Reflection on Pronunciation (Adrian Underhill)
Reflection on Pronunciation
Macmillan Education ELT, (2011, March 4). Introduction to Teaching Pronunciation Workshop - Adrian Underhill (COMPLETE) Introduction to Teaching Pronunciation Workshop - Adrian Underhill (COMPLETE) - YouTube
In this presentation of 1:02 minutes,
the teacher walks the audience through a practical approach to teaching
phonetics in order to impart to the listeners the fundamentals of
pronunciation. With such great dexterity, he is able to demonstrate how it is
important to understand how and why pronunciation is not (only) a mental
activity, but essentially a physical one, where a specific set of muscles come
into play. He is convinced that Keeping pronunciation in the head is a problem
that hinders effective learning and demonstrates how we can make sounds move
and become visible, for better understanding and hence fast learning and
mastery. Hence adopting a visible approach to pronunciation will help even deaf
persons to be able to understand phonetic sounds. I have always found it
difficult and very confusing to learn phonetics, and I have always avoided taking the time to study and understand it. But now I realized once you get the basics and
understand the various trends, it’s easier to use and also teach them.
The
teacher further identifies three ways of giving sound models to be followed by
students. First eliciting sounds from the students, which means the teacher
gives a model silently, and the students watch the movements of the muscles of
the teacher’s mouth, then produce the sound. Second, the teacher may give the
sound once, and get the students to produce the sound and practice until they
get the correct one; and lastly, the teacher may repeat it several times, in an
awareness and intentional approach, not just rote learning. This is interesting
because the student will not easily forget or get confused, and may not need
too much practice, which is time-consuming.
In addition, I learned that this
approach divides phonology into –sound -word (join sounds together) - rhythm
(join word stress together) - connected speech (join words together to form
sentences, stress, and intonation). However, as he said, it is important to
note that to a variable extent, pronunciation will depend on Teacher’s cultural
background or origin, which may influence his or her accent. In my opinion,
these are negligible mistakes, and as the teacher puts it, in teaching
phonetics, mistakes are welcome, because they are the syllables and they tell
the teacher what to do.
In the next stage, the teacher shows how
they can control sounds like a plastic one can pull out from someone’s mouth,
take and give it to someone else. This is a good illustration of sounds that
would create fun, to break monotony and boredom in class. Here, depending on each
student, the initial sound may be different, yet acceptable. In the practice
section that followed, the teacher successfully brings out the difference
between monophthongs and diphthongs, engaging the students in a series of
sounds incorporating the tongue, teeth, lips palate, and nose, and at the end,
he is able to use only the phonetic chart to make the students read the
sentence “So you have seen that with this chart you can find all the sounds of
English”. It is amazing! There is no sentence written anywhere, yet the
students can come out with sentences, just by watching the movement of the
teacher’s mouth as he narrates a story, or by following him as he points at the sounds on
the chart. The last part concerns the word stress. To illustrate word stress in
the 3-syllable word “beau-ti-ful” the teacher makes three students sit and
stand according to the tone of his voice, and they finally understand the
stress is on the first syllable, “Beau” [ˈbjuːtɪfl, and has 7 sounds involved.
I saw that using muscles to learn stress helps to memorize the sounds better.
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