The importance of phonology

OK, so I promised this a while ago, and I've let myself get distracted by a few other points in the interim, but I'll try to draw them in and show how they are related to the teaching of phonology in general.

In my posts 4 skills safe and 3 skills safe, I argued that the division of language teaching into the traditional 4 skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening was trivial, superficial and of very little pedagogic value.  Instead, I suggested that we should look at individual skills of syntax, morphology and phonology, and that we could add orthography as an additional, more abstract skill (Lev Vygotsky described reading and writing as "second-order abstractions").
vowe
Phonology often gets very little attention in the classroom, as it is seen as a sub-skill of speaking, and speaking's "difficult".  But phonology is fundamental to many languages.

If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at my posts In language, there's no such thing as a common error, and Common errors: My mistake!  In the first post I described a particular common error in written English (might of instead of might have, could of instead of could have etc) and in the second I expanded on the mechanisms that cause this "error", with the aim of showing that this wasn't an "error", but in fact a change in grammar, analogous to changes that have occurred in other languages.  What I didn't focus on there, but which is extremely relevant here, is that this change in grammar is pronunciation-led -- ie the phonology of English has caused this change in grammar.  The prosody of English has led to 've being always weak, and it has lost the link to the related strong form have.

And of course the change in the Romance languages that I mentioned in the second post is also led by phonological patterns.  If you look at any language whatsoever, many grammatical rules have arisen from mere matters of pronunciation.

The archetypal example is the English indefinite article -- a/an.  You may well be aware that like most other Indo-European languages in western Europe, this evolved out of the same root as the number one.  But the modern number one is a strong form and has a diphthong.  A/an is a clitic and always weak, so split off (completely analogous to 've and have).  This weak word /ən/ then lost its [n] before consonants, simply because it's easier to say that way, and retained it before vowels again because it's easier to say like that.  (And if you'll indulge a slight digression, that brings us back to would've etc, because you'll often hear woulda before a consonant and would've before a vowel.)

If you look at the Celtic languages, one of the trickiest parts of the grammar is the idea of initial consonant mutations.  Lenition in Modern Irish is a bit inconsistent (probably due to the relatively large number of school-taught speakers against native speakers), but the three mutations in Welsh are fairly systematic, with mutated forms usually only differing from the radical in one "dimension" of pronunciation.

These sorts of rules become very arbitrary and complex when described purely in terms of grammar, whereas when considered physically, they make a lot more sense.

Let's go back to a/an and take a closer look.  We all know the rule: a before a consonant, an before a vowel, right? Wrong! It's actually: a before a consonant phoneme, an before a vowel phoneme.  To see the difference between the two, fill in the following blanks with a or an:

I want __ biscuit.
I need __ explanation.
He is __ honest man.
I have __ university degree.

Now it's not a difficult task for a native speaker, because you wouldn't normally have to think about it: honest may start with the letter H, but you know intuitively that you don't pronounce it, so you write an without thinking.  Similary, university may start with the letter U, but you know intuitively that it starts with a y-glide sound (like "yoo", not "oo"), so you write a.

I have seen quite a few English learners write "an university" or "a honest man" because they are either trying to work from a grammatical rule in isolation from pronunciation, or because they simply pronounce these words wrong.  In the case of honest, the problem is compounded if the student can't pronounce H, because if he follows the rule correctly on paper, he undermines the phonological basis for the true rule.

It follows, then, that we cannot teach grammar without considering phonology.  (And anyone who has succeeded in understanding the French liaison rules can tell you categorically that this is true.)

But how does phonology affect us in other ways?

Phonology and the ease of vocabulary learning

It may seem trivial, but for his PhD thesis, an Australian teacher of Russian demonstrated that it is easier to learn foreign words that are possible in your native language than ones that aren't.  EG the word brobling with first-syllable stress is easy, brobling with second-syllable stress is a bit harder, grtarstlbing with lots of consonant clusters that can't occur in English is very difficult.  He then took a massive leap of logic that I'll examine later in greater depth.

This corresponds with what a lot of teachers believe, but few teachers have the time or patience to implement: that it's easier to teach phonemes one at a time and reuse them in different words.  Again I'll come back to that when I start discussing techniques.

For now, though, I'll simply suggest that it's easier to learn words that are made out of familiar "blocks" than ones that aren't.  It follows from this that good teaching of phonetics (whatever that means) is a prerequisite to vocabulary learning.

Phonotactics: the "crisps" problem

My high school had an exchange programme running with a school in France.  Teenagers are naturally curious beasts, and when my big brother and sister first went on one of these exchanges, the class discovered how funny it was to get the French people to say crisps (UK English for what the French and Americans call chips).  Very few of the French kids could actually pronounce it, because they were using French phonemes with a northern accent (the school was near Lille).  The French P is unaspirated (unlike English) and the French S is quite slender and hissy.  As a combination of sounds, French SPS is difficult, nearly impossible -- the P either gets lost in the hiss or one of the Ses gets cut short.  The English combination is physically much easier.

Similar problems occur in other places.  Spanish people find wants quite difficult to say, because Spanish T is not compatible with Spanish N or S due to the method of articulation.  NTS in Spanish needs the tip of the tongue to be in two different places at once -- the alveolar ridge for N and S and the gumline for T.

The problem is that many books will tell us that T, D, B, P etc are sufficiently similar in English and Spanish, French or whatever that we can use them equivalently, but this is only true for each phoneme in isolation.  Once we start trying to combine them, the differences start to accumulate.

Which brings us back to:

Grammar again - and how writing suffers for it

If you cannot pronounce the inflectional affixes in a language, your grammar suffers.  Many, many Spanish learners of English drop their -s and -ed suffixes because of the problems of incompatible sounds.  They replace it's with is.  These mistakes filter through from their pronunciation into their internal model of grammar and eventually into their writing.  But it's easy to ignore this, because most of the time they correct their own writing mistakes with their declarative knowledge, and on the few occassions where they don't correct it, the teacher simply tells them the rule again, but never attacks the root cause of the problem: if they learned to pronounce English [t] and [d] phonemes, most of the difficult sound combinations would become much, much easier, their internal model of the grammar would be built up to incorporate these non-syllabic morphemes (and there are no non-syllabic morphemes in Spanish as far as I know, so it's a totally new concept to them edit (2-feb-2014): Spanish has at least one non-syllabic morpheme: plural S after a vowel.) and they would write natural based on their procedural knowledge of the grammar..

And finally...
Allophones and comprehension

Apparently there are certain accents that are considered "hard" in some languages. Now I'm not implying that there is no such thing as a hard accent, but I do believe that most of the difficulties stem from the teaching, not from the language.

In Spain, the accent of Madrid is considered quite difficult to understand.  The reason for this is that the madrileño accent tends to lenite (weaken or soften) its non-intervocalic consonants.  The classic is the weaking of D to /ð/ (roughly equivalent to TH of then).  There is little physical similarity between the English D and ð as is clear from their technical descriptions: /d/ - voiced alveolar plosive; /ð/ - voiced dental fricative.  But the Spanish /d/ is a voiced dental plosive, which the description shows is quite similar to /ð/.  Basically, the soft D in Madrid is basically an incomplete hard D -- the tongue doesn't quite go far enough to touch the teeth and stop the sound, but instead it hisses slightly.

Now, if understanding language is a reflective act (as I claim here and here) then we understand sounds by considering what shape our mouths would be in if we were to make the sound we hear (something suggested by the concept of mirror neurons).  The soft and hard Ds in Spanish are not "soundalike" allophones at all, but they have a similar shape, which is different from the English D.  To me it seems clear that physically learning the Spanish hard D shape would result in better comprehension of the similarly shaped soft D in a way that simple hearing it won't accomplish.


Conclusion

All in all, it seems to me that phonology is an intrinsic component of language, and that the system of a language falls apart when phonology is not given the proper support throughout the learning process.

As for how to teach phonology, I have my own views, but I'm currently reading up on some alternative opinions so as to give a more balanced write-up of the options available.

Receptive skills as a reflective act

I'm not feeling my usual self this week.  I've got an infection under a fingernail, so it's a bit sore to type, which makes it hard to concentrate.  It's leading to silly mistakes in everything I do, so I'm going to avoid the complex topic I'd planned to write about this week (phonology) and stick to something a bit less involved.

A couple of weeks ago, in my post 4 skills safe, I suggested that the comprehension of language is a reflective act, that is to say that we understand by considering what would cause us to say the sentence we've just heard or read.

Now, I mentioned mirror neuron theory, and my Dad said to me at the weekend "you'd better have a better explanation than that."  My Dad taught in a high school up until retiring, and one constant throughout his career was that new teaching fashions would always be justified by the latest idea from psychology, but that it was all theory, no practice.

Now I can't offer anything in the way of empirical research, only anecdote.  Hopefully, though, the anecdotes that I offer will be universal enough that other teachers will see the same phenomena occurring in their own students.

Let's just briefly revisit what I said last time (minus the bit about mirror neurons):

• People often finish each other's sentences. To do so they must be actively constructing the utterance as they go.
• People often mistakenly say that they've said something, when actually it was someone else who said it, and they only heard it. So we identify very closely with sentences we hear (and agree with), suggesting a very close link between the mental process behind listening and that of speaking.
• There exists a (fairly harmless) neurological disorder which causes someone's lip to tremble when they're being spoken to, and they often echo the last word of your sentences (often suffixed with "uh-huh" for assent). For these people merely listening activates the physical speech organs.

 OK, so now let's move to anecdote.

Last night, I was at a language exchange (Spanish and English).  I was talking to a young woman called Cristina who I've spoken to on several occasions.  At one point she was concentrating so hard on what I was saying (in English) that she actually started mouthing the words.  Not the trembling lip of the neurological condition I mentioned before, she was literally mouthing the words.  It was a conscious act.

Now let's contrast this with reading, because I think reading aloud offers the best indication of language as reflection.

The first time I really noticed this was with a student in San Sebastian back in 2007.  Most of his peers read robotically when asked to read aloud -- What - I - Mean - Is - That -They - Would - Pronounce - Each - Word - Dist - inc - tly - And - Careful - ly.  This guy was different.  He spoke with natural flow and good intonation... but he didn't read what was on the page.  Specifically, he got his prepositions wrong.  Not wrong in a random way, though -- he simply substituted the preposition he would use for the word on the page.

Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone -- studies of native language reading have established that most prepositions (and in fact many function words) aren't actually "read" by fluent readers.  Instead, the brain simply notices a "small word" and works it out from the context.

I've since seen multiple variations on this theme -- I had one student who kept reading "attitude" as the Spanish "actitud" with the English stress pattern imposed on it ("áctitud" or "acteetood", more or less), and one who adds an S to "sort of thing", to match the pluralisation of the Spanish phrase "tipo de cosas".

But this is reading, and as I said last week, that's not a core language skill (incidentally, since then I've found that Lev Vygotsky described speaking and reading as "second-order abstractions" -- I wish I'd had that quote when I wrote the post).  However, it does demonstrate how much preconceptions can affect our perceptions.

So will this hold in the spoken mode?

First, consider that language generally has a high degree of redundancy.  Even if a noise obscures part of a sentence, you often still manage to understand the sentence.  If you compare "attitude" with "áctitud", in my accent there are three perceptible differences: English has the C, the schwa in the middle syllable (possibly i-schwa), and the Y-glide in the final syllable.  In many accents (mostly American), there isn't even a Y-glide, so there's only two differences.  There is no other word that similar, so the "filter of perception" will probably let it through without really caring about the differences.

The same goes for the "sort of things".  If a Spanish person understands me when I say "sort of thing", I cannot take it as granted that he perceived it without an erroneous final S.  His brain may simply have assumed it is missing.  This is a particular issue for Spanish, as in some dialects, a final -S may be dropped completely*, so it would be very easy for a Spanish speaker to percieve the word "thing" as "things" if context suggested this.

What are the consequences for the teacher or learner?

Assuming this is true (and I accept that many readers will believe otherwise), the consequences are pretty profound.  If our perception of received input is altered to match our existing internal model of language, then no amount of input alone will lead to perfection in a language.  The internal model can only be rebuilt by some directed process.

The success of some students in "silent period"-style environments doesn't disprove this - such a student may well have succeeded through an active analysis of the input, rather than simply through the sheer volume of input.


* This is less common than many Spanish speakers think.  Most "dropped Ses" are in fact [s] phonemes realised by an aspirant allophone (/h/) or a hiatus.  And here again the filter of perception comes into play -- there is no [h] phoneme in Spanish, so even some native speakers don't seem to notice the /h/ sound in something like "rastos" (=rahhtohh) and appear unable to distinguish it from "rato"