Gemma Archer shares insights from her latest book: Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World co-authored with Robin Walker. In this episode, Gemma talks about prioritising intelligibility over native-likeness in language learning, setting realistic learning goals, as well as shares techniques we can use to develop learners’ pronunciation.

Key talking points

Prioritising Intelligibility

Gemma stresses the importance of focusing on students' intelligibility rather than aiming for native-like pronunciation, ensuring they can be understood in international contexts.

Needs Analysis and Student Goals

Teachers can conduct a needs analysis by observing students' speech or collecting speech samples to identify specific pronunciation issues. Understanding students' goals and requirements is crucial.

Challenging Prestige Models

The dominance of marketed native-speaker accents, particularly from Southeast England and general American English, in teaching materials, media, and marketing shapes students' perceptions. Teachers should address and challenge these notions, emphasising the value of diverse English accents.

Techniques for Teaching Pronunciation

Simple, low-preparation techniques are recommended. Visual aids, gestures, and using students' language examples are effective. Emphasising sound differences and durations, such as using elastic bands to show vowel length, helps students grasp pronunciation better.

References & Resources

Links will direct you to resources Gemma mentions in this episode and more.

1. Walker, R. and Archer, G. (2024) Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World. Oxford University Press.

2. Walker, R. (2020) ‘L’ is for the Lingua Franca Core. What else? Available at English Global Communication here.

3. The Scottish Sound School. Available here.

4. IATEFL PronSIG. Available here.

   All hyperlinks listed were accessed on 25/06/2024.

Watch the video with closed captions or refer to the transcript below.

Transcript

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:26:06

Laura

TESOL Pop, season nine, episode ten. Hello and welcome to TESOL Pop, the mini podcast for busy Teachers. My name is Laura and joined me today to talk about what to prioritise when teaching pronunciation. Is author and teacher Gemma Archer. In this episode, Gemma talks about the importance of prioritising intelligibility over native likeness and how we can engage our learners in settings realistic goals.

00:00:26:08 - 00:00:41:09

Laura

We also look at some techniques that you can use to help develop your learners accuracy in their pronunciation. Again, moving towards greater intelligibility. Let's join the conversation where I asked Gemma, what should we prioritise when teaching pronunciation?

00:00:41:11 - 00:01:02:14

Gemma

Yeah, I think that's probably the number one question that I get asked more often now than ever before. What I would see in these circumstances is what do your students need? Because rather than getting overwhelmed with the sheer amount of resources that are available, start with your students. What is it that they need? What are they struggling with?

00:01:02:16 - 00:01:26:23

Gemma

And the easiest way to do that, of course, is to consider a piece of speech that they're producing for you and using that as a kind of needs analysis to, to identify any, any issues that they're struggling with. That could be just observing them in class. It could be asking them to to give you a piece of, recording of them speaking English, which they email to you or send to you in another way for you to listen to later.

00:01:27:02 - 00:01:48:19

Gemma

But I think it's important that we observe our students or listen to our students in some way and identify where they're struggling and and actually target those sounds. Now, that's all very well and good, but for some teachers, that's just not enough to help them get started. So another thing we can consider is what our students goals are.

00:01:48:19 - 00:02:14:05

Gemma

What are they headed? What are they going to be using English for? And for me, certainly when I'm teaching, I'm always teaching for, a goal of intelligibility, international intelligibility. And that as opposed to more traditional models of native likeness, where where teachers or resources would be trying to help students produce a sound or a feature in an exact imitation of a native speaker.

00:02:14:05 - 00:02:37:01

Gemma

And we know that that's not necessary anymore. there are very few occasions where that's necessary. So instead, we can consider what do our students need to be doing with their English? And for the vast majority of them, they will be using English to speak to other international speakers. So again, we can use that as a basis to choose well, what features are really important for international intelligibility?

00:02:37:03 - 00:03:04:19

Gemma

And certainly one of the most returned to sources on prioritising for the international English speaker is something like the lingua franca core, which Jennifer Jenkins created back in 2000. so that is a list of features of pronunciation. and these have come from observations and recordings she did over many years. And, and they were they were communication between international speakers.

00:03:04:21 - 00:03:29:00

Gemma

And she observed and categorised when they had communication breakdowns. And that kind of formed the basis of this list of, of what sounds, what features are likely to cause the most communication breakdowns. Let's prioritise these in the classroom so that students get the most you maximum practice time, using these features so they can go on to use them and be more intelligible speakers.

00:03:29:01 - 00:03:53:06

Laura

That's a brilliant place to start. So you mentioned needs analysis and thinking about what students are working towards and intelligibility, those three kind of key things to consider. I wonder how you navigate this when you're working with students, because students aren't necessarily, aware of intelligibility as a goal or may not even, consider the day to day scenarios when they'll be using the language.

00:03:53:06 - 00:04:20:22

Laura

And so there's quite a few, heavy marketing messages out there that are still very prevalent that portray this idea that they should sound native like. And they come. I've been in situations where students have come to me, where I've asked them what their goals are and what they're working towards, and they say they want to sound like a certain person from a certain place, and that fills in misalignment, really based on what they really need to achieve with the language.

00:04:20:22 - 00:04:24:06

Laura

I wonder if you have any insights on what we can do in that scenario.

00:04:24:08 - 00:04:51:24

Gemma

I have lots. So first of all, you're right. The market, the ELT market, the industry, the field of ELT, it's saturated with prestige voices and what I mean by that are usually L1 native speakers. And usually they will be from two places, predominantly, and those are southeast of England. What we would typically call an RP speaker or nowadays more standard southern British English.

00:04:52:01 - 00:05:13:18

Gemma

And the other is general American English as well. Both of these are really dominate in the materials that students have access to. And because of this, it's really led them to become very familiar with these varieties. And what happens when we become familiar with varieties? They become easier for us to understand and we get more comfortable with them.

00:05:13:20 - 00:05:50:10

Gemma

That means that when we're exposed to anything else, we immediately go, oh, not sure. I quite understood that it takes longer to process a new, unfamiliar accent. So students not only have this cognitive, effect of of prestige model dominance. they also see and hear these types of speakers and in all of our media, Netflix, for example, all of these streaming, you know, we we can stream programs online again where we're often seeing certain voices more than others, in the media and the news.

00:05:50:16 - 00:06:14:01

Gemma

Sure, things are changing a little bit, but predominantly they're still only having access to certain voices. So they are really, they it's no wonder that they have these preconceived ideas about what they should be sounding like, because they're only hearing certain voices. And, so I have this problem all the time. Problem this discussion all the time with my students.

00:06:14:03 - 00:06:39:23

Gemma

They come into the classroom, they moan and moan about the English they hear all around them, which they hate. What many of them hate. They say it ugly. They say they can't understand it because it's it's so different from what they've heard all along in their textbooks, in their resources, in their classroom audio sets. They've never been accustomed, they've never had to try and understand anything different.

00:06:40:04 - 00:07:02:05

Gemma

So they have this kind of immediate negative response. And I think that's the point where we have to start being explicit with students about why, why are they having this experience? Why are they having this feeling? because our most of our students are not linguists. They don't. As you said, they don't know this about intelligibility or familiarisation with a certain type of English.

00:07:02:11 - 00:07:25:17

Gemma

So we have to say you find this easier. You know, if we're speaking about standard British English, for instance, you find this easier because you have heard it for, you know, five years, ten years, 20 years. Sometimes for students, they've had so much time to get used to it and get comfortable with it so that when something new comes along, as I've said, it's a very different experience.

00:07:25:17 - 00:07:52:12

Gemma

So they need to be taught this. They need that explicit intervention so that they know that this is this is something that happens to us when we hear an unfamiliar accent or a variety of English. And it's important also to at that point establish that if we're talking about English, although this applies to other languages as well Arabic, Spanish, just to name a couple, there is no one variety of English that is better than any other.

00:07:52:14 - 00:08:14:19

Gemma

Many students don't know this. They feel that there is a prestige model that's the best English, associated with prestige speakers. So that's who they should emulate. So they need that explicit instruction that there are many types of English, not just native speaker Englishes, but World Englishes spoken, you know, across the globe. None of them are better than any other.

00:08:14:21 - 00:08:42:04

Gemma

but they all have their differences, and that's not a bad thing. That's something that we can accommodate and get used to so that we can be understood and understand others more easily. So I think we as teachers have to provide that intervention. If that's not something students understand and something that my co-author, in the book, several Robin Walker, is my co-author in the book that we've just recently published on the subject.

00:08:42:06 - 00:09:14:08

Gemma

And something that he does, which I've also taken into my own classrooms, is to encourage students to think about their mother tongue and the different varieties in their own mother tongue, you know, how many different accents can you think of? what adjectives would you associate with this accent versus this accent? So they're starting to to consider the labels that we and the feelings that we associate with certain varieties and kind of using that as a leading to consider that, you know, in English as well.

00:09:14:10 - 00:09:28:13

Gemma

so there are things that we can do to help them with this. And, and what I see is that students really do benefit from these discussions, and they do start to consider, you know, what they're using English for, what they need to do.

00:09:28:15 - 00:09:47:23

Laura

I’d love to spend a little bit of time towards the end of this episode to kind of look at some of the techniques that you've mentioned in your book, in terms of how we can teach pronunciation. So we've identified what to prioritise. We've talked to the students about it, and now, we found this particular sound or this cluster of sounds is problematic for students.

00:09:48:00 - 00:10:06:00

Laura

It can be so difficult, can't it, to kind of demonstrate, well, this is how the sounds made or this is a drawing I'm trying to put on the wall, or this is me trying to gesture where the tongue is. Do you have any tips on how we can, yeah, navigate that to help students to kind of develop specific areas of pronunciation.

00:10:06:02 - 00:10:31:22

Gemma

What we've done in the book is we've, first of all, we've tried to make the techniques that we're showing super simple, like nothing that requires preparation or very little preparation or resources, because we know if we want teachers to integrate these things into their classrooms, they especially spontaneously as as they pop up, they need to have techniques that, that they can just roll with immediately and, and not rely on one planning and preparation.

00:10:31:24 - 00:10:58:09

Gemma

So we have tried to go for something simple, that can be yeah, use as issues arise and and the other thing that we've tried to do a lot is to think about the visual and the exploration of sounds. So, and it's funny because looking through the book, I think, you know, are people going to get are we going to be like, oh, this, this type of technique again?

00:10:58:09 - 00:11:22:03

Gemma

Because a lot of it is observing your students language, collecting words and sounds that they're using and then using those, you know, student language to, to highlight a point consonants. in comparison to vowels are easy for us to see. So we can look at our mouths and see, am I doing the right thing with my lips? With my tongue?

00:11:22:05 - 00:11:55:00

Gemma

How open or closed is my jaw? So the mechanics can be addressed easily by, you know, using student's own language, whether they're mispronouncing things or encouraging them to look and compare either with you or with another proficient model. am I doing the same thing and drawing their awareness to this, allowing them to notice what is changing? and I think, we also have to consider, again, why are students making the mistakes that they're making?

00:11:55:02 - 00:12:18:07

Gemma

Because although we've just talked about, you know, the mechanics of producing consonant sound and little, little techniques that we can insert to draw their attention to how to pronounce these consonants. But the mechanics of the mouth movement are not always the reason behind a student's error. a lot of a lot of time. Often. Not always, but often.

00:12:18:09 - 00:12:57:01

Gemma

if we are teaching a sound in English that doesn't exist in the student's mother tongue, it may be that they're just not able to perceive the difference between the sounds that you're teaching. and so time can be spent on highlighting these different sounds and actually giving them training and hearing the difference. You know, that could be, for instance, if we talk about vowel sounds, we have a feature in the book we talk about, which is also known to increase intelligibility is how the length of a vowel changes depending on the sound that follows it.

00:12:57:03 - 00:13:25:19

Gemma

If a vowel is followed by an unvoiced consonant, it's going to have a shorter duration, whereas if it's followed by a voiced consonant, it has a longer duration. In most Englishes, not all of them. Not in mind, but in the vast majority of Englishes. This is something that happens and is very salient and helps increase intelligibility. So, for example, if we have the word mat versus the word mad, that final d that voiced consonant increases the duration of the vowel.

00:13:25:21 - 00:13:52:07

Gemma

So that's something that we can help students with. We can use a physical gesture to actually demonstrate that lengthening of the vowel. Lots of people love to use an elastic band to show that mat versus mad. So there are gestures that we can use simple things to help students visualise and hear at the same time what is going on in English.

00:13:52:09 - 00:14:02:22

Gemma

so yeah, small gestures like these small techniques and tips we've, we've tried to put in the book, but all of them are tied to the features which increase intelligiblility.

00:14:02:24 - 00:14:10:16

Laura

Gemma, this has been lovely talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing all these wonderful tips and insights. To close today's episode, could you tell listeners where can they find your book?

00:14:10:18 - 00:14:38:13

Gemma

Absolutely. So this is the book here, Teaching the Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World, which I have completed with my co-author, Robin Walker. It's available. It's published by Oxford University Press. So you can get it from the OUP website. It's also available with most ELT suppliers, and available on Amazon. And it's now, I believe, in an e-book format so you can get it electronically as well.

00:14:38:15 - 00:15:10:06

Laura

Wonderful. So links to Gemma and Robin's book will be in the show notes. You can find that easily along with other links where you can follow Gemma's work. If you have a question that you'd like us to answer or an idea that you'd like to pitch, then you can contact us via Facebook, Instagram or the website. TESOLPop.com finally, you can supporters by sharing today's episode with your teaching community by leaving a rating review wherever you listen to the podcast, or by even buying the coffee at ko-fi.com/tesolpop

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