Aspects of Teaching and Learning Phonetic Symbols
Aspects of Teaching and Learning Phonetic SymbolsThe teaching of pronunciation is described as "the Cinderella of language teaching", i.e. she has never got to go to the ball. That tells the truth. In contrast to those "princesses" — vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing and speaking people usually think much of, this "humble lady" has long been out of favour. But as a matter of fact, one's linguistic competence depends in a certain measure on his pronunciation which, if is too bad to communicate with other people, he will only be regarded as a failed language learner. On the other hand, for an adult, it is not difficult to enlarge the amount of vocabulary or enhance the knowledge of grammar. But without a solid foundation of pronunciation at the early stage, it will be beyond repair in case of fossilization. By this token, Teaching of pronunciation deserves much more attention than we paid before. This article ventures some personal ideas on the teaching of phonetic symbols — the most basic element of pronunciation
I. Why do we have to learn phonetic symbols? To learn or not to learn, that is not the question. The majority of Chinese and foreign teachers think it is quite necessary. In terms of teaching rules, learning phonetic symbols as early as possible is a good way of reducing down the repetition as well as raising up the memory of words . Those teachers are not baseless by saying that a large number of students lag behind in Grade Two owing to their failure of learning phonetic symbols in Grade One thus unable to expand their vocabulary and improve their reading ability. In aspect of teaching strategy, mastery of phonetic symbols at the initial stage usually makes the students feel successful and confident because, in a sense, they are already independent learners. As a result, tremendous interest has been kindled. An obvious profit is that, when phonetic symbols have been taught, most students would preview a lot of new words of the text. Their speed of learning new words sometimes could make the teacher greatly surprised. From a long-term view, pronunciation plays an important role in the formation of some other language skills, like listening, speaking and reading. There are many people who have learned English for a long time yet the language capability remains unimproved because of their poor pronunciation, known as "fossilization". So, Learning phonetic symbols at the very beginning should become a required course for students.
II. When to start learning? It is a topic worthy of discussion. Some teachers claim that early introduction of phonetic symbols to the students makes the latter study smoother. They even suggest that the phonetic symbols be taught at the same time with the alphabet letters. Their method is to put phonetic transcription on each letter and classify them by vowels. But I don't think this method conform with teaching rules. Firstly, Pinyin letters they have learned in primary schools are inveterate in their mind, but the pronunciations of Pinyi and English letters are actually different. At this time, teacher's task is to free students from the molestation of Pinyin letters and have them follow the correct pronunciation of English letters. If we introduce phonetic symbols to them here, they will be puzzled and confused with different concepts. The result is, as we often see, many students write "mai" for "my" and "tu" for "too" in the dictation. Next, learning letters through phonetic symbols is not as good an effect as learning phonetic symbols through letters. There are 26 English letters mostly read as syllables while 48 phonetic symbols all read as phonemes. Research shows that language learners are more sensible to holistic syllables than to individual phonemes. Therefore, we can achieve twice the result with half the effort by learning phonetic symbols through letters so long as we can read these letters correctly. Some others declare the teaching of phonetic symbols should be conducted later. They hold that students' main task in the first term is to get in touch with more language materials and strengthen the linguistic sense. Systematic learning of phonetic symbols is to be carried out in the second term. Without doubt, the more language materials the students get, the easier for them to learn phonetic symbols. But there are still two shortcomings in doing so. In the first place, in the mother tongue environment, forgetfulness is the archenemy if we learn a foreign language through mere imitation. As time passes, students might be fed up with endless repetition and weary of further study. In addition, under the circumstance of big-class teaching, students don't have many chances to practise and the particular instructions from the teacher are limited. Without instant remedy, it is possible that the more language materials they received, the more serious their pronunciation errors turned out to be. Earlier study of phonetic symbols is not expected to put an end to the problem, but at least better than none. What is the proper time to start teaching phonetic symbols, then? By the current situation and the textbook in use, in my opinion, the best time is right after the fourth or fifth unit of JEFC. At this moment, students are supposed to have a relatively good command of alphabet letters. Introduction of phonetic symbols now would not be likely to bring about any trouble. Also, nearly all the phonetic symbols have already appeared in the words of Unit 4 & 5 once or more and the students have had more or less sensibility of pronunciation. By having words and phonetic symbols be complementary to each other, we can get a better result.
III. On what issues should we lay stress in the teaching? Actually, the teaching approaches of phonetic symbols are largely identical but with minor differences. Popular process is probably: individual phonemes — monosyllables (fixed syllables) — disyllables (polysyllables) — words. But there are several issues should be taken into special consideration. ● Never teach individual phonemes much in depth. Phonemes themselves make no sense. Syllables and words are our ultimate goal. Don't spend too much time on phonemes or still worse, impose terminologies like plosives, fricatives, affricates or theories like the movement of pronunciation organs upon the students in hope of helping them master phonetic symbols quickly. These things will by no means do anything helpful. On the contrary, they are too abstract and scholastic to be understood by students and will be taking the edge off their interest. In fact, children have strong aptitude to imitation. What the teacher need to do is telling them necessary tips of pronunciation and they can handle these tips automatically. ● Syllables and words for practice ought to be carefully chosen. It is quite a long process from phonemes to syllables. Statistic made by Jerry Coker demonstrates that even a learner can read out all the phonemes precisely, when it comes to random syllables, the correctness is no more than 44% on an average. Thereby, syllables ought to be chosen mainly from the learned words that are familiar to the students instead of those long and complicated ones for drill before turning to whole words that should also be well known to the students. The teacher writes down the phonetic symbols and let students recognise what the word is. By combining pronunciation, shape and meaning together, the memory of this word intensified. ● Chinese-character-transcription on English words should be treated rightly. As the case stands, the phenomenon is ubiquitous and dies hard among Chinese students. It is generally thought as a devil in language learning which does nothing good but all harm. But I think, it should be looked on from another point of view. As we all know, the greatest interference for a foreign language learner is his mother tongue because all the knowledge he got — including pronunciation, of course — are from his own language. David Dalton noticed that beginners of a target language are inclined to convert almost every sound — especially when it is not clearly received — into the closest sound in the source language and follow it unconsciously. Rod Ellis thought that the L1 could be viewed as a contributing factor to the development of SLA (Second Language Acquisition). As the learner's proficiency of L2 grows, the influence of L1 will become less powerful. At this angle, labelling Chinese characters on English words shouldn't be totally denied because it indicates that the students are willing to acquire English with the help of Chinese. As a teacher, we should first of all explain to them how dangerous and unscientific of doing so, and at the meantime, have some prior expectation of what elements of English phonetics are likely to cause problems in order to prevent these problems from happening or solve them at once. The writer gathered some frequent errors of students for reference only. (See the appendix: List of Common Phonetic Errors from Students)
IV. How long will the learning of phonetic symbols last? According to the second
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