|
TEACHING PRONUNCIATION
16TH
MAY 2005
In this session we looked at the challenges facing Chinese
learners with regards to pronunciation, the benefits of being a Chinese
native speaker teacher, and Western styles of teaching pronunciation compared
with the Chinese approach.
We also did a brainstorm on different methods and ways of
teaching pronunciation in the classroom and these can be seen in the document
Pronunciation Brainstorm. After you open the document you may want to
consider your own techniques before looking down the page at ours.
1. Challenges facing Chinese learners
Some of the biggest problems for Chinese learners are
final consonant sounds, especially as Chinese doesn't have any final
consonant sounds. All Chinese words have an initial consonant sound and a
final vowel sound. This means students often add an incorrect vowel sound at
the end of a word, like "book" becomes "booker".
Likewise, all consonant clusters, like "asks" or
"breakfast", cause problems.
This makes present simple and past tenses particularly
difficult to pronounce correctly, the problem being exacerbated by the lack
of tense usage in Chinese. Hence "likes" or liked" are often
pronounced "like".
Word stress is a problem. Especially knowing where to put
the stress when a word changes its form, like, "economy",
"economics" and "economical", and so on.
Word stress in nouns and compound nouns is often
mistakenly put on the second word, instead of the first, like swimming pool
and football, instead of swimming pool and football. In fact studies show
that 85% of all content words in English, such as nouns, have the stress on
the first syllable. Actually, this is a key decodifier for native speakers to
understand connected speech.
Weak and strong forms are difficult for Chinese learners.
The tendency is to stress every syllable strongly and with equal weight.
Connected speech is usually ignored. For example, words
are not usually linked by Chinese speakers. This maybe due to traditional
teaching methods that emphasise learning pronunciation from reading aloud and
also due to not knowing how words drastically change their properties in
connected speech. To learn more about this see books referenced below.
An excellent book to find out more about Chinese problem
areas (in linguistic areas, not only pronunciation) see...
LEARNER ENGLISH, by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith
(Cambridge University Press). Each focuses on a nationality and analyses the
problems that nationality has learning English by comparing it to the mother
tongue.
Another book for a guide to pronunciation features of
English and how to teach them is...
TEACHING PRONUNCIATION, by Marianne Celce-Murcia,
Donna Brinton and Janet Goodwin (published by the People's University
Press). An excellent, complete guide for beginner or experienced teachers.
Benefits of being a Chinese native speaker teacher
- They know the problems the learner faces.
- They are o the same page as the learner and can
empathise with them.
- They have overcome many of the obstacles the
learner os facing.
- They are familiar with local Chinese accents that
may be posing pronunciation problems for a learner.
Western and Chinese styles compared
This comparison was not aimed at showing one style to be
better than the other, rather just to raise awareness and put you in the
shoes of the other.
Chinese learners often memorise an already analysed
article or passage in order to perfect and remember pronunciation.
WHY? It builds confidence. If the article is
connected to their real life, it creates a deep impression and motivation to
learn it. For example, some students may learn a whole paragraph form Li Yang
introducing himself and where he studied and so on. Memorising whole articles
helps create a feeling of "Yu Gan" or "sense of language".
This feeling of the language, not just knowing grammar and rules, is very
important.
Western learners may memorise small chunks or
collocations, to remember words and their pronunciation, not whole passages.
WHY? This enables the learner to improvise in a conversation. These chunks
are easy to manipulate and hence make it easy to personalise the language.
There's a feeling that learning a piece of written prose is not useful in
conversation as it isn't natural and doesn't reflect real life conversations.
Finally, if you are interested in finding out more
about connected speech you should found out about a new method of perfecting
pronunciation for higher-level learners, called Streaming Speech, by
Richard Cauldwell. It won the British Council Innovation ion ELT award in
2004.
You can listen to a radio programme about it here, go to:
Programme 5 - 'Let's get talking'
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/download/radio/innovations/innovations.shtml
You find out more and get a free demo at Richard's
website: http://www.speechinaction.com/
and if you like it so much join his newsletter!
|
