The Teacher Development Series Sound Foundations Living Phonology Adrian Underhill Heinemann RenaeLevel i Leet Level 3 Level 1 Contents The Teacher Development Series Introduction to Sound Foundations Ideas behind the phonemic chart Key to phonemic symbols Part1 Discovery toolkit Sounds in isolation 1 Introduction 2. Vowels: monophthongs 3. Vowels: diphthongs 4 Consonants Words in isolation 1 Introduction 2 Joining individual phonemes to make words 3. Stress in words 4 Unstress in words 5 Primary and secondary stress 6 Where do you put the stress in words? 7 Intonation and word stress Connected speech 1 Introduction 2 Overview 3 Sounds and simplifications in connected speech 4 Rhythm in connected speech 5 Intonation Part 2 Classroom toolkit Sounds in isolation General applications of the chart Using the pointer Introducing and integrating the chart Seven modes of chart usage A first lesson with the chart Four ways of giving models Developing your internal imaging of sounds Developing your use of mime and gesture Working with individual sounds Working with mistakes BAUER WNE Sow vii viii xii 96 96 98 99 100 107 110 114 115 118 132Level 2 Level 3 Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Words in isolation 145 1 Establishing the sound flow 145 2. Working with the spelling-pronunciation link 146 3 Word stress: working with words of two or more syllables. 151 4 Word stress and Cuisenaire rods 154 5 Finger correction 160 6 Integrating the learner’s dictionary with pronunciation work 166 7 Lip reading, ventriloquism, pronunciation and vocabulary 169 Connected speech 171 1 Overview 171 2. Simplification and reduction of sounds in connected speech 173 3. Stress, prominence and rhythm in connected speech 176 4 Intonation 194 5 Some integrative activities and suggestions 202 Further thoughts on using the cassette player, blackboard, and pointer 205 Phonemic charts for other languages 207 Further reading 208 Index 209The Teacher Development Series ‘TEACHER DEVELOPMENT is the process of becoming the best teacher you can be. It means becoming a student of learning, your own as well as that of others. It represents a widening of the focus of teaching to include not only the subject matter and the teaching methods, but also the people who are working with the subject and using the methods. It means taking a step back to see the larger picture of what goes on in learning, and how the relationship between learners and teachers influences learning. It also means attending to small details which can in turn change the bigger picture. Teacher development is a continuous process of transforming human potential into human performance, a process that is never finished. ‘The Teacher Development Series offers perspectives on learning that embrace topic, method and person as parts of one larger interacting whole. We aim to help you, the teacher, trainer or academic manager to stretch your awareness not only of what you do and how you do it, but also of how you affect your learners and colleagues. This will enable you to extract more from your own experience, both as it happens and in retrospect, and to become more actively involved in your own continuous learning. The books themselves will focus on new treatments of familiar subjects as well as areas that are just emerging as subjects of the future. ‘The series represents work that is in progress rather than finished or closed. The authors are themselves exploring, and invite you to bring your own experience to the study of these books while at the same time learning from the experiences of others. We encourage you to observe, value and understand your own experience, and to evaluate and integrate relevant external practice and knowledge into your own internal evolving model of effective teaching and Iearning. Adrian Underhillvi About the author Adrian Underhill I work at International House in Hastings, where I am Director of the ‘Teacher ‘Training Institute. | travel quite frequently, meeting and working with teachers and learners in different countries. [am particularly interested in the human sides of teaching and Jearning and it seems to me that no matter how marvellous the materials and the conditions, in the end itis the person of the teacher that counts. ‘This conclusion has formed the basis of much of my work on our programme of, teachers’ courses in Hastings, and led me to founding the Teacher Development Group (the first Special Interest Group of IATEFL) in 1985 I became interested in pronunciation when I discovered that it had the power to engage and upgrade learners’ attention in a definite and tangible way, and that this could even affect the rest of their language studies. I sometimes run intensive workshops on teaching pronunciation, as well as on such topics as facilitation skills, presence and performance for teachers and trainers, and humanistic approaches in educationIntroduction to Sound Foundations SOUND FOUNDATIONS is about understanding and enjoying phonology. It is about integrating phonology learning into all other class activities, and developing the skill and confidence to challenge learners creatively. Sound Foundations is made up of two complementary parts, each of which comprises a set of simple tools that enable you to carry out a large number of specific tasks quite easily. The tools themselves are made up in varying proportions from three ingredients: awareness, technique, and knowledge. ‘The first part of this book is the discovery toolkit, which is for you to do yourself. ‘The tools you will find here will enable you to discover through direct experience how your own pronunciation works, what the variables are and how to affect them. Your work here is guided by the discovery activities and by the commentaries. You will probably find that as you make discoveries yourself you can use the activities in class to help your learners make the same discoveries. ‘The second part is the classroom toolkit, and this contains activities to do with your learners. In working with these classroom activities and commentaries your Iearners will develop trust in their own capacity to learn, and you will develop the ability to respond directly and effectively to your learners’ pronunciation needs as they arise. Linguistic descriptions of phonology usually follow a two-fold division of the subject matter into segmentals (ie phonemes) and supra-segmentals (ie intonation and rhythm). This framework was not consirucied for language learners or teachers and does not necessarily provide the most useful basis on which to build learning activities. Sound Foundations is designed specifically for learning and teaching pronunciation, and is based on a three-fold division, which seems to provide a more practical way of understanding phonology and a more usefull and precise set of pedagogic tools. The three divisions are: Level 1: Sounds Level 2: Words Level 3: Connected speech Both the discovery toolkit and the classroom toolkit focus on each level in turn. In studying individual sounds and words we do not lose sight of the fact that our main purpose is the promotion of fluent speech. Nevertheless sounds and words are the building blocks for connected speech, and specific and detailed work can be done at these levels without losing touch with the fluent speech from which the parts have been abstracted. Sound Foundations offers ways of moving elegantly and immediately from connected speech to words to sounds and back again, and of noticing, examining and constantly refining connected speech. Thope you find pleasure and success in working with this material, and in improving it by making it yours. Adrian Underhill Hastings January 1994 vitvii Ideas behind the phonemic chart Looking at the chart The phonemic set Every spoken language has its own set of sounds. A. characteristic of this set is that all the sounds within it exist in some sort of relationship to each other, each sound helping to shape the contours and boundaries of its neighbours. I refer to this set as the phonemic set. This chart shows the phonemic set of English as a complete and consistent system, to be worked with as one organic and interacting whole. Why these symbols? ‘The symbols which are used on the chart to represent the sounds of the English phonemic set are taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet. These are the symbols used by most learner dictionaries, so working with them will also help learners develop the skills of finding for themselves the pronunciation and stress of any word in a learner dictionary. Phonemes and allophones A phoneme is the smallest sound that can make a difference in meaning. So if you change one phoneme for another you change the word. The word mine changes to pine and to shine if you change the phoneme /m/ to /p/ to /f/. There are forty- four such significant sounds, or phonemes, in standard British English. Each phoneme has a variety of allophones, slightly different and acceptable ways of saying the sound without changing the meaning. In this sense allophones are not significant. For example, /p/ has spread lips in peel and rounded lips in pool but both varieties are regarded as being the same phoneme.