Miamo's Academic Portal

REFLECTION ON PRONUNCIATION

Before, as a pupil, student, and language teacher, I had never experienced any circumstances where the phonetic part of pronunciation was considered something very important, or even critical in language learning. It was treated as something “good to know”, that one just mentions in passing or just writes beside a new word for formality, and this is exactly how I perceived phonetics, isolated from pronunciation. This is why within the framework of my Graduate Program in Teaching English to Young Learners at the University of Warsaw, I was very surprised when last semester I found out that I got the wrong pronunciations of the letter “a” for example.

Based on this error, I even produced and distributed a learning tool “The Alpha Story” to help students to remember the sounds of the letters of the alphabet with a story, during the period of crisis in my country when all schools were closed for some years. I was also pronounced “who” with the /w/ sound, instead of /h/. The greatest shock came when I requested for feedback about a job interview where I had to teach English to adults online. I was not chosen because my accent was not a native speaker’s accent, in spite of the good methodology, as quoted below, and the interviewer recommended a book to me to this effect “How now bow cow” by Mimi Ponsonby.

“Our method is based on conversation, so the clarity and correctness of the teacher's speech are absolutely essential. Namely, during our conversation, you made certain pronunciation mistakes that sometimes made it difficult to understand particular words articulated by you. That could not be the case during lessons with potential students. The mistakes were present in sounds such as /ɔː/ /ʌ/ /ɒ/…When it comes to pedagogical aspects, during the role-play activity, you performed well. You were building questions about students' feelings, and you were providing some feedback and establishing rules. We do not have anything to add in this respect. :)”

In one of Adrian Underhill’s videos, I saw all the mechanisms, techniques, and art he put in place just to ensure that students get the correct pronunciation. It was amazing the number of muscles and terminologies involved in learning pronunciation that I took for granted. I have now made pronunciation one of my learning and teaching goals, and I intend to make extensive use of his sound foundation Chart.

As a non-native English speaker who learned and taught in an ESL context all this while, I would be pretending if I said that this discovery didn’t make me panic! I mean, I had no idea at all that speaking so fluently, I did not have a good accent. How would I even know this? I inherited the accent of my teachers and I had the accent of the people I have been listening to throughout my life. How could I solve a problem I couldn’t see? The work ahead was daunting and even frightful because my ambition to evolve in the teaching field as a language teacher, and to a higher level was at stake with this accent issue. I would be damaging my future learners. I was thinking that I had already done so with my past and current learners until I watched the video of Robin Walker on the importance of pronunciation introduced to us by our course teacher during one of our lessons. It gave me hope. I was not the only sad case, I was not part of the problem English learners were and are still facing nowadays in terms of pronunciation, but I was part of the solution.

It was very relieving to realize that 97% of native speakers born and bred in England also had the wrong accent and that aiming at speaking with native a speaker's accent was a wrong and an unrealistic goal that unnecessarily overwhelms learners. I learned that beyond achieving the native speaker standard of pronunciation, I still had a flexible option in the comfortable intelligibility standard, where it was enough for me to be understood by a native speaker, and that I the best option in the international intelligibility standard, where I just needed to be understood by any non-native speaker anywhere in the world! I also think that this should be the target in any language teaching context, especially as English has become a Lingua Franca, a simple tool that people learn only to use and communicate in daily life contexts, and not to KNOW the language.

However, I am conscious of the importance of pronunciation which should not be undermined by the above considerations. What I gathered from Walker’s video was that good pronunciation impacts the student’s ability and willingness to speak and makes speaking meaningful to the listeners. Poor intelligibility would damage their ego, cause them to avoid language structures, and sink into risk avoidance. Pronunciation is also very important because it involves all the speaking, listening, reading, and writing skill that is essential in language learning. It impacts listening and the ability to understand the spoken text since the learners may recognize a written word, not a spoken word because of the spelling which is similar to their L1. It also impacts writing because the spoken word is not consistent with the written word. In addition, pronunciation impacts reading because if we take into account the phonological loop we cannot remember what we cannot pronounce because it cannot be stored in the short/long-term memory, and Stephen Krashen (1993) emphasized the importance of reading in learning the language very fast.

To conclude, I am happy to have learned about all these issues on pronunciation, especially since efforts are being made to simplify language learning and teaching and make it more accessible with realistic goals. It is my ambition to open a school one day, and I will definitely “make pronunciation matter” at a very young stage so that more students don’t have to face the challenges that come with pronunciation.