choral practice in Kjellin (2024).
Minute-by-minute protocol
Many teachers fear that their learners will find the repeated pronunciation drills boring. In my experience, however, usually only the teachers find them repetitive and boring. For the learners, each repetition is a new and better version of their pronunciation, and they feel very clearly how fast they improve by each repetition. This is important, because the feeling of success is addictive, and they will want to feel more and more of it. It is essential to co-practise as many different neurons as possible (multi-modal learning), and dancing also induces well-being in most people. It also prevents dozing off. So, generally we will practise standing up and dancing with slightly exaggerated rhythm (Kjellin, 2014).
Thus, the process will enhance motivation and keep itself going. It is imperative that you, the teacher, give praise and encouragement with an ever-happier smile for each repetition, and that you give the learners the chance to keep repeating until they are satisfied/saturated. It is not important that everything be perfect for you to give praise. It suffices that you are satisfied with the particular little detail that you happen to be paying attention and giving feedback to. Avoiding the word no when something does have to be changed, I may say, ‘Yes, 95% perfect! Now also do this...’, demonstrating pertinent detail with dramatic gesture. Ultimately, you will be required to pay attention to every detail, one at a time, and keep practicing it up to the level of learner-requested perfection.
In effect, the practice session as such will begin only after that level of perfection is attained, i.e., after some 10-20-30 initial repetitions with your enthusiastic, immediate feedback, depending on the learner's level and the difficulty of the phrase, because only then will the correct automatization and saturation processes start. The 10-30 initial repetitions are only the search for mastery. The rest will be the automatization and consolidation of it. So do not ever, ever stop practising after just 20-30 repetitions; that is a waste of time and effort, because the effect will fade too soon. Instead, you should usually keep repeating the phrase in chorus and with individuals for perhaps 100 times, or even more. During individual exercises, cycle frequently between all-group-chorus and single-person solo and yourself solo. The rest of the group will listen attentively and learn just as much as the particular individual does. Quickly shift back to all-group chorus after 2-3 repetitions, habitually, regardless of
learner's attainment, in order not to embarrass anybody, and also in order to meet the eagerness of the rest of the class to try again. And do not worry: the class will not be bored. Only you. The trick is the incredibly satisfying feeling of success the learners get when they sense the beginning automaticity after, say, 50-100 repetitions.
On introducing a new phrase, I will say, ‘Just listen to me 7 times; then, we will say it all in unison.’ By the 3rd or 4th time, most mouths will begin to mimic me silently. It is very rewarding to see this! And by the 8th time, every mouth will be prepared and ready to speak out aloud, and thanks to the chorus, they will manage it well. Particularly the rhythm and melody will be rather irresistible, thanks to those direct audio-motor pathways described above.
After some 10-15 repetitions, I will ask them to listen in silence again, because by then they will be ready to discover new details. And then ‘come back into the chorus when you feel ready for it’. Based on my observations, students very quickly learn to say the target phrase perfectly, to their own great surprise! Sometimes, after many repetitions, I will ask them, ‘was this exercise boring?’ Nobody has ever said ‘yes’ yet. Enjoy their happy looks.
A couple of days into the language course, I will shock the students by requesting the person just being grilled to come forward and play the teacher's part in choral practice for the particular phrase we are practising. I dare to do so, because their pronunciation per practice phrase will already be identical or nearly identical to my own pronunciation. After the first shock and horror, they will be very proud to play the teacher and lead their peers for even more repetitions. Eventually, all the students will play the teacher several times while their peers listen ever so attentively, trying to detect any faults. In this way, it will be easy to keep practising the same phrase for even more than the suggested 15 minutes. They do not notice that, because the situation itself is new, and the feeling of progress is so rewarding, the addictive feeling of being successful. This also adds significantly to the teacher's own feeling of success.
References
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Judd, T. (1988) The varieties of musical talent. In L. Obler och D. Fein (Eds.), The exceptional brain: neuropsychology of talent and special abilities (pp. 127-155). Guilford Press.
Kjellin, O. (2014, November 1). Pronunciation of Swedish long "o" and "u" [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjcJeVMoPgs
Kjellin, O. (2024). Quality practise pronunciation with Audacity – the best method! A tutorial. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6dp80fambvopt2e3c7dky/Kjellin-Practise-Pronunciation-wAudacity.pdf?rlkey=ccncuo0b1q2qhm43mwfullhun&dl=0
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Marinova-Todd, S. H., Bradford Marshall, D., & Snow, C.E. (2000) Three misconceptions about age and L2 learning. TESOL Quarterly, 34(1), 9-34.
Markham, D. (1997). Phonetic imitation, accent, and the learner [Doctoral dissertation]. Lund University Press.
Raichle, M. E., Fiez, J. A., Videen, T. O., Macleod, A-M. K., Pardo, J. V., Fox, P. T. & Steven E., & Petersen, S. E. (1994). Practice-related changes in human brain functional anatomy during nonmotor learning. Cerebral Cortex, 1(4), 8-26. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/4.1.8
Rizzolatti G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169-92. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.27.070203.144230
Ruben R. J. (1997). A time frame of critical/sensitive periods of language development. Acta Oto-Laryngologica, 117(2), 202–205. https://doi.org/10.3109/00016489709117769
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926-1928. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.274.5294.1926
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Seidlhofer, B., & Dalton-Puffer, C. (1995). Appropriate units in pronunciation teaching: some programmatic pointers. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(1), 135-146.
Skoyles, J. R. (1998). Speech phones are a replication code. Medical Hypotheses, 50(2), 167-173. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0306-9877(98)90203-1
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Olle Kjellin is a post-doc phonetician/speech physiologist, a Swedish language teacher, and a medical doctor (radiology, subspecialized in the functions and disorders of the speech and swallowing organs) with a special interest in the neurophysiology of communication, learning, and forgetting (worked for 6 years in a memory and dementia clinic).
Email: okjhum@yahoo.se
The potential of an online platform for pronunciation learning: the case of Educaplay
Ana Cecilia Cad & Florencia Giménez
This case study aims to examine the potential of Educaplay, an educational gaming platform, to support the teaching and learning of plosives and fricatives to Spanish speakers learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). During the study, participants of a first-year English pronunciation course at a state university completed digital game-based activities over a semester and the effectiveness of the platform was explored through the participants’ eyes. The data collection instruments included a survey, interviews, the platform reports, and tests. The results indicate that the activities built in Educaplay were beneficial for EFL pronunciation practice. Finally, the pedagogical implications of the present study are discussed.
Introduction
Pronunciation is vital to communication. According to Pennington and RogersonRevell (2019), “it is the crucial starting point for all spoken language, since thoughts must be articulated in sound in order to be heard and so to become a message that can be communicated to another person.” (p. 1) The attention to pronunciation teaching and learning has fluctuated over time. At present, the renewed interest in pronunciation among L2 teachers and students can be attributed to factors like the need for intelligible speech in a globalized world and the recognition of the impact of pronunciation on successful communication as well as overall language proficiency.
Over the last few decades, the field of pronunciation pedagogy has seen the emergence of Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) and Mobileassisted Pronunciation Training (MAPT) systems that offer learners opportunities for self-paced practice, exposure to target language examples (Neri et al., 2002), and immediate feedback (Rogerson-Revell, 2021), which in turn can aid in phoneme acquisition (Neri et al., 2006). The integration of such technology-enhanced approaches has empowered both teachers and students to better address pronunciation challenges and foster effective communication skills in the target language.
Correction strategies, including request for repetition and feedback, are also employed in these perspectives (Burns & Seidlhofer, 2020). Besides, CAPT and MAPT allow learners to engage with comprehensible input that aids their language acquisition, and provide opportunities to get exposed to oral language, which can enhance their pronunciation skills (Safavi, 2021).
Technological advancements and a shift in language teaching methodologies have contributed to the heightened focus on pronunciation development in L2 learning. In this context, the exploration of innovative digital platforms, like Educaplay, holds promise for enhancing the teaching and learning of L2 English pronunciation at university level.
Theoretical background
Digital learning platforms have transformed L2 teaching by offering diverse resources for practice. However, it is important for instructors to recognize the strengths and the shortcomings of these technological resources. Among their many benefits, the fact that these resources often include interactive exercises and audio recordings that engage learners with different aspects of the language can be mentioned. Such platforms also empower users to take control of their language acquisition journey by allowing flexibility in time management and accessibility. Immediate feedback is another strength, reducing reliance on physical classrooms or instructors (Chiu & Wu, 2017) and promoting independent learning.
Despite the strengths mentioned above, digital learning platforms and apps also present some limitations. One of them is that many lack input from language learning experts, requiring teachers to design their own activities with a specific pedagogical approach (Becker & Edalatishams, 2019). Additionally, some activities on these platforms primarily focus on drilling and repetition (Ozkul, 2019), which may not align with a constructivist and communicative language teaching approach. Furthermore, most activities provide generalized feedback instead of addressing individual needs.
Research indicates that technology tools have a positive impact on student motivation and learning outcomes. Cruaud (2018) explored gamified applications in a Norwegian upper-secondary school and found that gamification in L2 learning had a positive impact. In the field of L2 pronunciation in particular, the use of technology has shown considerable benefits. Pokrivcakova (2015) emphasized the advantages of using CAPT resources to improve pronunciation skills. Ong’onda and Muindi Nguvi’s (2016) quasi-experimental study shows that computerized programs can be beneficial when real-life pronunciation practice is infrequent. Tejedor-García et al.´s (2020) and Barcomb and Cardoso´s (2020) research have also demonstrated a
positive correlation between mobile applications and gamified activities, and learning outcomes in L2 pronunciation instruction.
In the present study, we aimed to explore the potential of Educaplay to enhance EFL learners’ motivation and facilitate the learning of English pronunciation features, specifically fricatives and plosives, among Spanish-speaking students in a university context.
Research questions
The following research questions (RQs) are addressed in this study:
1. Does Educaplay have the potential to facilitate the creation of activities that promote the learning of English pronunciation learning among Spanishspeaking EFL learners?
2. Does Educaplay have the potential to design activities that positively impact students’ motivation?
3. Do students perceive digital activities built in Educaplay as beneficial for their L2 pronunciation development?
Methods Context
The study was carried out in an EFL pronunciation course of a teacher- and translator-training program in Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina. The main goal of this course is to help students acquire new articulatory habits and, consequently, improve their pronunciation. To achieve that aim, classes are mainly practical and provide students with the opportunity to engage in both oral and written work consisting of the identification and production of English segments. In general, monolingual groups of about 30 Argentine Spanish-speaking students attend the course which is taught by two EFL professors, experts in the field of English phonology. Since the teacher-student ratio is not ideal, apart from in-class practice, students are expected to continue practising after class. Digital game-based activities appear to be well-suited for this purpose.
Participants
A group of 19 students (18 females and 1 male) with a mean age of 19 participated in all the activities that were designed. They were Argentinian first-year university students. Their level of English was pre-intermediate (A2-B1 according to the CEFR).
Selection of target features
The target features for pronunciation instruction were plosives and fricatives. The selection criteria were based on two major factors. One criterion was the differences between Spanish and English. For instance, Finch and Ortiz Lira (1982) point out that English has a greater number of consonants. O'Connor and Fletcher (1989) highlight segments absent in Spanish as a top priority for Spanish speakers learning English. The other criterion was the concept of functional load, which measures the importance of speech sounds in distinguishing minimal pairs (Munro & Derwing, 2006, p. 522). The selected features were all the English plosives /p, t, k, b, d, g/ and the fricatives /z/ and /s/ in initial and final positions, with an emphasis on sounds absent in Spanish.
Platform and activities
Educaplay (https://es.educaplay.com/) was the platform used to design the activities for various reasons. First, it provides tutorials to help first-time users learn how to create different activity types, and both premium and free accounts are available. Also, many of the activities featured on the platform for different knowledge areas seemed to suit different learning styles and levels. Third, the layout and variety of the activities made the platform visually attractive. Besides, Educaplay allows material developers and classroom teachers to either use ready-made activities or design their own. The latter was a determining factor in the selection since we, as experts in the field of pronunciation, wanted to design our own activities with a clear pedagogical focus - ones that were challenging and engaging and facilitated the development of pronunciation skills. Finally, Educaplay’s interactive features were key to custom design the activities. For example, the ability to insert, record and playback audio provides students with immediate feedback and opportunities for self-monitoring, which are crucial for improving pronunciation skills. The combination of Educaplay´s capabilities and the instructor´s ability to personalize the learning experience can enhance the teaching and learning of L2 English pronunciation at university level.
A set of four game-based activities were designed to promote the identification and guided practice on the metalanguage of the field, to work on the perception of sounds in isolation and in context, and to practice phonetic transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA):
1. Video Quiz: https://es.educaplay.com/recursos-educativos/9895932-endings.html
All the tasks performed by the students produced insights about the affordances and limitations of the platform in a beginner-level L2 pronunciation class.
Data collection instruments
Four different tools were employed to collect data. One of them was a survey conducted at the end of the semester to explore the students’ perceptions on their use of Educaplay to support pronunciation learning. This instrument was administered through a Google Form and was also used to assess the platform’s impact on their motivation. The participants evaluated seven statements and indicated their level of agreement using a three-point Likert scale with the options: Always, Sometimes and Never The second data collection instrument was a threequestion, semi-structured interview that was designed to delve deeper into the students’ perceptions of Educaplay as a pronunciation learning tool after they had completed the survey (See Appendix A). Six students randomly picked from the course participated in it at the end of the semester. The interviews were held online and recorded. The platform reports were the third source of information. These provided objective measures on student performance (i.e. task completion, time spent on each activity, and scores obtained in each task). The results the students obtained in the tests completed the data pool.
The collected data sets were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The survey results were processed by the form itself and produced a bar graph that displays students’ perceptions on the use of Educaplay to learn L2 pronunciation. The interviews were analyzed by the researchers. The students’ responses were first transcribed, and then categorized according to their reported experiences. The data from the reports were converted to a spreadsheet for storage and analysis. That included information regarding participation, task completion and overall performance. Finally, the test results were analyzed in relation to the responses students provided in the content-related evaluation conducted through the survey and the interview.
Results and discussion
The results will be discussed in relation to the aspects each RQ addressed.
Suitability of Educaplay for the learning of L2 pronunciation
Both the survey and the interview yielded interesting results regarding the appropriacy of Educaplay as a useful tool for pronunciation. Table 1 displays the answers to the survey:
Table 1. Survey results
The fact that most students responded to the items as Always or Sometimes indicates they believe the activities in Educaplay have contributed to their learning of English plosives and fricatives. It is worth focusing on the answers to item 7 in the survey. Although most of the students highlighted the usefulness of the Matching and Memory activities to improve their identification of segmental features (63.5% of the students marked Always and 31.5%, Sometimes), one student (5.2%) stated these had failed to achieve the objective for which they had been designed. It could have been interesting to interview this student to further enquire into the reasons for this answer. Even though this was not the case, we might venture that the student’s answer is founded on the intrinsic difficulty of these two activities. In order to successfully complete them, the students had to be familiar with segmental features, had to retrieve from memory the rules for endings they had learnt and apply them correctly. Besides, in the Memory activity, perception skills were crucial. However, data from a larger sample may be necessary to provide a more solid explanation.
The students randomly selected to be interviewed confirmed the results of the survey as regards the suitability of Educaplay for the learning of L2 pronunciation. They all
agreed that Educaplay played an important role in supporting their learning. More specifically, Student A stated: ‘Sometimes, I find difficult to identify a sound. With Educaplay, you can listen to the sound several times and understand it better’. Along the same line, Student B declared: ‘I really struggle with dictation. Mainly class dictation. I feel that my classmates get things I don´t. In the game, I can repeat the recording several times to complete the activity without feeling embarrassed’
There seems to be a strong relationship between the average scores the students obtained in the gamified activities, according to the platform reports, and the average scores they got in the test; that is, in general, the students’ performance in Educaplay was similar to that in the test. The students who participated and scored higher in the games were the ones who outperformed their classmates during the test. Contrastingly, students who did not complete all the activities or obtained lower scores in the games performed poorly in the test as well. To illustrate these tendencies, the performance of three randomly-selected students that participated in the study are displayed in Figure 1.
1
Individual students’ performance
These results conform with Barcomb and Cardoso (2020), Shroff et al. (2016), and Tejedor-García et al. (2020), who also report positive effects when using gamified activities built in online educational platforms to support pronunciation teaching and learning.
Digital gamification as a tool to boost students’ motivation
Contrary to previous studies (Deterding, 2012; Esnaola Horacek, 2019; Kapp, 2012; Pennington & Rogerson-Revell, 2019), our results do not seem to support the claim
Figure
that gamified activities have a strong motivational pull. It is noteworthy that 10 students (52.6% of the population) indicated that Educaplay motivated them to complete the activities only occasionally, as they marked Sometimes (see Question 2). When asked to expand upon this idea in the interviews, three students agreed that the Dictation did not look attractive and could not be easily completed. In fact, Student C said: ‘At first, I didn’t feel like doing the activity since there was no visual input; to have something written on the whiteboard fully depended on me’. Student D commented: ‘I came in contact with the IPA alphabet when I started university a few months ago. I had to be familiar with it to complete this activity. Very difficult!’
This seems to indicate that high motivation stemmed in many cases from the fact that the students found the tasks enjoyable, visually attractive and not extremely demanding.
Students’ perceptions about the use of gamified activities for pronunciation learning
Considering the data gathered, the behaviour of the students seems to fluctuate according to their beliefs. Those students who thought that playing games could actually help them learn were the ones who completed the activities more than once, obtained the highest scores and obtained the best results in their test. For example, one of those students commented: ‘I use apps and games like Duolingo to learn English so I like the idea of using Educaplay to learn. I played the games before the class and the test to refresh my knowledge’ (Student D). This reveals that the benefits of this type of practice vary according to how meaningful the activities are perceived to be. However, further research is needed to corroborate the connection between students’ beliefs and the effectiveness of digital activities as a tool in the field of L2 pronunciation.
Conclusions
This study has explored the effectiveness of Educaplay in supporting the teaching and learning of English plosives and fricatives among Spanish-speaking university students. It also investigated the usefulness of this platform as a tool to boost students’ motivation to learn L2 pronunciation. The different games proved to be successful in helping students acquire these sounds and, in some cases, had an impact on the learner’s motivation to continue learning in the field. Thus, it is possible to conclude that Educaplay is a suitable platform to design pronunciation activities that can be integrated into the curricula of higher education. This may yield multiple benefits. Among them, we can mention the possibility to add variety to L2 pronunciation courses and to expose students to limitless input and immediate
feedback in a stress-free environment. Besides this, designing activities with varied stimuli may not only reinforce students’ cognitive skills, but also contribute to longerlasting learning. Even more important than that is the fact that digital activities in the L2 pronunciation class can foster autonomy since students do not need the instructor for feedback and, consequently, can choose when and how many times they will complete a gamified activity. Helping students take the reins of their own learning will surely help them master the skills they need to succeed in L2 pronunciation.
References
ADR Formación (2021). Educaplay [Computer software]. https://es.educaplay.com/
Barcomb, M., & Cardoso, W. (2020). Rock or lock? Gamifying an online course management system for pronunciation instruction: Focus on English /r/ and /l/. CALICO Journal, 37(2), 127–147. https://doi.org/10.1558/cj.36996
Becker, K., & Edalatishams, I. (2019). ELSA Speak – Accent Reduction [Review]. In J. Levis, C. Nagle, & E. Todey (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (pp. 434-438). Iowa State University.
Burns, A., & Seidlhofer, B. (2020). Speaking and pronunciation. In N. Schmitt and M. P. H. Rodgers (Eds.), An Introduction to Applied Linguistics (3rd ed.) (pp.240-258). Routledge.
Chiu, L., & Wu, M. (2017). Enhancing accessibility in language learning: The role of online pronunciation resources. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 20(3), 136-147.
Cruaud, C. (2018). The playful frame: Design and use of a gamified application for foreign language learning (Doctoral dissertation). University of Oslo, Norway. Retrieved from University of Oslo DUO Research Archive: https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/60251/PhD-Caroline-Cruaud 2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Deterding, S. (2012). Gamification: Designing for motivation. Interactions, 19(4), 14 17.
Esnaola Horacek, G. (2019, September 26-27). Pedagogías emergentes: aprendizaje basado en juegos. Actas de IV Jornadas de Educación a Distancia y Universidad. Flacso Argentina.
Finch, D. F., & Ortiz Lira, H. (1982). A course in English phonetics for Spanish speakers Heinemann Educational Books.
Kapp, K. M. (2012). The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education. John Wiley & Sons.
Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (2006). The functional load principle in ESL pronunciation instruction: An exploratory study. System, 34(4), 520–531. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2006.09.004
Neri, A., Cucchiarini, C., & Strik, H. (2006) Selecting segmental errors in L2 Dutch for optimal pronunciation training. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 44, 357–404. https://doi.org/10.1515/IRAL.2006.016
Neri, A., Cucchiarini, C., Strik, H., & Boves, L. (2002). The pedagogy-technology interface in Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 15(5), 441–467.
O'Connor, J. D., & Fletcher, C. (1989). Sounds English: A pronunciation practice book Longman.
Ong’onda, N., & Muindi Nguvi, M. (2016). Computer assisted language learning software: The effect of integrating computer assisted pronunciation training on Kenyan English phonetics Class at the university level. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 5(4), 1-21.
Ozkul, A. (2019). Accent perfect: American English pronunciation app [Review]. In J. Levis, C. Nagle, & E. Todey (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (pp. 473-482). Iowa State University.
Pennington, M. C., & Rogerson-Revell, P. (2019). English pronunciation teaching and research. Palgrave Macmillan.
Pokrivcakova, S. (2015). CALL and teaching pronunciation. In CALL and Foreign Language Education: E-textbook for Foreign Language Teachers (pp.29-37). Constantine the Philosopher University.
Safavi, S. (2021). Accent conversation in Computer–Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT). In K. Kelch, P. Byun, S. Safavi, S. Cervantes (Eds.), CALL Theory Applications for Online TESOL Education (pp. 127-160). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2006.09.004
Shroff, R. H., Keyes, C. L., & Wee, L. H. (2016). Gamified pedagogy: Examining how a phonetics app coupled with effective pedagogy can support learning. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 17(1), 273-289.
Tejedor-García, C., Escudero-Mancebo, D., Cardeñoso-Payo, V., & González-Ferreras, C. (2020). Using challenges to enhance a learning game for pronunciation training of English as a second language. IEEE Access 8, 74250-74266. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2988406
Rogerson-Revell, P. M. (2021). Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT): Current issues and future directions. RELC Journal, 52(1), 189-205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688220977406
Appendix A
Interview questions
1. Have the activities built in Educaplay promoted your learning of EFL pronunciation?
2. Did you feel motivated to complete the activities built in Educaplay?
3. Have the activities built in Educaplay had a positive effect on your L2 pronunciation development?
Ana Cecilia Cad is a lecturer in ELT at the EFL Teacher Education Programme, Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She also works at a Teacher Training College in Córdoba. Her research interests are multimodality, teaching English to young learners, technologies applied to the field of second language education, pronunciation and social justice education.
Email: anaceciliacad@unc.edu.ar
Florencia Giménez is a professor of English phonetics and phonology in teacher and translator training at Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She holds an MA degree in English and Applied Linguistics. Her main research interests are second language pronunciation, and discourse analysis with a focus on discourse intonation.
E-mail: fgimenez@unc.edu.ar
Event Report: IATEFL PronSIG Showcase day at IATEFL 2024 in Brighton
Ana P. Biazon Rocha
The IATEFL PronSIG Showcase Day on 17 April in Brighton was hugely successful thanks to the great range of presentations and active audience participation. It was an excellent opportunity for sharing and networking. PronSIG also showcased its work and expertise within the conference. There were five presentations and a pronunciation clinic led by Robin Walker, a pronunciation expert and former PronSIG committee member and editor of Speak Out!. Highlights of the presentations and clinic are summarised below.
The first morning session was titled as Bringing pronunciation into the classroom: activities for intelligibility with Gemma Archer and Robin Walker, and it was based on their most recent publication, English Pronunciation for a Global World (2024) by Oxford University Press (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Gemma Archer and Robin Walker’s session
Both Archer and Walker clearly advocated for the importance of teaching the pronunciation of English as a lingua franca to prepare learners from all over the world to better communicate in international settings. They also reassured the audience that teachers are the most effective pronunciation model to their learners, regardless of the English variety they speak or accent of English they have. The room was packed, and it was remarkable to have names of the calibre of Archer and Walker emphasise the relevance and efficacy of a) pronunciation instruction, b) English as a global language and c) comfortable intelligibility.
Following that, the next session was a pronunciation clinic, mediated by Gemma Archer, where participants could get into groups to discuss and share tips about pronunciation teaching (see Figure 2).
Pronunciation clinic
Participants had the chance to ask and talk to Robin Walker as well, who offered great insights, as usual. For example, some questions were raised about the
Figure 2
importance of having a pronunciation standard. Walker then reinforced that focusing on intelligibility does not mean accepting anything – anyone can speak the way they want – but making sure that speakers and listeners can clearly understand each other, and that communication is established successfully. This does not mean that one needs to follow the most well-known varieties of English, such as Standard Southern British or General American. They can use the variety they feel comfortable with as long as they are clear and understandable.
After lunch, the Showcase Day continued with two presentations about pronunciation teaching to Chinese students of English. First, Hongzhi Wang’s session entitled Do traditional pronunciation teaching techniques actually work on improving intelligibility? (see Figure 3) discussed the use of well-known pronunciation teaching techniques such as demonstration and repetition, listening discrimination, gestures, minimal pairs, among others, with L1-Mandarin speakers from different ages, gender and parts of China.
Third session with Hongzhi Wang
For instance, Wang found that demonstration and repetition techniques helped students improve their vowel intelligibility and their ability to apply vowel features to similar but untaught words. According to her, the implications of her research to teachers are that the so-called ‘traditional’ techniques do work, and that teachers
Figure 3
should help Chinese learners by focusing on spelling-pronunciation difficulties, and by offering frequent, clear and timely feedback on their pronunciation.
Then, Xian Wang, IATEFL PronSIG’s 2024 scholarship winner, presented The impact of English accent variations on Chinese learners (see Figure 4). Through classroom research with his own students, Wang was able to help them compare and contrast some sounds from their regional dialects in China that are somehow closely related to certain sounds of English. According to him, this facilitated learners’ perception and production of these sounds in English
4
Fourth session with Xian Wang
In his research, students also had the chance to interact more with different accents of English during pronunciation lessons through activities, videos and mobile apps, to name a few, which led to the improvement of their perception of such accents. Wang concluded that more learner-centred pronunciation lessons are needed to cater for Chinese students’ needs and interests, especially towards intelligibility and English as a lingua franca. In this way, students will be better prepared to use English internationally. Wang also wrote an article about his research in the 70th issue of Speak Out!, in February 2024, ‘Exploring the impact of Chinese and global
Figure
English accent variations on Chinese learners: a phonetics curriculum experiment’ (p. 49-60), which is worth checking out.
The following presentation was led by PronSIG’s committee member and treasurer, Ivana Duckinoska-Mihajlovska, entitled Understanding pronunciation learning strategies for word stress through diary reflections (see Figure 5).
Figure 5
Fifth session with Ivana Duckinoska-Mihajlovska
In her research, she analysed first-year English majors who had not received any prior pronunciation instruction. Students were explicitly taught four orthographic word-stress rules for polysyllabic words based on Hahn and Dickerson (1999). They completed homework, kept a diary, and reported on their main pronunciation learning strategies: cognitive, memory, or social. Most of them found this experience useful for understanding word stress in English: in many cases it can be predicted rather than occurring randomly. They also reflected on their learning process and used resources such as dictionaries or YouGlish to check their pronunciation. They felt more motivated, noticed improvements, and appreciated the reflective practice.
For Duckinoska-Mihajlovska, diaries serve as a reflection tool, helping learners build awareness and promote their own learning development.
Michael Burri wrapped up the Showcase Day with his presentation L2 teachers' professional trajectories with pronunciation teaching: a 10-year study (see Figure 6).
Final session with Michael Burri
In his research spanning ten years and divided into six phases, Burri focused on teachers’ professional trajectories, especially their practices and cognitions about pronunciation. In phase one, sixteen participants attended a thirteen-week pronunciation course in 2013. Most then started their teaching careers, but by phase six in 2023, only four participants remained due to various reasons, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Burri emphasised that different contextual features significantly influenced participants' pronunciation practices and cognitions, underscoring the need to better prepare student teachers for diverse contexts and challenges. For instance, during the pandemic, participants prioritised learning how to teach online and how to use technology to support their students over teaching pronunciation.
Figure 6
As reported above, PronSIG’s Showcase Day shed light on different aspects of pronunciation instruction. Noticeably, participants were really engaged during the sessions and left them with numerous takeaways. We are looking forward to checking what our next Showcase day at IATEFL 2025 in Edinburgh will have in store for us. Stay tuned!
References
Hahn, L. D. & Dickerson, W. (1999). Speechcraft: Discourse Pronunciation for Advanced Learners. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Wang, X. (2024). Exploring the impact of Chinese and global English accent variations on Chinese learners: a phonetics curriculum experiment. Speak Out!, 70, 49-60.
Walker, R., & Archer, G. (2024). Teaching English pronunciation for a global world. Oxford University Press.
Ana P. Biazon Rocha is a committee member and resident blogger of IATEFL PronSIG. She is a Delta-qualified English teacher and teacher trainer from Sao Paulo, Brazil, currently based in Sheffield, UK. She works as an Assistant Director and Teaching Development Coordinator at the English Language Teaching Centre (ELTC), University of Sheffield.
Email: a.p.biazon-rocha@sheffield.ac.uk
Emo Pron Stories: The ElVes’ Magic MoVes and Heather & The Sound Cavern
Reviewed by Romina Muse
Palavecino, S. (2023). The ElVes’ Magic MoVes. Buenos Aires English House ELT Publishing Books.
ISBN 978-987-88-8250-5, 36pp.
Palavecino, S. (2024). Heather & the Sound Cavern. Buenos Aires English House ELT Publishing Books.
ISBN 978-631-00-2408-0, 22pp.
Helping very young learners master pronunciation becomes particularly challenging when the language they are learning is vastly different from their mother tongue. Storybooks can be invaluable tools in this process, as they provide engaging, context-rich exposure to the sounds and rhythms of the new language. Early exposure to the new phonetic system plays a pivotal role in picking up accurate pronunciation and developing a natural accent. A realistic goal is to enable learners to surpass the threshold level so that their pronunciation will not detract from their ability to communicate (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, p. 9). Exposure coming from stories connects with young learners, making the learning process both engaging and effective. Stella Palavecino’s “The ElVes’ Magic MoVes” and “Heather & the Sound Cavern” are the keys to unlocking the doors of fantasy, narrating stories that invite young learners to discover their deepest emotions, and even more, they reveal how to untangle the most complex sounds.
The ElVes’ Magic MoVes
‘The ElVes’ Magic MoVes’ is a delightful tale that serves as an invaluable tool for young learners mastering the pronunciation of the /v/ sound. Across languages like Spanish, the /b/ and /v/ sounds may seem similar, yet in English, they distinctly differ in the way they are pronounced. For speakers of other languages, especially those from Spanish-speaking backgrounds, the challenge lies in overcoming the tendency to pronounce /v/ like the softer bilabial /b/ of their native tongue, particularly between vowels. These two sounds require certain technicalities and mouth positioning that prove very challenging to young children. That’s where Victor and Vicky’s tale comes in, weaving a narrative where children naturally absorb the correct pronunciation through an engaging conflict. The magical JiVe unites beloved characters, yet envydriven elVes plot against Victor and Vicky, causing them to lose their teeth. With the Tooth Fairy’s help, they reclaim their smiles, resolving the conflict.
Heather & The Sound Cavern
‘Heather and the Sound Cavern’ is a captivating tale designed to help children master the /ð/ sound in ‘they’ and the /d/ sound in ‘day’, connecting these sounds to their corresponding spellings through engaging fantasy characters.
Heather is a tiny tot who adores listening to her mom sing. The story goes that mom makes magical sounds thanks to the gnomes living inside her mouth cavern. Because of them, mom can create the tricky /θ/ and /d/ sounds. But one day, a wizard casts a spell, and the gnomes are kicked out, leaving mom with hiccups. Like any baby, Heather puts the gnomes in her own mouth, melting the wizard's heart, and everyone ends up singing happily together.
The rationale behind The ElVes’ MoVes and Heather & the Sound Cavern
Stella Palavecino crafted these English as a Foreign Language (EFL) phonics story books around a method she authored herself. The Emo Pron Method, short for ‘Emotional Pronunciation’, refers to a teaching approach or methodology that incorporates emotional engagement and storytelling techniques to facilitate pronunciation instruction and learning (Palavecino, 2022). This approach aims to make learning more enjoyable and memorable by embedding linguistic concepts within narratives. Emo Pron stories serve as a bridge to help learners acquire English sounds absent in their mother tongue through engaging fantasy characters and emotionally compelling plots. By focusing on emotional connections and
memorable conflicts related to specific phonetic sounds, learners are guided to acquire new articulatory habits effectively.
Visual storytelling to boost comprehension and language learning
‘The ElVes’ Magic MoVes’ and ‘Heather & the Sound Cavern’ effectively combine illustrations and text to tell their own captivating Emo Pron stories. Both texts fit within the category of picture storybooks, which Sandie Mourão defines as “a narrative story which is conveyed through both illustrations and text” (2009). This blend of visuals and words not only helps children grasp the story but also enhances their language learning experience. Furthermore, the additional peritext features in the books invite children to predict, discuss, and develop their language skills. The chosen fonts throughout the texts perfectly complement the enchanting worlds, enriching the reading journey for young learners.
The peritext in ‘Heather & The Sound Cavern’ includes several notable features. The main title, ‘Heather & The Sound Cavern’, prominently displayed, clearly indicates the book's focus, while the subtitle, ‘A pronunciation ESL phonics story series for young learners’, provides additional context and highlights the educational purpose of the book. The cover features colourful and engaging illustrations of a young girl, presumably Heather, surrounded by cheerful gnomes, suggesting a whimsical and fun story that appeals to young readers. The presence of musical notes around the title and characters hints at the importance of sound and possibly songs within the story, aligning with Palavecino's focus on pronunciation and phonics.
In ‘The ElVes’ Magic MoVes’, the peritext also provides several elements. The title, ‘The ElVes' Magic MoVes’, prominently displayed, draws attention to the quirky /v/ sound. Again, the subtitle, ‘a pronunciation ESL phonics story book series for young learners’, emphasises the author's educational purpose in teaching pronunciation and phonics. The cover features colourful and engaging illustrations of two smiling elves making playful tricks, very much appealing to young children.
Layout design and narrative structure to facilitate cognitive development and aesthetic enjoyment
‘The ElVes’ Magic MoVes’ display a two-page spread layout with text on the right and illustrations on the left to enhance children's reading and comprehension by providing immediate visual context, fostering prediction and inference skills, and balancing cognitive load. This layout aligns with natural eye movement, encouraging sequential reading and making the experience more engaging. Illustrations serve as
memory cues and support vocabulary building, while also increasing motivation and interest.
In ‘Heather & the Sound Cavern’, the story unfolds within the confines of a concise twenty-page narrative, characterised by straightforward prose that invites accessibility and clarity. Each page is adorned with abundant visual elements, enriching the text with vibrant illustrations that beautifully intertwine with the story's progression. A visual display that covers practically the full page serves to amplify the narrative's themes and emotions, creating an immersive reading experience that captivates through both its simplicity and its visual storytelling prowess.
The narrative structure in both Emo Pron stories is very dynamic and engaging. The point of view shifts from 2nd person to 3rd person, allowing readers to both immerse themselves in the story and step outside of it for better comprehension. This combination of perspectives enhances the connection to the story while also offering a comprehensive view of the narrative.
Recommendation
‘Heather & the Sound Cavern’ and ‘The ElVes’ Magic MoVes’ use emotional engagement and compelling conflicts that centred around specific phonetic challenges to maximise learning effectiveness. They are designed to help children master challenging phonemes such as /ð/, /d/, /v/, and /b/ by linking them to their spellings through engaging fantasy characters. These narratives integrate pronunciation and spelling instruction to accelerate learning across reading and writing skills. Palavecino crafted these Emo Pron stories around a scaffolded approach for EFL learners to help them master challenging sounds within fantasy worlds that serve as pathways to practise the correct articulation of sounds in an enjoyable manner.
References
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Goodwin, J., & Gringer, B. (2010). Teaching Pronunciation: A course book and reference guide (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Mourão, S. (2009). Using stories in the primary classroom. In BritLit: Using Literature in EFL Classrooms (pp. 17-31) British Council.
Palavecino, S. (2022). Emo Pron: revolutionising EFL pronunciation teaching for young learners. https://emopronstories.com.ar/
Romina Muse is a teacher of English and Literature based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a faculty professor at UNPAZ and a teacher trainer at ISFD Pedro Poveda and ISLV (Posadas). She serves as co-editor for IATEFL, YLTSIG. She is the author of Marcos an Aquanaut, a picture book that celebrates inclusion and diversity. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Culture and English Literature.
Email: rominagmuse@gmail.com
PronPack. Word Recognition for Listeners
Reviewed by Jonathan Marks
Hancock, M. (2023). PronPack: Word recognition for listeners Hancock McDonald ELT.
ISBN: 978-1-8384040-4-8
Word Recognition for Listeners is the second title in the Pronunciation for Listening sub-series of Mark Hancock’s PronPacks. The first, Connected Speech for Listeners, was reviewed in Speak Out! 70. The overall aim is to help teachers to address the common learner complaint that “despite many years studying English, they still understand very little when they find themselves on the streets of an Englishspeaking country” (p. 19) – or, I would add, anywhere else where they hear English spoken by unfamiliar voices, and especially by speakers more proficient than them.
Section A ‘Practical tips’ outlines clearly and concisely (each of the twelve tips is two pages long or slightly over) the rationale behind the materials and procedures in Sections B and C, and the word ‘tips’ does not really do justice to the wealth or importance of the information in this section. Tip A1 ‘Teach Spoken Word Recognition’ introduces, with relevant examples, the fundamental insight that spoken language is different from written language in ways that are not intuitively obvious: for example, speech has to be processed immediately and continuously as it is received; divisions between words are generally not provided by speakers but have to be surmised by listeners; English spelling can give rise to mistaken assumptions about what words will sound like; and the pronunciation of words is subject to considerable variation and, in particular, reduction.
Subsequent tips, including A2 ‘Break the spell of the written form’, A3 ‘Show how words are simplified in speech’, A7 ‘Pay attention to word stress’, A9 ‘Raise awareness of weak syllables’ and A11 ‘Help learners to spot word boundaries’, develop and exemplify these points further, enabling teachers to improve their own
awareness and to appreciate the design of the classroom activities in Sections B and C.
Tip A3 includes examples of words commonly affected by elision, assimilation and other processes of simplification. The simplified pronunciation of some words is represented by respelling, e.g. ‘samwich’ for ‘sandwich’, and it would have been useful to extend this to the other examples, e.g. to show ‘twenty’, ‘friends’, ‘asked’ as ‘twenny’, ‘frenz’, ‘ast’, and to provide audio files of contrasting ‘official’ and simplified forms.
Awareness of word simplification is presented, quite rightly in view of the overall purpose of the book, as important for listening, and the author suggests that “you may feel that it would be wrong to encourage learners to simplify words in this way” (p. 16), but it would be worth pointing out that elision and assimilation can provide learners with helpful achievement strategies; for example, if they struggle to pronounce the cluster /ndz/ in ‘friends’, they might be relieved to know that they can safely omit the /d/.
Tip A4 ‘Prepare learners for word variability’ gives transcriptions of eight possible versions of ‘February’, ranging from four-syllable citation form to /ˈfeb.ri/. Readers who are not so familiar with phonemic transcription would probably appreciate sound files of these eight versions.
Some readers may be daunted by the density of information in parts of Section A, such as Tip 5 ‘Highlight the structure of syllables’, which would have benefited from division into separate tips. Also, some of the information is not entirely accurate. For example, “… if you hear the cluster /ps/, you know it can’t be the start of a new word” (p. 23), but /ps/ does occur word-initially in reduced pronunciations of ‘percentage’, ‘perception’ (‘psentage’, ‘pseption’), etc. In the same section, /sl/, /sn/ and /kl/ are listed among clusters that English syllables ‘don’t like to end with’, but they do occur frequently with a syllabic /l/ or /n/, for example in ‘castle’, ‘listen’ and ‘critical’. Tip A6 ‘Know how to divide words into syllables’ suggests that syllabic consonants are “a detail you don’t necessarily need to complicate your class with” (p. 25), but they are a frequent and salient feature of English pronunciation, and deserve more attention than this.
Despite the above-mentioned comments, Section A is impressive in its clear and concise coverage of features of English speech and the challenges they raise for learner-listeners. It not only serves as an introduction to Sections B and C, but will repay re-reading by teachers as they gain experience of using the classroom activities and noticing learners’ responses.
Section B comprises 12 ‘Word recognition games’ to practise awareness of features described in Section A: sound/spelling relationships, open and closed syllables, consonant clusters, silent letters, word stress patterns, common unstressed syllables, schwa, division of longer words into syllables, elision in weak syllables, etc. It utilises a variety of game formats, including mazes, maps, verbal tennis, listening to and creating stories, riddles, stepping stones and ‘trictation’: ‘dictation with a trick’, in which learners first hear and write a short phrase such as ‘It’s a fish’, and then hear a continuation of the phrase, such as 'It’s official’, and revise what they wrote accordingly.
In one or two cases the link between the language point and the activity format is less than entirely convincing. For example, B3 ‘Land of lost letters’, to raise awareness of silent letters, involves a map of an island showing clusters of villages with unlikely names such as Wrap, Wrist, Write, Two and Who. In contrast, the associated story ‘The Ghost in the Lighthouse’, for listening, word identification and reconstruction, makes natural use of silent-letter words simply as words, rather than as place names.
The need to match suitable vocabulary with activity formats results in occasional plausibility gaps between different items in the same activity; for example in B10 ‘Syllable Spotting’, the sentence ‘I’ve seen all the recent research about retail in the region’ is one that might actually occur, whereas ‘I’m satisfied after seeing a satellite on Saturday’ seems contrived and unlikely in comparison.
Overall, though, Section B offers a wide variety of ready-to-use, enjoyable fun activities with a serious purpose, and will be greatly appreciated by teachers.
Section C ‘Lexis for listeners’ consists of 18 lessons to practise recognition of common word endings (e.g. -ary/-ery/-ory, -able/-ible) and beginnings (e.g. be-/de/re-/pre-). Each lesson starts with an ‘earworm’: a short rhyme to provide memorable, high-density “accelerated experience” (p. 33) i.e. “focused exposure to repeated instances” of these prefixes and suffixes. Some earworms are little more than stylised word lists, e.g.:
Collect, connect and correct
Arrive, approve and affect
Attract, arrange and apply
Suggest, support and supply*
(*This should be ‘supply’. The convention of bolding prominent syllables is not explained, and there are other incorrect examples, e.g. ‘excellence’, ‘celebrate’.)
– whereas the best of them contextualise the vocabulary entertainingly, e.g.:
I’m your neighbour Mister Frazer Do me a favour Lend me a shaver
Here’s a razor Mister Frazer Call me Ivor Lend me a fiver?
Further example words are given, with explanations of how the affixes and the words containing them are pronounced and how they make word recognition difficult, followed by exercises such as pairing rhyming words, finding the odd-one-out, wordbuilding, guessing the spelling, dictation, and note-taking from short listening passages ingeniously designed to give further ‘accelerated experience’. As in Section B, the activities are varied and light-hearted, but provide effective and intensive practice of different aspects of word-decoding.
Projectable/photocopiable versions of classroom material, audio files and videos are available on the PronPack website. All the recordings seem to be in the author’s own voice (except for some ‘rap’ versions with a chorus). In view of the importance of multiple ‘exemplars’ (p. 20) it would have been preferable to use a range of voices for the recordings.
Section D ‘Resources’ is really ‘Resources plus other bits and pieces’, as it includes not only a reference chart of phonemic symbols with example words, a glossary of terms and a short bibliography (and I think shortness is a virtue in a publication of this kind) but also a few words ‘About the Author’ and a list of his other publications (complete with smiling photo), a set of acknowledgements and a list of the other PronPack titles with ISBNs.
A point about terminology: the pronunciations given in dictionaries are referred to mostly as ‘citation forms’, but also sometimes as ‘official forms’. Some readers might not realise that these terms are used as synonyms, and wonder what the difference is.
In spite of a few imperfections, Word Recognition for Listeners is a very welcome resource which offers teachers a range of classroom activities to practice decoding of words in speech, plus the information they need to enhance their own understanding of how and why learners find this challenging. The activities are well researched, and considerable effort clearly went into choosing relevant words to include and assembling them in memorable, entertaining mini-texts and activity frames.
Jonathan Marks is a founder member and former coordinator of the PronSIG. He is the author of English Pronunciation in Use Elementary (CUP) and co-author of The Book of Pronunciation (Delta Publishing). His survey review of recent books on pronunciation teaching, entitled Pronunciation: from Cinderella to Achilles Heel … to Golden Age?, appeared in ELT Journal 76(4) in 2022.
Email: jonathanmarks@wp.pl
Upcoming event: PronSIG’s October online conference
Join PronSIG on October 12 for our annual online conference all about pronunciation and AI!
Event title:
Pronunciation and AI: Will the AI revolution remove the need for pronunciation teachers?
Event brief:
Discussions about AI’s role in English language teaching are inescapable at present, as are concerns that it could ultimately replace teachers, or, at the very least, change our learning environments beyond all recognition. This is particularly visible in the
field of pronunciation instruction, where voice recognition technology, automated learner feedback, and voice assistants are becoming increasingly common. While this may cause worry initially, we cannot ignore the potential benefits these developments could offer both learners and teachers.
Join PronSIG for this whole day conference as we discuss what the AI revolution could mean for pronunciation instruction.
Conference recordings and time zones
As always, if you want to attend the conference but cannot, all sessions will be recorded and made available to ticket holders after the event. As such, even if you’re in a time zone that makes watching live difficult, you can catch up later at your own convenience. Recordings will be sent out in the week following the event.
Ticket price and registration
As a PronSIG member, you can attend this event for free. To do so, please follow these steps:
1. Go to IATEFL’s website here and log in with your username and password.
2. Once logged in, click on this link to go to the event registration page.
3. Register for your ticket. You should have received the discount code on an e-mail sent on 23rd September 2024.
Where can I get more information on the event?
The conference programme and schedule, including the speaker line up and session abstracts, will be available here in September once the speaker line-up has been confirmed.
To stay up-to-date on all conference news or join in with session discussions on the day, follow us on our social media on Facebook, X, Instagram and LinkedIn.
