Pronunciation Snippet: Understanding Colloquialisms

My husband has recently started his first job here in Ireland. He could really write a book about the language-related situations he's experienced in his first few months. For an ELT practitioner, his encounters give quite an insight to how complex language learning can be once you've left the safety of the classroom. Not only does my husband have to become accustomed to a new job, but new language, both technical and colloquial, with the colloquial coming from various parts of the country, meaning very different accents. Of course, it got me thinking that we need to bring more of these types of encounters into the classroom to prepare our learners for the use of English in a professional environment. This can apply to ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) contexts too, where many of the employees speak English as a second Language.

Here is a short activity using some of the more colloquial phrases that my husband encountered. You can apply the same steps to any selection of phrases. You could ask your learners about ones they've heard, you can choose some from an authentic audio or video recording, or maybe choose some vocabulary items from the lesson in your course book that you think will be challenging for learners to understand if heard outside the classroom.

What you need: A set of phrases that are used in a certain context, a synonym or explanation of these phrases on a small hand out or written on the board. For this example, I have provided hand outs for which you can find the links below.

Procedure:

• Give the learners a copy of the phrases and explanations mixed up. Ask them to match the phrases to the correct explanations.
• Play the recording and ask the learners to match the phrases 1-5 on the audio to the phrases a-e on the page.

• Break down the pronunciation of each phrase. Start in citation form, then go through the features of connected speech, and then go through the jungle pronunciation, as Richard Cauldwell calls it. (See this post) 

            Select to view breakdown of forms.

• Give the learners the short dialogues and ask them to put the phrases into the correct dialogue.
• Students practise saying the dialogues a few times. They don't have to say the phrases in the jungle form as they heard in the audio, this is just to give them practise of recognising the context that these phrases are in. Alternatively, you could read out one line of the dialogue and they all have to say the response together as a whole class, or do this in pairs.

           Select to view the hand out for the activities.
           Select to view the hand out with answers.

IATEFL Conference 2015: A summary of listening related talks

When I was in school, I studied Irish, Spanish and French and for all three languages, I had the same problem . . . listening. The teacher only had to say the word and my heart started pounding. There was always a list of questions that we would read before we listened. By the time I read the second question, I'd forgotten what the first one was. Then, the recording was played and all I could hear were streams of sounds which I was supposed to de-code and find the answer to the questions I didn't even remember. I recall one sunny day in my last year of secondary school in Spanish class when I looked around the classroom and watched as everyone else scribbled down answers. I remember thinking, "Aha, I've got it, someone has recorded a subliminal message in English and then have mixed the two audio files together, but it's the English we're supposed to be listening out for. It's the only possible way that anyone can make any sense of what the speaker is saying." So, I understand when the learners start to groan when I say we're going to do a listening activity!

Perhaps it is because of my own experience as a learner that I have an interest in thinking of alternative ways to help our learners to make sense of what sounds like a load of nonsense. And at this year's IATEFL Conference, one of my goals was to attend different sessions on developing listening skills. Here you will find a summary of five sessions I attended that were related to listening.

Lindsey Gutt - Fun Listening
Lindsey's session was all about easing our learners into listening and finding the fun in this much dreaded skill. She expressed that we need to provide our learners with fun, interactive, varied, interesting, and beneficial activities. That sounds like a lot of work, but the ideas that Lindsey shared don't require much preparation. She recommended activities that help boost learners' confidence and joy in listening rather than jumping in and giving them a list of questions. For example, listen to different sounds, like a door creaking, traffic, someone coughing etc., and guess what they are. Or, listen and draw what you hear. My favourite was a bingo listening. So, say the theme of the lesson is my school. Ask the learners to draw a grid in their notebooks and write one word in each space that they would expect to hear when some talks about their school. Then, play the recording and the learners cross out their words as they hear them. The first to cross out all of their words shouts out Bingo! Alternatively, the students could listen to the teacher or to their classmates talking about their school.
                     
                      

Olga Sergeeva - Authentic listening: stepping from bottom-up processing to understanding
Olga's session focused on authentic videos and how to create lessons around them. Unlike Lindsey's workshop, Olga's lesson plans requires a good amount of preparation, but it would provide some excellent materials for your learners and you could also use them again and again with future classes. Olga recommended using interviews as they convey more natural interaction, appeal to human interest and the interviewers tend to ask interesting questions.
With this idea of bottom-up decoding, Olga uses a lot of references to pronunciation features. So, for example, before watching the video, give the learners a few phrases from a short section of the video and ask them to mark the features of connected speech that they would expect to happen, like linking, elision, and types of assimilation. Then, they listen and try to pick out the phrases. She also uses the transcripts a lot and directed us to the Toronto Public Library channel on YouTube where they provide the transcripts so you can jump to the specific sentence in the video you're working on. So, give the learners six or seven gapped sentences and ask them to watch the section of the video and fill in the spaces. They listen several times and then classify some of the missing phrases according to the pronunciation feature that is being produced, such as elision of final sounds, vowel reduction, and word blending. For more ideas from Olga check out her blog.

Richard Cauldwell - Listening and connected speech: untruthful rules, unruly truths
Richard uses a very clever metaphor for phonology and listening:

1. the greenhouse - where everything is separate just like in citation form
2. the garden - where items are moved out of the greenhouse and organised in arrangements as in ELT materials when pronunciation rules are explained.
3. the jungle - where there is no order and everything is unpredictable as in natural rapid speech.



 

 Richard explained that rules for connected speech are explained on paper, but in reality, we don't speak like that, we speak much faster and even some of those rules are omitted. He commented that many native speakers believe that we are in the garden in the way that we speak, but the reality for our learners in that we are in the jungle!
Richard recommended introducing this idea to learners of the greenhouse, garden and jungle, and when introducing new language, ask the learners how it might sound in each stage, or build up the language item from citation form to a real speech model. For more information on Richard's ideas and materials, go to his website Speech In Action.


Laura Patsko - The ear of the beholder: helping learners understand different accents
In this session, Laura discussed using authentic materials for listening in an ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) context. Many of our learners need English for their jobs in their own countries where they will be communicating with people from various different parts of the world, mainly from others who are speaking English as a second language, so it is essential that they are prepared for this just as much for interaction with L1 speakers of English.
Laura demonstrated a lesson that she designed around an interview with the Spanish actor Javier Bardem and recommended that using celebrities who use English as their L2 as role models. She described a five step lesson plan in the workshop and she has made the presentation and hand outs available on her blog.

Annie MacDonald - Learning listening: the challenge of unscripted listening
Annie started by mentioning the difference between scripted recordings that we find in ELT course books and unscripted recordings that we hear all around us in the real world. So what do unscripted recordings have that scripted ones don't?

• false starts, e.g. I . .I . . .Well what really matters is . .
• fillers, e.g.erm, eh, mmm
• they're very untidy
• incomplete or unfinished sentences

To help our learners understand unscripted real world speech, we need to expose them to it and show them how they can decode it. For this, you will need transcripts of unscripted speech, which is obviously a very time-consuming task, but there are resources out there, such as that which Olga mentioned (see above) or Annie's new resource pack that she wrote with Mark Hancock Authentic Listening Resource Pack by Delta Publishing.
Annie demonstrated many different exercises you can do, such as listening to a short piece of audio and mark where you hear the marker kind of or sort of in the transcript. She highlighted many different things that speakers do in unscripted speech and the importance of giving our learners as much practise as possible. For more information about Annie and her talk, go to her website.

IATEFL PronSIG PCE 2015

IATEFL PronSIG's Pre Conference Event this year was called Practical Pronunciation Teaching. There were a range of talks that had something for teachers at all levels. In this post, I will give a short outline of each of the talks given at this PCE.

Laura Patsko - How to identify pronunciation priorities in the multilingual classroom
  In this session, Laura described to us the steps she takes to decide on what pronunciation features her learners need to develop to be intelligible in an ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) context. She did this by anticipating what areas her learners are likely to have based on their L1. She mentioned that we should not allow stereotypes to influence this step, but rather anticipate based of facts such as those outlines in published literature, and a grid she developed as part of her MA. Deciding on the pronunciation priorities for each set of learners, should be done by looking at what issues overlap.
  Another important step in deciding the priorities is to observe your learners and notice what it is that they need. Laura gave an example of a dictation activity that she uses, and she demonstrated how to go about this. You can find the handouts and more information about Laura's needs analysis process here.

Jane Setter - Flipping Intonation! Making focus on practice practical.
  Jane's decision to introduce the idea of the flipped classroom in her intonation lectures at the University of Reading came about from feedback from her students. They felt that there was too much theory happening in class and that they needed more practical lessons. For anyone who isn't sure, the flipped classroom means that the learners do the homework before to prepare themselves for the next lesson so that they can discuss any problems they have in the lessons and spend more time putting the language focus into practise.
  Jane showed us how she makes her own videos explaining the theory. She then posts the video onto YouTube and her students watch this before going to class. That way, they have plenty of time for practice in class.

Roselyn Young - Articulatory settings: a practical demonstration
 In this session, Roselyn demonstrated how to get in touch with the physicality of pronouncing sounds using French as a model. She used the chart designed by Pronunciation Science which is based on the Silent Way. For many of us, it made us realise how difficult it is for our learners to get in touch the articulators that we require to make sounds in a different language. We starting by discovering a few individual sounds, and then built up those sounds to make words and short phrases. For me, I finally learnt how to make the French oo sound, such as in the word toute.

Sophie Farag - Maximising pronunciation practice through blended learning
  Sophie works for the American University in Cairo. She explained to us how there was little or no pronunciation work included in the curriculum, and so she had to find the tools to be able to increase her learners' awareness and build their confidence in both listening and speaking. She gave the details of a number of online tools and mobile apps that she used both in class to compliment pronunciation homework. She also outlined the various difficulties and technical issues she faced throughout the project.

Robin Walker - IDEAS for teaching pronunciation
  Robin gave a very entertaining and energetic talk on being creative when it comes to pronunciation teaching. He used the acronym IDEAS as guide to how we should teach pronunciation and showed us different activities that he has used by following this guide. Some of his main ideas included demonstrating pronunciation to our learners rather than explaining it to them. Making associations, for example, colours and anecdotes, can be a memorable and fun. Also, try to make pronunciation engaging by taking pronunciation off the page. You can find out more about Robin and his work here.

Pronunciation Snippet: Marking connected speech

  Connected speech is a feature of pronunciation that is often dealt with at higher levels in many materials. Perhaps this is because the terminology or the concept behind some of these features is too complex for lower level learners.
  Marks and Bowen (2012) say that pronunciation cannot be ordered according to level as grammar is "because all aspects of pronunciation are needed right from the start". So, is there a way to raise awareness of aspects of connected speech without overwhelming our learners? Absolutely.

Let's look at the following items that would be taught in an A1 classroom.

•  a cup of coffee
• Where do you live?

Many learners would read the phrases and expect to hear something like this:

But, if they hear these phrases being spoken outside of the classroom by native or fluent speakers, they will probably hear something like this:


These two versions of the same language items sound quite different to a learner and the second can come as quite a shock when they are used to hearing it in citation form. We can help prepare our learners for coming into contact with this rush of sounds. When introducing new language, whether it is lexis, grammar or functional language, we need to teach the meaning, form, use AND pronunciation. And when we say "pronunciation" we mean not just in citation form, but how it is likely to sound when they come into contact with it in the real world.

Here is how we might display these phrases on the board. We can use phonemic symbols, arrows to show that two words are connecting together, and a dot to represent the most stressed syllable.

Teaching notes: Take each phrase individually. Write them on the board. Ask the learners to say the phrase so that they can feel the words in their mouths. Next, tell them that they might hear these being said in a different way. Say the phrase as naturally as you would normally say it. You may need to repeat it more than once. Break the phrase down writing in the reductions, connections and marking the stressed syllable. Drill the phrase a couple of times.

So the next time you are introducing a new phrase or grammar item into your lesson, have a quick think about how you would say this naturally and mark down some ways you can give them a visual aid to your learners on the board.

Reference
Marks, J. and Bowen, T (2012) The Book of Pronunciation: Proposals for a practical pedagogy. Delta Publishing: Surrey