Hi Vu,

I'm not sure whether I understood you correctly.

Well I teach in Germany. So when I teach pronunciation I teach English in speaking to my students (first of all) and then of course I use tapes or CD with native speakers. that's all.

Maybe I don't see the complexity of your question, because German and English are relatively similar in pronunciation with both being stress-timed languages where intonation and pitch is mostly paralinguistic i.e. not meaning-differentiating.

Well I don't know whether this answers your question. Does it?

Regards,

Marylou

Dear Marylou!

I have read you reply and I want to explain something about our teaching context.

English and Vietnamese are two different languages. Vietnamese has no stress, no rhythm, and more importantly, the sounds and the spelling of vowels and consonants are the same. In order to make the students get familiar with the language, teachers record the sounds that don't exist in Vietnamese language, the intonation in questions, statement etc depending on the students needs.  For example, if I teach elementary students, I will record the sounds of vowels and consonants that they often confuse and prepare a list of words they have learnt. Then I bring them to class. At the beginning of the pronunciation lesson, I ask the students to listen to the recording and tick the words they hear as a warmer-up.

Dear Vu,

Thanks for your explanation. I can now understand much better the complexity of the problem you are dealing with.

Just a tiny question keeps pestering me.

For a pedagogical purpose I think it's o.k. to have something like "the sounds of vowels and consonatns that they [your students] often confuse" and then to have a list of words in which they are asked to identify the sounds.

But in real life or for scientific accurracy sounds  d o   n o t   exist in isolation. What you have is a sheer endless list of words and from all these contexts you can deduct the sound. Most people call it phoneme e.g. /i:/. This phoneme is an   a b s t r a c t i o n  from all its occurences in contexts like "lead, beat, free, eel".

But please do not take me for a pedant. I just want to make it clear that there is a pragmatic and a theoretical approach to the description of sounds . 

- As a teacher in your situation I'm sure I would opt for the same pragmatic way like you.

Dear Marylou!

Thanks a lot for your pragmatic idea in teaching pronunciation. I agree with you that teaching sounds in isolation means pressing too much the sounds in textbooks. This ,in turn ,may lead to the result that the students aren't flexible in dealing with speaking as sounds are not fixed in words or sentences as they are taught alone. This is also the matter that keeps pestering me . I believe that teaching sounds in isolation is an unnatural way. Your assumption makes me think that maybe we should select only a few sounds that need to be presented in isolation and try to put them in practice of words and sentences as much as possible for the students to recognize them in different situations.

Dear Vu!

I'm not sure whether we understand each other correctly.

In my last post I just wanted to point out that what you call "sound" or "sounds in textbooks" do not exist in reality, that they are sheer abstraction of all the naturally occuring variants in context. I just wanted to make the point that we have to know what it is we are dealing with, ie. either the abstraction/phoneme or the actual occurance /allophone. - And with this distinction I can live quite happily.

As a teacher I do go about it very much like you eg. I correct my pupils and say, no, that's a long i: like in bead and I make them repeat the word "bead" two or three times and always refer to it as the "i: in bead". But my students will say "ah, you mean the i with the colon". So it's them who refer to the sounds as real entity - and to be honest, I don't correct them. Because they just want to learn the language and that's fine with me. If I do classes in phonetics and phonology on the other hand, I do make the difference between phoneme and allophone clear to them.

There is however another thing which I suspect makes communication difficult for us two. And this is my sheer ignorance of what Vietnamese is like. Maybe I could understand you much better, if I had a little idea of what the difficulties are that you have to overcome in order to teach English pronunciation to Vietnamese students. I guess that the sound system of Vietnamese is very much more different from the English one as the German one is. And this is probably why I still have the feeling of not completely understanding you.

Marylou

Dear Marylou,

I understand that our teaching context merits further explanation. Vietnamese is an one-syllabic language while English is multi-syllabic. The following mistakes are common in our students' pronunciation.

They cannot pronounce sounds that do not exist in their language such as  /θ/ /η/ , replace these sounds by similar ones in Vietnamese, do not pronounce the clusters, add consonant(s) to combinations of clusters and  do not use stress  or use the stress in wrong position. In Vietnamese we have no stress in words, sentences.

In our textbooks, each unit has 5 lessons: Reading, Speaking, Listening, Writing and Language Focus. Pronunciation is put in the last lesson. In this lesson, three language elements : Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Grammar are taught. For example, the pronunciation part  designed in the 10th form focuses on the sound discrimination. A pair of sounds ( eg. / I / and /i;/) are presented in isolation , in words and in sentences for the students step by step to recognize the sounds because in Vietnamese we have letter and the sound /i/, neither short nor long.

Dear Vu,

thanks a lot for the extra tuition you've given me on Vietnamese! This has been very helpful.

I think I now begin to understand your teaching context and the problems you have - or the challenges you meet - much better. To start with, I can only say that your job in teaching correct pronunciation is a much more difficult  one than mine with native speakers of German. Of course, there are also a couple of English sounds which don't exist at all in German like the "th" or the "v", but probably not as many as when comparing English with Vietnamese.

I'm just trying to think.... There are a lot of sounds in English for which there are only close-correspondents in German. Like the vowel in "bad". There is a similar sound in German. But it's not quite the same. So what I have to make sure is that students hear the difference first of all. I have to train their ears to recognize that there is a difference. And this task is sometimes enormous. And I think it is here where we two have sort of the same job or same difficulty. Having to teach sounds to students which are not part of their native language and train their ear to hear that there actually is a difference and that they are not hearing a sound which they have in their own language.

Do you think I've finally understood you correctly?

Dear Marylou,

I think we now have understood each other and I am happy because you eventually have some perceptions  of our EFl context. I also have learnt from you that training the students' ears to make them aware of the sounds that they have to produce is more pragmatic than simply repeating the sounds in isolation agian and again. I want to add an idea that it's our job not only to teach them mime the sounds but also, more importantly, recognize the flexibility of the sounds in combination.

Best regards,

Vuthixuandung

Hello Vuthixuandung:

     Regarding your question: "Have you ever applied technology in teaching pronunciation? How do you make use of technology in this aspect?" the answer is that I use very low technology to teach pronunciation.  I use a pencil, paper, a chalk board, my hands, and a plastic model of the mouth.  There are, for example, computer programs available with which a student can record their pronunciation and compare it to the pronunciation of a native speaker; however, I never use such computer programs to teach pronunciation.  The reason is that teaching the pronunciation of an L2 is actually the teaching of a motor skill.  The teaching of motor skills requires providing useful feedback to a student, which is not possible by simply having a student work with a computer program.

     However, once students have learned the material and no longer need my assistance, I do use higher technology, such as computers (PowerPoint, for example) and CDs for the purpose of creating opportunities for the students to continue to practice what they have learn on their own.

     Dan Jenkins (Foreign Expert, English Department, China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing, China) 

Dear Dan,

Your experience is a good experience for me. I have attended some workshops where pronunciation is taught simply with pencil, paper and the teacher's presentation ( using mouth to demonstrate the sounds). What I want to mention here is that a slide show sometimes is useful because some main points can be put "in one". I mean it includes the sound's presentation in written form, the recording of the sound and the exercise to practise. I believe it a good means for the students to learn pronunciation.