To teach the phonology of international English or not to teach |
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Smiljana Komar (Ljubljana) |
The paper presents some
pedagogical considerations regarding the plausibility of teaching standard
English pronunciation as opposed to the alternative Lingua Franca Core to
future teachers of English. In addition, it daringly suggests the contribution
of Slovene speakers to the Lingua Franca Core.
The main pedagogical
assumption is that when it comes to teaching of English pronunciation, one has
to bear in mind who the learners are and adapt the curriculum to their needs.
The spectrum of phonological, phonetic and prosodic features that a teacher may
want to teach largely depends on the learners' age and their purpose of
learning English. An elementary school English teacher in Slovenia, whose
pupils start learning English at the age of 9, should be allowed to teach
standard English thus giving the learners the possibility to master the
accepted English pronunciation. An ESP teacher, on the contrary, may want to
make pronunciation allowances for the fact that the learners are either too old
to master pronunciation successfully or will use English only for a very
specific purpose and in a restricted interaction. For the latter, Lingua Franca
Phonological Core may be useful and appropriate.
There is, however, one
important linguistic consideration related to the Lingua Franca Core as
proposed by J. Jenkins in The Phonology of English as an International Language
(2000). At this stage of research into the pronunciation of international
English, Jenkins' proposal of the Lingua Franca Phonological Core should be
regarded as an early attempt to describe the pronunciation features of the non-native
speakers' talk and to pinpoint those phonological, phonetic and prosodic
features which inhibit mutual inteligibility. It should by no means be regarded
as the ultimate objective for the teaching of pronunciation.
If the purpose of the
Lingua Franca Phonological Core is supposed to ease the learning of English
pronunciation, let us see what it can offer to a native speaker of Slovene. A
brief look at the most typical pronunciation errors of Slovene speakers shows
that most of the suggestions what to teach on the segmental level can be
applied to Slovene learners. Teachers may overlook the pronunciation of the
dental fricatives and the dark /l/ allophone. They should, however, insist on
the aspiration of voiceless plosives in syllable-initial accented prevocalic
positions, as well as on maintaining the vowel quality and quantity.
The description of the
phonological core of English as an international language is pre-mature at this
stage. It will only be possible when a large corpus of recorded data is
acquired and when the phonological research in various languages is complete.
Nonetheless, we would like to add another important phonological feature to the
existing phonological core which is typical of Slovene speakers and which may
produce a number of homophones thus causing possible misunderstandings. The
feature we have in mind is the replacement of final voiced obstruents by their
voiceless counterparts which combined with the neutralization of /e/ and /Q/
vowels can turn the following 4 distinct English words: bat, bad, bet, bed into
one homophone /bet/.