Friday, September 05, 2014

Sound Foundations by Adrian Underhill


Subtitle: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation

Why I Read This Book
         This book was recommended reading for the Distance Delta (W) course that I’m currently doing.
            In particular, my course tutor recommended this book to me after I did badly on a practice test involving pronunciation.

            Pronunciation, word stress, and the phonemic alphabet have always been my weak points, despite the fact that I really should have mastered it by now.  Not only did I study the phonemic chart in my CELTA (W), I have also completed a whole course on Phonemics and Phonology at the graduate level.  And I’ve attended a couple professional development sessions on the phonemic chart.  And yet, I can’t seem to get those vowel symbols straight in my head.  The consonants are easy enough, but those vowels always confused me. 
            Why I’m so rubbish on this, I don’t know.  My guess is that I never really did have much of a musical ear for things like tone and pitch, and that carries over to phonemic sounds.*

            Anyway, for whatever reason, learning the phonemic alphabet and teaching pronunciation has always been a weak point of mine, so I decided to read this book to see if it would help.

The Review
          The book is divided into two parts.  The first section helps the reader themselves understand the basics of pronunciation (a section entitled the Discovery Toolkit) and a second section gives advice for teaching pronunciation in the classroom (the Classroom Toolkit). 
            The first section I found very useful.  The second section I really struggled with, although that is my fault and not the book’s fault.

            The first section is a very clear, very straight forward, very easy to follow explanation of the phonemic chart, and how our mouth produces various sounds.  I’ve studied all this before, but I’ve never read such a clear explanation before. 
           (In fact, I really wish I had read this book before I had studied phonetics and phonology in graduate school.  I think a thorough knowledge of this book, at least the first section, would have really reduced all the frustration I had in that class.  Alas, it’s impossible for me to live my life backwards, but I did strongly recommend this book to a colleague of mine who is going to graduate school this fall.**)

            The book is filled with “Discovery Activities” which encourage you to make certain sounds while noticing with your fingers the shape that your lips and tongue are making.  This is all okay if you’re reading this book alone in your room at night, but can cause some embarrassment if you’re mostly reading the book at work or in a coffee shop (as I was).  But I did my best to discretely do most of the Discovery Activities.

            The explanation of all the vowel sounds, and how they are formed in your mouth, is very helpful.  I understood it perfectly while I was reading it, but unfortunately committing it to memory is another matter, and I confess that I’m probably still a little bit shaky on the phonemic vowel symbols.  However it is probably too much to ask from a book that it will help you memorize something as well as learn it.  The hard work of memorization must be carried out on your own.  (In preparation for the Delta test, I did try to dutifully quiz myself on the vowel symbols every day, and I think that did help me for the test.  But since the test, I’ve stopped rehearsing them, and they’ve begun fading from my memory already.)

            The second half of the book describes various classroom activities you can do to teach your students about pronunciation, connected speech, word stress, et cetera.

            This second half of the book was difficult for me, because I don’t usually teach a lot of pronunciation in my classes, and indeed feel that it is outside my comfort zone.  Even after having read the first half of the book, I felt like I still lacked the confidence to teach the pronunciation exercises in the second half of the book.
           
            Probably for that reason, because I was resistant to doing the exercises, I had a really hard time focusing on the book.  My eyes frequently glazed over as I read the pages, and I continually was discovering that I had gotten to the bottom of the page without having absorbed any of the words my eyes had passed over, and so I had to make myself go back to the top of the page.
            For this reason, the second half of the book took me much longer to finish than the first half.  The first half of the book I read relatively quickly, but the second half I got stalled on for ages before I finally forced myself to sit down and finish the book.
            But that’s my problem—that’s not the fault of the book.  In fact, I really should be doing much more work on pronunciation in my classes, and I really should be adopting most of the exercises in this book.

Thoughts of Teaching Pronunciation
          I’m going to write down a few of my thoughts on teaching pronunciation.  None of these are fully developed yet, so this section is more thinking out loud.  Feel free to skip over this.

            First of all, it turns out I’m not the only person at my school who has discovered this book.  While I was reading this book, one of my colleagues led a professional development seminar based on the ideas she had learned from this book.  She led the seminar very well, and seeing her in action helped give me a concrete visual idea of how the pronunciation activities in this book could be used in a real classroom.  (She was also, however, much more theatrical and dynamic than I am, so I have my doubts about whether I myself could pull off what she so effortlessly demonstrated.)

            Her seminar focused on how to introduce the phonemic chart to students, using the ideas from this book.  The phonemic chart is not in regular usage at our school, but she encouraged us all to start using it, and she told us that in her own classes, she usually takes 3 class periods to introduce the phonemic chart to the students at the beginning of each term.
            Afterwards, several of us discussed her seminar informally.  The problem at our school in particular is that the terms are so short.  We only have 30 classes total, and we wondered if we could justify sacrificing 3 of them just to introduce the phonemic chart.  The general consensus seemed to be that it was an interesting idea, but it would probably never work at our school.

            In fact, I wonder how necessary the phonemic chart actually is for students.  Sound-spelling correlation in English is a problem, but it’s a problem for native speakers learning reading as young children as well as for ESL learners, and we all learned to read and write eventually without the phonemic chart.  (Then there’s also the question of different regional accents.  At our school in particular, students are liable to have an American teacher one term, and then a British teacher the next term.  Maybe it’s best if they are learn that a written form can have variable pronunciations, instead of trying to nail the pronunciation down in the written form of the phonemic alphabet?)

            How much to explicitly teach connected speech and intonation is something that I also wonder about.
            Way back when I was still teaching at an English Conversation School in Japan, the textbooks used to have a section on natural sounding speech, where the students were encouraged to try to adopt natural sounding English—e.g. “Whatcha doing?” instead of “What are you doing?”
            After observing me trying to teach this in one of my lessons, the head teacher at our branch confided to me that he didn’t really approve of trying to teach students overly natural English, because it just resulted in them speaking in very affected ways.  I myself had noticed this with many of our students—some of whom put too much effort into trying to sound colloquial, with the result that their speech just sounded strange. 
            The head teacher told me he preferred to teach connected speech for comprehension, but not necessarily encourage the students to imitate it, and I’ve adopted this as my own philosophy ever since.

            To add to this, many of my best students, the ones who speak English with the most natural intonation and accents, seldom overtly study any of the pronunciation exercises that Adrian Underhill recommends.  They just seem to pick up the natural rhythm of English from watching English TV.
            By itself, this would make me think that intonation, stress, rhythm, and connected speech don’t need to be taught.  However, balanced against this, is a large number of students who don’t seem to pick it up.  Even when given plenty of exposure.       For example, I had a Vietnamese friend in Australia who was living immersed in an English environment, but who never quite managed to get the rhythm of English speech.  Each individual word he pronounced was fine in itself, but he pronounced all the syllables with exactly the same stress, leading to a kind of “machine-gun” English sound when he talked rapidly to me.  It made him almost impossible to listen to.  So for him, mere exposure to English was obviously not enough to pick up the rhythm and intonation.  And he obviously would probably have benefitted from a number of the activities that Adrian Underhill describes.

            It’s curious that some students manage to pick up intonation and rhythm naturally, and others don’t.  However, for the benefit of the half of the class that doesn’t pick it up naturally, I probably should try to incorporate more of Adrian Underhill’s ideas.

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* Footnote 1: It’s also been suggested to me that we Americans have a hard time using pronunciation materials designed for British English, and that may be a factor as well. 
            (Short digression: It’s a funny thing, but in Japan, American English was the preferred variety, much to the frustration of my British colleagues.  But here in Southeast Asia, the situation is reversed, and British English seems to be the dominant variant, much to my occasional frustration.  My school is technically Australian, but makes almost exclusive use of British textbooks.  This seems to be not so much because of the preference of the local Southeast Asians themselves, who I think would be just as happy to learn American English all else being equal, but because the British seem to have capitalized on the soft-power of English as an international language much more than the Americans, and the British seem to have been much more aggressive about marketing English and creating ESL schools and materials.)

** Footnote 2: I actually gave him a whole list of recommended reading books that I thought he should read before graduate school.  The other two books were An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Peter Collins, and David Blair  and The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
  
Link of the Day
Language and the Mind Revisited - The Biolinguistic Turn with Noam Chomsky

Update: June 13, 2017
Video Review HERE