What ’s Phonetics Got to Do with Language Teaching?
Investigating future teachers’ use of knowledge about phonetics and phonology
At the time of this study I taught the two applied linguistics courses in Spanish that were required for the teaching credential in Spanish at one of the California State University campuses: Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics and Spanish Applied Linguistics. When I first started teaching the introductory course, two years prior to the initiation of the present study, I used it to give an survey of Hispanic linguisticsi but was not satisfied with the general level of knowledge about language (KAL) that the teachers-in-training were able to demonstrate at the end of the course. The majority of those novice teachers who continued with the Spanish Applied Linguistics course were especially weak with respect to phonetics and phonology. In the applied linguistics course, I felt I needed to be able to refer to phonemes with respect to ease or difficulty of acquisition in the context of the foreign language classroom and the possibility of designing processing instruction. (Processing instruction refers to input activities that require students to pay attention to grammatical concepts at the same time they process for meaningii (See Lee and VanPatten, (1985) for a detailed discussion.) In the case of phonemic awareness, processing instruction would attract the learner’s attention to the phonemic contrasts between Spanish and English.)
However, the pre-study future teachers, except the one with the GPA of 4.0, did not seem to remember anything from the 3-4 weeks they had spent on phonetics and phonology the previous semester. Furthermore, end-of-semester evaluations from these pre-study teachers-in-training informed me that they had not seen the relevance to their future teaching careers of the transcription project that I had required them to do. It was painfully obvious that something must change in order to make relevant the subject matter for these teachers in training if they were going to be motivated to learn and retain information pertaining to phonetics and phonology. In addition, the professors who observed the teachers-in-training during their student-teaching experience had been reporting that our credential candidates were very deficient in KAL in general, making numerous mistakes in front of the class. In order to make KAL in general and phonetics and phonology in particular seem more relevant, I had to totally overhaul the two courses so that the first course was less of a linguistic survey course and more focused on the KAL that language teachers need to know in order to function effectively in the classroom. I made the second course more of a practical application course in which the teachers in training focused on SLA and how to incorporate KAL into actual lesson plans. The course materials were likewise changed to reflect the new goals. When commercially available materials were found lacking, I supplemented with handouts and lectures.
Therefore, in the Fall semester of 2001 I changed the objectives for both courses with the Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics providing a more in depth analysis of the aspects of the language that, from my perspective, are most relevant to future Spanish teachers: general description of mechanics of sound production; linking of sounds across word boundaries; derivational and inflectional morphology; the syntactic function of words, phrases and clauses; semantics of the tense-aspect-mood system; basic characteristics of the different dialects of Spanish; and sociocultural/ pragmatic knowledge. To make room for these topics I left out issues that I deemed less important for teachers to know such as history of the language and sociolinguistics. The text used was Terrell and Salgués de Cargill (1979). In the Spanish Applied Linguistics course the new course objectives focused on knowledge of SLA and processing instruction that serves to focus the learner’s attention on form (in other words, the teaching of level-appropriate KAL in communicative contexts). The text for this course was Lee and VanPatten (1985).
We report on a study that investigates the extent to which the modified course objectives described above were successful in helping novice teachers acquire KAL and be able to use it in doing teacher tasks. The focus of the study was knowledge of articulatory phonetics and phonology and the ability to transfer that knowledge in a practical way to beginning learners of the Spanish language. The focus on knowledge about pronunciation was chosen because I feel that such knowledge is important for teachers and that they are not likely to acquire such knowledge unless it is taught in applied linguistics classes.
Future teachers will not get a detailed description of how sounds are produced in a literature or a methodology class. To make matters worse, many Spanish textbooks neglect to include information on how to pronounce the sounds of Spanish and how these relate to the orthography of Spanish (Martínez-Lage, Gutiérrez & Rosser, 2003; VanPatten, Lee & Ballman, 1999; and others). Pronunciation practice is relegated for the most part to lab manual activities. Therefore, if teachers are going to address their students’ problems in pronunciation, they will need knowledge of the Spanish sound system in order to model the sounds as well as to direct their students as to placement of lips, teeth and tongue in addition to other aspects of sound production.
Given that the research suggests that the likelihood of achieving native-like pronunciation in L2 is significantly reduced unless the language learning process begins at a very young age (See Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991) for an in-depth discussion), some would argue that teaching pronunciation is a low priority. However, it has been shown that it is possible for post-pubescent learners to acquire a native-like proficiency (loup, Boustagi, El Tigi, & Moselle, 1994) and that training in pronunciation can help achievement in pronunciation (Moyer, 1999). Furthermore, my own experience shows that knowledge of phonetics and phonology can be vital in the acquisition of target pronunciation. I owe my success (motivation apart) in acquiring Spanish pronunciation almost exclusively to having had the great opportunity in the early stages of my M.A. program to have studied Spanish phonetics and phonology. I was able to tape myself and understand not only that some aspect of my pronunciation had to be changed but also HOW it needed to be changed. Having an understanding of Spanish phonetics and phonology and how they contrasted with English phonetics and phonology gave me the tools I needed to continue to improve my pronunciation even after reaching the stage of competency in which a native speaker could always understand what I was saying. Thus, if the problem with adult acquisition of L2 phonology has to do with a brain specialization that happens at about six months of age (see Jacobs (1988) for in depth discussion) and that our brains stop being able to perceive phonemes not of our LI, then as in my case, knowledge of the mechanics of pronunciation should help. Making the learner cognizant of how the sounds of L2 are different from those of L1 should be an effective remedy for inability to perceive L2 phonemes. It is logical to assume that language teachers can only help learners perceive the different phonemes if they themselves understand the mechanics involved.
Taking into account the current focus on communicative competence in which interactions between learners are given prominence, we can assume that a learner is just as likely to interact with a classmate as with an instructor. Instructors themselves are likely to let pronunciation take a backseat to the expression of meaning if they follow the advice of many experts in SLA. One of my applied linguistics students had the following to say about the classroom approach that puts pronunciation at the bottom of the priority list:
...the professors and peers slop correcting us after they think that we know sufficient enough Spanish to get by. So then you have students who aren’t afraid to speak it in front of a big group and sometimes we really can’t understand them because they are speaking very fast and un-clear.
Furthermore, many novice teachers, native speakers (NSs) and heritage speakers (HSs), seem to not realize the importance of knowledge about pronunciation. Native and heritage speakers come to the university with the apparent belief that the only thing necessary to be able to teach Spanish is to be a native speaker of Spanish. It does not seem to occur to them that they need to be able to analyze the language from the point of view of an English speaker in order to be able to have empathy with their students and to be able to present language in a way that makes sense to the learners. The question of pronunciation is an interesting one for these novice teachers, as most of them have never had to pay much attention to their pronunciation in Spanish, having grown up in households where Spanish was spoken and so took it for granted. Without an orientation to the sound system of their native language, these NSs and HSs arrive at their first jobs never having had to analyze their own pronunciation and are then armed with a textbook that will most likely not help them in this respect. On the other hand, non-native speakers (NNSs) of Spanish who succeed in completing a Spanish major and obtaining their teaching credential, and who are products of a system in which pronunciation is not given much emphasis, probably perpetuate the problem.
iBy ‘survey,’ I mean an introduction to the notion that grammar is more than prescriptive grammar plus short units on phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. (The course description, written by a literature professor, called for an introduction to historical linguistics and sociolinguistics as well. I tried that for one semester and quickly eliminated those two units.)
ii Processing instruction contrasts with mechanical drills in which students perform grammatical manipulations in many cases without having to understand what they are doing. It involves providing input that requires the learners to focus on form, in other words, to pay attention to one grammatical structure at a time.
