What ’s Phonetics Got to Do with Language Teaching?
CONCLUSIONS
Considering current emphasis on communicative competence, the results of this small study suggest that the university teacher-training program that does not afford sufficient time to create an awareness of phonetics and phonology in its graduates is ill-preparing them for their interactions with learners once they are in the field. With respect to the research questions, we have the following to say:
1) To what extent do novice teachers make use of KAL when reflecting on their teaching?
Although we cannot quantify the amount of KAL used in the responses, it is obvious from our small sample that if only three or four respondents out of 22 mention just a few aspects of all the KAL that they should know, the majority of the future teachers were really not able to articulate KAL at the level appropriate for us to say that they are qualified to teach Spanish. Although more participants scored in the 90-100 range on exams composed primarily to demonstrate recognition of concepts, it is clear from the quality of their responses to the reflection questions, that they have not truly assimilated the material. The questions might have been designed differently to elicit more language that demonstrated KAL, for example, by appending a caveat such as “Be sure to make reference in your answer to the concepts that you learned when studying phonetics and phonology last semester.”
2) What aspects of pronunciation do novice teachers tend to overlook in their teaching?
The few participants that did use KAL in their responses were only able to use the most high frequency information dealing with phonemes that posed a significant contrast with English, diphthongs, and accentuation. There was some allusion to the lack of glottal stop in Spanish that causes syllabification to take place across word boundaries and that contributes enormously to learners’ misunderstanding of aural input as well as the learners’ capacity to produce Spanish that others can understand. Since there was only one reference made to intonation as a cause of miscommunication, it is evident that much more time needs to be spent working with intonation contours and the meaning they lend to an utterance. We were only able to spend one day on intonation in the introductory course. Obviously, this amount of time is not sufficient when one considers the importance of intonation in sounding at least polite. Something else that we spent just one class period on is the tendency of L1 English speakers to create diphthongs from simple vowels whereas in Spanish all diphthongs are orthographically represented. There was a show of recognition among the participants when I demonstrated how this tendency helps to define the ‘gringo’ accent in Spanish. In addition, I gave direct input to two of the participants that the beginner they were working with in the tutoring project had a serious problem with this L1 habit and they still did not mention inappropriate diphthongation in any of their responses. I do not know a beginner who does not have a problem in this respect so potentially all participants should have mentioned this issue at some point in their responses. The lack of mention of inappropriate dipthongation must mean that the concept needs to be presented over and over in different ways.
3) How do novice teachers view the usefulness of KAL components of teacher education courses?
This question is especially difficult to answer because of the nature of reflection question #5. All the participants appreciated the opportunity to participate in the tutoring project and stated that the project in general was beneficial to them. However, they did not overtly make the connection between the KAL that they had supposedly learned during the first semester and the opportunity to put into practice what they had been learning in the second course. Again, this could be due to the wording of the question. Perhaps a more appropriate question would be something like the following: “How did you use what you learned about phonetics and phonology during the pronunciation tutoring experience?” “Could you have done as thorough a job teaching pronunciation if you had not studied phonetics and phonology?” “Why or why not?”
4) What was the quality of KAL acquired for the purposes of teaching by the novice teachers who participated in this study?
Table 1 in “Raising Orthographic Awareness of Teachers of Chinese RESULTS Participants’ Comments on the Pedagogy Course” makes clear that the level of KAL, with respect to phonetics and phonology, acquired for the purposes of teaching by the participants in this study is not notable. Even though their answers were evaluated with respect to the understanding that they showed of certain concepts that had been taught in the classroom and not necessarily with respect to use of metalinguistic terminology, the application of knowledge about phonetics and phonology apparently was a struggle for the novice teachers. Since the application in this case was the one-on-one tutoring of a beginning student in pronunciation, one can assume that this context should have convinced the participants of the real-world relevance of the material. However, the results do not bear out this assumption.
The level of KAL acquired was more impressive than before I added the practical application, in other words, before I required the teachers-in-training to participate in the kind of activity that teachers have to do. I have concluded that, in order to make the material even more relevant, there must be commercially-produced materials available that establish the context for acquisition of linguistic knowledge within the framework of pedagogical issues. Materials that simply expound about language may be perceived as irrelevant by certain types of learners. In other words, future teachers should not be treated as future linguists. It is perhaps difficult for an applied linguist to understand that even though we are teachers as well as linguists, and the link between linguistics and language teaching is obvious to us, the same may not be true of someone aspiring to teach language on a more elementary level.
The most important information obtained from this study is that with all the facts that our future teachers need to know to be effective in the classroom with their own students, it is crucial to allot specific time in the teacher-training classroom for projects in order for the trainees to assimilate the information. Since personal experience has shown me that with ever dwindling resources and the tendency to give preference to literature courses over linguistics courses in language programs, it is important to make our applied linguistics courses relevant. We need not only to assess the learning of our teachers-in-training, but also to assess the course content itself to ensure that we are giving time to the KAL that our trainees really need to know in order to function in the work place and in order to plan an overall curriculum that makes sense according to the needs of our student population. The results of this study, although qualitative in nature, have shown me that if we do not spend sufficient time with a concept in class and allot specific and sufficient time to every concept in the form of a project that helps the students make the information their own, then we simply cannot assume that the students will somehow learn it. Just because a concept is mentioned in the textbook or is presented in a lecture and just because WE know it is important, nothing makes more clear to the student that something is important than the time and energy that the instructor devotes to it. If I had remained at the university where this study was conducted, I would have pushed to have three courses for teacher preparation within the foreign language department divided as per the following: (1) KAL for future teachers, (2) second language acquisition, and (3) teaching Spanish – processing instruction for syntax, morphology and phonetics. I maintain that this three course sequence is the minimum that any teacher-training program should require of its credential candidates.
I am reminded of a workshop I once attended entitled, “I taught it but they didn’t learn it”. As applied linguists in teacher-training programs, we must take the emphasis off of what ‘we teach’ and put it where it belongs... on what the teachers-in-training learn. We must design our courses keeping in mind how to help all future teachers achieve the learning outcomes we have until recently only assumed for the A students.
