Well intentioned people often insist on trying to pronounce placenames in the "authentic" native form, even when there's a well-known variation in their own language.
At times, that change is remarkably successful, such as the change of "Peking" to "Beijing". There is an argument that this is futile, however, as the Chinese phonemes are rarely that close to English ones, and the tones of the Chinese are completely absent.
About a fortnight ago, the TV was marking the 70th anniversary of the brutal slaughter of the people of Hiroshima.
Now, most of us say "hiROshima", but a few people say "HEEroSHEEma". I thought about it a bit, and I figured that the first one is probably right, as the second one sounds like two words. I then looked up on the internet, and felt a bit sheepish when I read that the name means "wide island" in Japanese. Two words? Oh. But then I brought up Forvo and nope -- it's pronounced as one word.
So why do we end up with two forms in English?
It's all about perception. There are multiple things that you might detect. First up, there's word stress. In Japanese, Hiroshima is stressed on the second syllable, which is how I pronounce it in English. However, a knock-on effect of English stress is that adjacent syllables are weakened, so the Is are both I-schwa in English. However, in Japanese, vowels are generally clear, and vowel reduction is a matter of length, not vowel quality.
When the English speaker's ear hears Hiroshima, it either notes the correct stress, and fails to perceive the "EE" sounds, or it hears the EE sounds and fails to perceive the correct stress.
Which of these is further from the original? From an English speaker's perspective, it's impossible to say -- you need to make reference to the original language. I do not know for sure, but as Japanese has far fewer vowels than English, I would imagine hiROshima is readily recognised for the intended meaning, and that HEEroSHEEma would be pretty hard to process.
So it's a bit of a fool's errand trying to be "authentic", in my book.
Showing posts with label phonology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phonology. Show all posts
05 November 2012
New languages, and new views on old ones....
I had a bit of a realisation this morning about English, and it's all thanks to Corsican. Corsican tends to weaken certain vowels when they're unstressed. So marking the stressed vowel with bold type, "accende" (the infinitive to light or enflame) becomes "accindite" (present, 2nd person plural). And this happens with almost all Es. Almost. Note the unstressed E at the end of both accende and accindite. But these unstressed Es only seem to occur where they have a specific grammatical purpose -- as far as I can tell any other E becomes I.
Now in certain parts these vowel "mutations" don't occur, but the majority dialects tend to do it. The odd thing, then, is that vowel mutation happens even though speakers of the language are evidently capable of saying the "forbidden" sound. Why not say it if you can?
Well, somewhere along the line, I started thinking about English, and in particular the prefixes pre- and re-.
There's two pronunciations for each: one with schwa and one with /i/. The schwa occurs wherever the syllable has no stress, normally adjacent to the primary stressed syllable -- eg "report", "reply" -- and the /ri/ pronunciation when it has secondary stress. So that's an "ee" sound, like a Corsican "I". It never seems to have an "eh" sound, like a Corsican "E".
And no matter how much I try to, I can't think of a single word in English with the "eh" of "pedal" and "petal" anywhere but in the position of primary stress.
Unless your American, in which case it occurs everywhere.
And that's what I'd never noticed before -- I always thought of the US "reh"-produce as though it was something specific to the re- prefix, but it's a bit more fundamental than that, isn't it...?
Now in certain parts these vowel "mutations" don't occur, but the majority dialects tend to do it. The odd thing, then, is that vowel mutation happens even though speakers of the language are evidently capable of saying the "forbidden" sound. Why not say it if you can?
Well, somewhere along the line, I started thinking about English, and in particular the prefixes pre- and re-.
There's two pronunciations for each: one with schwa and one with /i/. The schwa occurs wherever the syllable has no stress, normally adjacent to the primary stressed syllable -- eg "report", "reply" -- and the /ri/ pronunciation when it has secondary stress. So that's an "ee" sound, like a Corsican "I". It never seems to have an "eh" sound, like a Corsican "E".
And no matter how much I try to, I can't think of a single word in English with the "eh" of "pedal" and "petal" anywhere but in the position of primary stress.
Unless your American, in which case it occurs everywhere.
And that's what I'd never noticed before -- I always thought of the US "reh"-produce as though it was something specific to the re- prefix, but it's a bit more fundamental than that, isn't it...?
14 August 2011
Phonology -- whats and hows part II
Last time, I wrote about phonology and the necessity of physically training the tongue to produce new sounds. However, as I pointed out, not all new phonemes require new physical skills. Can we pick these up just by listening? I think not, and I'd be happy to tell you how.
Meaningful sounds
The problem that I'm always trying to stress is that the brain is only interested in meaningful input -- if something has no meaning, the brain isn't interested.
This leads to some striking (and often unexpected) results. The BBC documentary Horizon showed this with colours in the programme Do You See What I See? (UK only). In the program, you see several Himba tribespeople trying to pick out different colours on a computer screen. The show two tests -- one with a very slightly different green, which is difficult for the viewer and fairly easy for the Himba, and one with an obviously different colour... well, obvious to us, but not to the Himba.
The distinctions that the Himba find easy are ones that they have names for, and the distinctions we find easy are the ones we have names for. It would appear that the act of naming something focuses the consciousness on it, so if you tell me that a French P has a puffy sound, I'm more likely to notice it, because I know what I'm looking for.
Consider the old face/vase optical illusion: the first time you look at it, you see either the faces or the vase, and your brain fixates on that single image. If someone else tells you about the other picture, you struggle to see it at first, because your brain already sees something meaningful in the image. But once your brain finally sees the second image, you can change your mental focus between the two meaningful images at will.
But that example doesn't say much about subjectivity and objectivity, because the two objects are fairly arbitrary. A better example would be one where you can predict what the viewer will see based on simple demographic information. Maybe adults vs children, like this painting, where adults immediately see a particular image and children see a different one. (View the picture, and then read the explanation on the page. I saw the second picture without reading the explanation, but only because I could understand the French label on the bottle....)
So what is meaningful to us is normally a matter of past experience and expectation. When it comes to meaningful sounds, past experience and expectation all comes from the languages we already speak. So it would follow that we need to consciously draw the student's attention to the differences, or they're just not likely to notice them.
What do we need to draw their attention to?
The phoneme is not the minimal unit of sound
The phoneme is often mistakenly considered the atomic unit of pronunciation in a language, but most languages build their phonemes out of a series of distinctions, in a fairly systematic manner.
In English, for example, we have voicing of consonants as a distinction, and it occurs pretty much wherever it can. Voicing is the difference between P & B (at the front of the mouth), T & D (in the middle) and C/K & G (at the back). We also have nasalisation, which takes those three pairs and gives us the sounds M, N and NG. It's a stable and systematic structure.
There are other languages (EG Gaelic) where the distinction between P & B is not one of voicing, but aspiration. The same distinction carries through for P&B and T&D. In fact, it's hard to find any language that has a voicing distinction on one of those pairs, but makes a distinction in aspiration -- in general, the same distinction carries through.
Polish gives a great example of how regular these consonant distinctions can be.
In the diagram above, you can see a clear structure uniting 12 sounds in 3 distinctions (two 2-way distinctions, one 3-way distinction). It's almost entirely systematic -- this cannot happen by accident, so we must assume that the native speaker's internal model of language acts on the level of these distinctions.
For this reason, I believe that it is not enough to draw the learner's attention to an individual phoneme, but that we must teach them the individual distinctions.
This doesn't have to be done in a dry "linguistics" way, though.
Teach once, then repeat
When teaching a phonemic distinction like voicing or aspiration, you don't need to start with the idea in the abstract. Instead, you can start by teaching the pronunciation of one letter, then its contrast (eg P first, then B). In teaching the contrast, you pick a word that describes it ("puffiness" or "breathiness" is more meaningful than "aspiration") or you just describe it. Then when you move onto the next pair (T,D), you can refer back to the first pair, because it's the same difference. And once you get to the final pair (K,G), it'll be very easy to do.
Of course, this means that you have to restrict the number of phonemes to start off with, but there are many people who are theoretically in favour of gradually introducing phonemes -- it's just the order of material that messes them up.
Teaching one thing at a time
Most teachers like to start with seemingly useful words and phrases. Hello, how are you, goodbye -- that sort of thing. This takes away the teacher's control over the phonemes -- teachers don't choose them, they just use whichever ones pop up.
Worse, quite a lot of teachers will introduce numbers early on, and in many languages you'll have encountered half of the phonemes of the language by the time you reach ten. (This probably isn't an accident -- ambiguity in numbers would be a problem, so they naturally evolve to be fairly different.)
One commercial course points out this problem, and suggests that the way round it is to teach numbers one at a time, in a way which supports a progressive increase in the number of phonemes. The example they used was 10 and 100 in Spanish: diez and cien. These two words share all but one phoneme (C before I or E is pronounced the same as Z in Spanish), so if you teach one then the other, you're only introducing one phoneme the second time round.
(I think I remember which course this was, but the blurb on the website no longer mentions this, so I'm not going to link to it.)
And after all, why should we teach numbers in numerical order in a second language? When teaching children numbers in their first language, we're teaching both the concepts and the words, but in a second language you're only teaching the words, because they've already got the appropriate concepts to peg them to. We can now selectively use any of those pegs we want to, in any order we want to.
Putting it together
So if we teach a couple of consonants well, and then we introduce new consonants one by one, we can use the earlier consonants as an anchor to show repeated distinctions. It doesn't matter whether the student can consciously remember what those distinctions were -- a native speaker normally wouldn't have a clue. What matters is that the model the student uses automatically for pronunciation implicitly respects the consistent rules of the language.
This will not happen if the student is left to listen, because one misheard phoneme can threaten the integrity of the entire structure -- pull any one of the sounds out of my neat little Polish diagram and dump it somewhere else and the whole thing will collapse.
Next time
Previously I spoke about sounds as new muscle movements, today I spoke about simply the meaning of sounds. Next time, I'd like to demonstrate how almost all new sounds really are new physical movements anyway.
Last time, I wrote about phonology and the necessity of physically training the tongue to produce new sounds. However, as I pointed out, not all new phonemes require new physical skills. Can we pick these up just by listening? I think not, and I'd be happy to tell you how.
Meaningful sounds
The problem that I'm always trying to stress is that the brain is only interested in meaningful input -- if something has no meaning, the brain isn't interested.
This leads to some striking (and often unexpected) results. The BBC documentary Horizon showed this with colours in the programme Do You See What I See? (UK only). In the program, you see several Himba tribespeople trying to pick out different colours on a computer screen. The show two tests -- one with a very slightly different green, which is difficult for the viewer and fairly easy for the Himba, and one with an obviously different colour... well, obvious to us, but not to the Himba.
The distinctions that the Himba find easy are ones that they have names for, and the distinctions we find easy are the ones we have names for. It would appear that the act of naming something focuses the consciousness on it, so if you tell me that a French P has a puffy sound, I'm more likely to notice it, because I know what I'm looking for.
Consider the old face/vase optical illusion: the first time you look at it, you see either the faces or the vase, and your brain fixates on that single image. If someone else tells you about the other picture, you struggle to see it at first, because your brain already sees something meaningful in the image. But once your brain finally sees the second image, you can change your mental focus between the two meaningful images at will.
But that example doesn't say much about subjectivity and objectivity, because the two objects are fairly arbitrary. A better example would be one where you can predict what the viewer will see based on simple demographic information. Maybe adults vs children, like this painting, where adults immediately see a particular image and children see a different one. (View the picture, and then read the explanation on the page. I saw the second picture without reading the explanation, but only because I could understand the French label on the bottle....)
So what is meaningful to us is normally a matter of past experience and expectation. When it comes to meaningful sounds, past experience and expectation all comes from the languages we already speak. So it would follow that we need to consciously draw the student's attention to the differences, or they're just not likely to notice them.
What do we need to draw their attention to?
The phoneme is not the minimal unit of sound
The phoneme is often mistakenly considered the atomic unit of pronunciation in a language, but most languages build their phonemes out of a series of distinctions, in a fairly systematic manner.
In English, for example, we have voicing of consonants as a distinction, and it occurs pretty much wherever it can. Voicing is the difference between P & B (at the front of the mouth), T & D (in the middle) and C/K & G (at the back). We also have nasalisation, which takes those three pairs and gives us the sounds M, N and NG. It's a stable and systematic structure.
There are other languages (EG Gaelic) where the distinction between P & B is not one of voicing, but aspiration. The same distinction carries through for P&B and T&D. In fact, it's hard to find any language that has a voicing distinction on one of those pairs, but makes a distinction in aspiration -- in general, the same distinction carries through.
Polish gives a great example of how regular these consonant distinctions can be.
For this reason, I believe that it is not enough to draw the learner's attention to an individual phoneme, but that we must teach them the individual distinctions.
This doesn't have to be done in a dry "linguistics" way, though.
Teach once, then repeat
When teaching a phonemic distinction like voicing or aspiration, you don't need to start with the idea in the abstract. Instead, you can start by teaching the pronunciation of one letter, then its contrast (eg P first, then B). In teaching the contrast, you pick a word that describes it ("puffiness" or "breathiness" is more meaningful than "aspiration") or you just describe it. Then when you move onto the next pair (T,D), you can refer back to the first pair, because it's the same difference. And once you get to the final pair (K,G), it'll be very easy to do.
Of course, this means that you have to restrict the number of phonemes to start off with, but there are many people who are theoretically in favour of gradually introducing phonemes -- it's just the order of material that messes them up.
Teaching one thing at a time
Most teachers like to start with seemingly useful words and phrases. Hello, how are you, goodbye -- that sort of thing. This takes away the teacher's control over the phonemes -- teachers don't choose them, they just use whichever ones pop up.
Worse, quite a lot of teachers will introduce numbers early on, and in many languages you'll have encountered half of the phonemes of the language by the time you reach ten. (This probably isn't an accident -- ambiguity in numbers would be a problem, so they naturally evolve to be fairly different.)
One commercial course points out this problem, and suggests that the way round it is to teach numbers one at a time, in a way which supports a progressive increase in the number of phonemes. The example they used was 10 and 100 in Spanish: diez and cien. These two words share all but one phoneme (C before I or E is pronounced the same as Z in Spanish), so if you teach one then the other, you're only introducing one phoneme the second time round.
(I think I remember which course this was, but the blurb on the website no longer mentions this, so I'm not going to link to it.)
And after all, why should we teach numbers in numerical order in a second language? When teaching children numbers in their first language, we're teaching both the concepts and the words, but in a second language you're only teaching the words, because they've already got the appropriate concepts to peg them to. We can now selectively use any of those pegs we want to, in any order we want to.
Putting it together
So if we teach a couple of consonants well, and then we introduce new consonants one by one, we can use the earlier consonants as an anchor to show repeated distinctions. It doesn't matter whether the student can consciously remember what those distinctions were -- a native speaker normally wouldn't have a clue. What matters is that the model the student uses automatically for pronunciation implicitly respects the consistent rules of the language.
This will not happen if the student is left to listen, because one misheard phoneme can threaten the integrity of the entire structure -- pull any one of the sounds out of my neat little Polish diagram and dump it somewhere else and the whole thing will collapse.
Next time
Previously I spoke about sounds as new muscle movements, today I spoke about simply the meaning of sounds. Next time, I'd like to demonstrate how almost all new sounds really are new physical movements anyway.
10 August 2011
Phonology -- whats and hows
A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the importance of phonology, trying to demonstrate why it should be consciously dealt with in the teaching/learning process, but I took the decision not to include any comments on how to teach it in that article. Basically, I didn't want to give anyone any grounds to reject my argument out-of-hand. In this post, I'd like to cover how I believe it should be taught, but remember that this, the how, doesn't affect my argument on the importance, the why. Reject my methods if you want, but please don't reject phonology as an area of study.
So, what did I establish in the previous post?
Can we learn pronunciation from listening?
Some even argue that we learn pronunciation from hearing (and they sometimes add "just like children"). However, as I tried to demonstrate in my recent post receptive skills as a reflective act, there is good reason to believe that we understand language by comparison to our own internal model of the language. In the follow-up post, I gave a concrete example of mishearing a word on Italian radio, and how my flawed internal model was good enough to understand the message without perceiving every sound.
OK, so that's anecdotal and doesn't prove a general case, but ask yourself this: how many different accents can you understand in your own language? And how many of those accents can you speak in?
So you can see that simple exposure hasn't given you extra accents. As I said above, accent is not phonology. But our brains have learned to ignore accental differences (to an extent) to enable us to understand the widest possible number of people around us. So if our brain assumes a different phonology is just a different accent, it throws away all the information you're supposed to be learning from.
So I really don't believe it's possible to learn from "just listening", no matter how much you do.
Motherese and exaggeration
Here's the outcome of an interesting study (YouTube video). It turns out that when we teach kids to speak, we don't expect them to learn from natural speech, but we exaggerate our phonemes, effectively making them "more real than real" or "whiter than white". And if you think about it, isn't this what we do when speaking to foreigners or people with a very different accent from ours?
The point is that we have to make the differences clear and noticeable, so that one phoneme doesn't blend into another.
I would suggest that this points towards the right answer in language teaching to adults: if even children (who have no preconceptions of what a phoneme is) need extra emphasis to understand the difference between similar phonemes, then us adults (who are biased towards our native language's phonology) really could do with a bit of help. The brain has to be told that this new information is useful, or it will throw it all away.
Exaggeration of pronunciation appears to help the listener notice the differences.
Learning pronunciation through pronouncing
However, we learn to dance by dancing, and we learn to drive by driving. In both cases we can pick up a few hints and tips from watching, but we need a heck of a lot of practice. Why shouldn't this be the case with language?
People are very quick to tell me that language is different from every other skill. That is a valid opinion, but it is still only an opinion - no-one has ever presented anything to me that demonstrates it to be true, or even likely. Right now, it's just a theory... and it's one I do not believe.
To me, pronunciation is a muscle skill. Let's consider some of the extremes sounds that don't occur in English.
Take retroflex consonants. Retro - backwards; flex - bend. In retroflex consonants, your tongue bends backwards, and the tip goes behind the alveolar ridge. This type of sound doesn't occur in English, so a monolingual English-speaker will probably never produce this sound in his life. If you ask such a person to put their tongue into that position, they won't be able to -- their tongue just can't bend that way.
But then your average person couldn't do yoga postures on a first attempt either -- the yoga teacher will lead them through some simple postures and exercises to encourage the muscles to stretch and strengthen appropriately until they are capable of performing the required movements.
The brain doesn't prepare the muscles just because you've seen the movements; the body prepares the muscles once you've started doing the movements. Your brain similarly cannot train the tongue as it's just another muscle, after all -- only the body can do that.
So clearly, there are certain sounds that must be taught consciously, or the learner won't physically be able to say it. But obviously there are also sounds that the learner is physically capable of saying, but isn't in the habit of saying.
This post is starting to get a bit on the long side, so I'll come back to the question of this second category of sounds next time.
How I learned to pronounce retroflex consonants
I had a notion to learn a few words in various Indian languages a few years ago when I was working in IT support. Our front-line helpdesk was in India and I wanted to try to build a better rapport with my coworkers.
One of the sources I used stated quite plainly that while languages like French and Spanish let you get away with "close enough" pronunciation (not entirely true...) with Hindi, you would simply not be understood if you spoke in an English-speaker's accent. It described the retroflex articulation and what I did was to start doing a regime of "tongue stretches" -- as I walked to and from work, I would tap my tongue continually off the roof of my mouth, and move it slowly backwards and forwards, to create a sort of silent T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t or D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Every day I could reach slightly further back, and in about a week and a half I was able to produce a convincingly Hindi-like retroflex for all of the various consonants (except R, cos that's really quite complicated). I was curious about how far I could go, and within another few days I'd got to the point where I could touch the tip of my tongue to my soft palate.
So certain sounds need to be learned physically, and it's something that can be done. Next time, I'll start looking at sounds that are more a matter of habit, and showing that the boundary between "habit" and "ability" isn't always that clear.
A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the importance of phonology, trying to demonstrate why it should be consciously dealt with in the teaching/learning process, but I took the decision not to include any comments on how to teach it in that article. Basically, I didn't want to give anyone any grounds to reject my argument out-of-hand. In this post, I'd like to cover how I believe it should be taught, but remember that this, the how, doesn't affect my argument on the importance, the why. Reject my methods if you want, but please don't reject phonology as an area of study.
So, what did I establish in the previous post?
- Incorrect pronunciation of an individual phoneme leads to problems in pronouncing clusters with that phoneme.
- Problems in pronouncing certain sequences of phonemes lead to grammatical errors.
- That vocabulary is harder to learn when you're not familiar with the rules of pronunciation in a language.
- That not understanding target language phoneme boundaries makes it hard to understand native speakers.
- That sounds that the learner drops in speech are often matched by a dropping of the corresponding letters in writing.
Can we learn pronunciation from listening?
Some even argue that we learn pronunciation from hearing (and they sometimes add "just like children"). However, as I tried to demonstrate in my recent post receptive skills as a reflective act, there is good reason to believe that we understand language by comparison to our own internal model of the language. In the follow-up post, I gave a concrete example of mishearing a word on Italian radio, and how my flawed internal model was good enough to understand the message without perceiving every sound.
OK, so that's anecdotal and doesn't prove a general case, but ask yourself this: how many different accents can you understand in your own language? And how many of those accents can you speak in?
So you can see that simple exposure hasn't given you extra accents. As I said above, accent is not phonology. But our brains have learned to ignore accental differences (to an extent) to enable us to understand the widest possible number of people around us. So if our brain assumes a different phonology is just a different accent, it throws away all the information you're supposed to be learning from.
So I really don't believe it's possible to learn from "just listening", no matter how much you do.
Motherese and exaggeration
Here's the outcome of an interesting study (YouTube video). It turns out that when we teach kids to speak, we don't expect them to learn from natural speech, but we exaggerate our phonemes, effectively making them "more real than real" or "whiter than white". And if you think about it, isn't this what we do when speaking to foreigners or people with a very different accent from ours?
The point is that we have to make the differences clear and noticeable, so that one phoneme doesn't blend into another.
I would suggest that this points towards the right answer in language teaching to adults: if even children (who have no preconceptions of what a phoneme is) need extra emphasis to understand the difference between similar phonemes, then us adults (who are biased towards our native language's phonology) really could do with a bit of help. The brain has to be told that this new information is useful, or it will throw it all away.
Exaggeration of pronunciation appears to help the listener notice the differences.
Learning pronunciation through pronouncing
However, we learn to dance by dancing, and we learn to drive by driving. In both cases we can pick up a few hints and tips from watching, but we need a heck of a lot of practice. Why shouldn't this be the case with language?
People are very quick to tell me that language is different from every other skill. That is a valid opinion, but it is still only an opinion - no-one has ever presented anything to me that demonstrates it to be true, or even likely. Right now, it's just a theory... and it's one I do not believe.
To me, pronunciation is a muscle skill. Let's consider some of the extremes sounds that don't occur in English.
Take retroflex consonants. Retro - backwards; flex - bend. In retroflex consonants, your tongue bends backwards, and the tip goes behind the alveolar ridge. This type of sound doesn't occur in English, so a monolingual English-speaker will probably never produce this sound in his life. If you ask such a person to put their tongue into that position, they won't be able to -- their tongue just can't bend that way.
But then your average person couldn't do yoga postures on a first attempt either -- the yoga teacher will lead them through some simple postures and exercises to encourage the muscles to stretch and strengthen appropriately until they are capable of performing the required movements.
The brain doesn't prepare the muscles just because you've seen the movements; the body prepares the muscles once you've started doing the movements. Your brain similarly cannot train the tongue as it's just another muscle, after all -- only the body can do that.
So clearly, there are certain sounds that must be taught consciously, or the learner won't physically be able to say it. But obviously there are also sounds that the learner is physically capable of saying, but isn't in the habit of saying.
This post is starting to get a bit on the long side, so I'll come back to the question of this second category of sounds next time.
How I learned to pronounce retroflex consonants
I had a notion to learn a few words in various Indian languages a few years ago when I was working in IT support. Our front-line helpdesk was in India and I wanted to try to build a better rapport with my coworkers.
One of the sources I used stated quite plainly that while languages like French and Spanish let you get away with "close enough" pronunciation (not entirely true...) with Hindi, you would simply not be understood if you spoke in an English-speaker's accent. It described the retroflex articulation and what I did was to start doing a regime of "tongue stretches" -- as I walked to and from work, I would tap my tongue continually off the roof of my mouth, and move it slowly backwards and forwards, to create a sort of silent T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t or D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. Every day I could reach slightly further back, and in about a week and a half I was able to produce a convincingly Hindi-like retroflex for all of the various consonants (except R, cos that's really quite complicated). I was curious about how far I could go, and within another few days I'd got to the point where I could touch the tip of my tongue to my soft palate.
So certain sounds need to be learned physically, and it's something that can be done. Next time, I'll start looking at sounds that are more a matter of habit, and showing that the boundary between "habit" and "ability" isn't always that clear.
29 July 2011
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 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.
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.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 need __ explanation.
He is __ honest man.
I have __ university degree.
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 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.
24 July 2011
Another example of language as a reflective act
On Thursday I was maybe even more unfocused than usual, thanks to a very sore hand, but I hope I made a clear enough point.
I tried to show that when we recieve language, our perception is affected by what we expect to hear. Unfortunately I only had examples from the written mode, because it's impossible to see into someone else's head and hear their perception of spoken language.
Well, chance has smiled upon me and given me a spoken example just in the nick of time. I've often regretted not getting good at Italian -- it's a language I feel like I should know already, but it's so difficult for me to use it at full speed. I decided recently that I should dedicate a bit more time to it.
And so it happened that this morning I was listening to an Italian radio station on-line, and not understanding hellish much of it, but catching the odd word. One word I heard was obviamente... but there's no such word in Italian! The guy on the radio had actually said ovviamente, and on a pure physical sound level that is what I heard, but my immediate subconscious reaction was to here the more familiar BV consonant cluster -- ovviamente is Italian for obviously, after all.
This presumably worked so smoothly because of Italian's consonant gemination -- consonants written double are lengthened. This doesn't happen in English, so it makes no automatic sense to my brain. It also meant that there was time in the word for the B that my brain felt was missing.
My brain altered the received input to give perceived input that matched my internal model, so I have to work on improving the internal model rather then simply receiving more input.
On Thursday I was maybe even more unfocused than usual, thanks to a very sore hand, but I hope I made a clear enough point.
I tried to show that when we recieve language, our perception is affected by what we expect to hear. Unfortunately I only had examples from the written mode, because it's impossible to see into someone else's head and hear their perception of spoken language.
Well, chance has smiled upon me and given me a spoken example just in the nick of time. I've often regretted not getting good at Italian -- it's a language I feel like I should know already, but it's so difficult for me to use it at full speed. I decided recently that I should dedicate a bit more time to it.
And so it happened that this morning I was listening to an Italian radio station on-line, and not understanding hellish much of it, but catching the odd word. One word I heard was obviamente... but there's no such word in Italian! The guy on the radio had actually said ovviamente, and on a pure physical sound level that is what I heard, but my immediate subconscious reaction was to here the more familiar BV consonant cluster -- ovviamente is Italian for obviously, after all.
This presumably worked so smoothly because of Italian's consonant gemination -- consonants written double are lengthened. This doesn't happen in English, so it makes no automatic sense to my brain. It also meant that there was time in the word for the B that my brain felt was missing.
My brain altered the received input to give perceived input that matched my internal model, so I have to work on improving the internal model rather then simply receiving more input.
14 July 2011
3 Skills Safe
Last week, I discussed the traditional "4 skills" of language teaching: speaking, listening, reading and writing. I presented a different set of four skills: syntax, morphology, phonology and orthography. I then set about showing why the skill of syntax demonstrates the problems caused by the traditional model, and then went into a quite extreme theory expanding on this. This time, I'm going to focus on orthography and phonology.
Actually, I lied first time round. I said:
Centuries ago, people couldn't read quietly. According to QI and my good friend the internet, there is a historical record of the first man known to be able to read without moving his lips: Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397AD). Nowadays, it's not a particularly notable skill -- in fact, we use the idea of not being able to read without moving your lips as a way of insulting someone's intelligence. Most people today would swear that when they read, their brains are silent. Neurolinguists suggest otherwise.
Modern brain scanners are incredibly sensitive machines that can detect activity in any part of the brain, and last I'd heard, no-one had been found whose auditory functions weren't activated by reading -- ie. all reading seems to be translated into sound in order to be understood, whether we're aware of it or not.
And that is why this post is called 3 Skills Safe: because language is composed of 3 core skills: syntax, morphology and phonology. Orthography is something we're all born with the ability to learn, but in some weird way it appears to be an adjunct to language, something we add on top.
But what about sign language? I hear you cry. Very few people consider sign language as a form of writing, but rather as a form of speaking. Many respected language scientists now believe that the first human language was a gestural (sign) language, not a spoken language. In fact, the work of V S Ramachandran suggests that even spoken language is gestural in nature, and sound is merely the medium of transmission for that gesture. As a theory, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It all revolves around the so-called "mirror neuron" -- a mechanism in the brain that takes observations and turns them into experience. So we hear a sound and our brain understands it by recreating mentally how and why we ourselves would have produced that sound. This would explain the crossover between speaking and listening that I highlighted last week and it has some very profound consequences for the teaching of phonology, which I'll spend more time on soon.
But if phonology is about shape, why use a term derived from the Greek for sound? Well, simply put, it's the established term. Perhaps someone will make a new name for it in the future, but right now we're stuck with the words people use. But phonology is not restricted to the spoken medium, and interestingly enough, "orthography" is similarly not restricted to its usual visual medium. There is Braille, of course, but more interesting than that is the audio channel.
Though massively outdated now, telegraphy revolutionised global communication. The vital components in this global engine were the telegraphers, who relayed messages via Morse code. While they were working mostly through the medium of sound, the code was still denoting letters, not phonemes. An expert coder would have no problem even with the phonetic irregularities of English, such as the famous "rough, cough, bough, through" example. We can only conclude that they must have been "reading" through their ears.
Reading and writing therefore cannot be considered independent of speaking and listening. They are not separate "skills" but something that is built on top of spoken skills. Which means that before you start teaching reading and writing, you must ensure you have something to build on!
What happens if you don't?
Well, the learner builds on something else -- either an arbitrary pattern or on their first language. Case in point: many English speakers have problems with the "3 Es" of French: E, É, È. You will hear even some advanced students asking "Does this E have an accent? Which one?" But this is a regular feature of French: each refers to a distinct sound. By starting from the written form and almost invariably picking the "e" of English "pet", the learner has not built a proper representation of French phonemes and they've all merged into one. With only one sound behind all three forms of E, the choice of accent seems arbitrary and is difficult to remember. But to someone who has learnt from phonology, the correct accent is a matter of second nature.
Note that I said "someone who has learnt from phonology", not "someone who has learned by listening", because the two are not the same. People can also fail to notice phonemic differences when listening -- phonology must be taught explicitly. The irony is that after everything I've said, in some languages (Spanish, but not Chinese, for example) orthography can actually be a useful tool in teaching phonology... but that path is rather convoluted so we'll avoid going down it today and leave it for another time.
An anecdote from personal experience
I've held the above beliefs for a good few years now, but it wasn't until I started trying out LiveMocha's Polish course that the reality hit home.
My Polish is pretty basic, but I do know how the orthography works. I understand the non-palatised/alveolar-palatal/retroflex distinction in the main consonants, I know how it's written and I know how to pronounce it. And yet...
LiveMocha's speaking practice exercises ask you to read out a script. And I kept making silly mistakes. For example, I kept pronouncing C as /k/, rather than the correct /ts/. I put the stress in the 3rd-to-last syllable sometimes, or the last syllable sometimes. Why? Well although I "know" the rules of Polish sound, I'm not really comfortable with them yet. Reading pushed me beyond my level of ability, and I fell back on the systems of other languages.
Conclusion and consequences
I suggested previously that an apparent better ability in the written mode than in the spoken mode was a sign that the learner was using inappropriate and untransferrable strategies in the written mode, which means that the common learner situation of having a higher ability in the written mode than the spoken mode is actually a disordered state and consequently leads to long-term difficulties.
Today, I've tried to give another reason why this is such a disordered state, by showing that the written mode isn't pure language, but rather a layer of abstraction added on top of the language, and you can't build on a foundation that hasn't been laid yet.
Now let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone should be better at listening than at reading (this is something I plan to discuss in my next article, on phonology), but simply that a beginner has an urgent need to develop performance in the spoken mode. I'm not even saying that all new vocabulary should be presented in the spoken mode. No, if the vocabulary is built on phonemes that the student knows and has rehearsed sufficiently, and the orthography is regular enough, it's not a problem. But introducing new phonemes in the written mode is just mental. The student will learn to read them, but he will have to construct his own phonology underneath that orthography, and that will almost certainly be wrong.
Actually, I lied first time round. I said:
two of the skills are common to both the spoken and the written mode.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, three of the skills are common to both the spoken and written mode.
Centuries ago, people couldn't read quietly. According to QI and my good friend the internet, there is a historical record of the first man known to be able to read without moving his lips: Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397AD). Nowadays, it's not a particularly notable skill -- in fact, we use the idea of not being able to read without moving your lips as a way of insulting someone's intelligence. Most people today would swear that when they read, their brains are silent. Neurolinguists suggest otherwise.
Modern brain scanners are incredibly sensitive machines that can detect activity in any part of the brain, and last I'd heard, no-one had been found whose auditory functions weren't activated by reading -- ie. all reading seems to be translated into sound in order to be understood, whether we're aware of it or not.
And that is why this post is called 3 Skills Safe: because language is composed of 3 core skills: syntax, morphology and phonology. Orthography is something we're all born with the ability to learn, but in some weird way it appears to be an adjunct to language, something we add on top.
But what about sign language? I hear you cry. Very few people consider sign language as a form of writing, but rather as a form of speaking. Many respected language scientists now believe that the first human language was a gestural (sign) language, not a spoken language. In fact, the work of V S Ramachandran suggests that even spoken language is gestural in nature, and sound is merely the medium of transmission for that gesture. As a theory, it's pretty mind-blowing stuff. It all revolves around the so-called "mirror neuron" -- a mechanism in the brain that takes observations and turns them into experience. So we hear a sound and our brain understands it by recreating mentally how and why we ourselves would have produced that sound. This would explain the crossover between speaking and listening that I highlighted last week and it has some very profound consequences for the teaching of phonology, which I'll spend more time on soon.
But if phonology is about shape, why use a term derived from the Greek for sound? Well, simply put, it's the established term. Perhaps someone will make a new name for it in the future, but right now we're stuck with the words people use. But phonology is not restricted to the spoken medium, and interestingly enough, "orthography" is similarly not restricted to its usual visual medium. There is Braille, of course, but more interesting than that is the audio channel.
Though massively outdated now, telegraphy revolutionised global communication. The vital components in this global engine were the telegraphers, who relayed messages via Morse code. While they were working mostly through the medium of sound, the code was still denoting letters, not phonemes. An expert coder would have no problem even with the phonetic irregularities of English, such as the famous "rough, cough, bough, through" example. We can only conclude that they must have been "reading" through their ears.
Reading and writing therefore cannot be considered independent of speaking and listening. They are not separate "skills" but something that is built on top of spoken skills. Which means that before you start teaching reading and writing, you must ensure you have something to build on!
What happens if you don't?
Well, the learner builds on something else -- either an arbitrary pattern or on their first language. Case in point: many English speakers have problems with the "3 Es" of French: E, É, È. You will hear even some advanced students asking "Does this E have an accent? Which one?" But this is a regular feature of French: each refers to a distinct sound. By starting from the written form and almost invariably picking the "e" of English "pet", the learner has not built a proper representation of French phonemes and they've all merged into one. With only one sound behind all three forms of E, the choice of accent seems arbitrary and is difficult to remember. But to someone who has learnt from phonology, the correct accent is a matter of second nature.
Note that I said "someone who has learnt from phonology", not "someone who has learned by listening", because the two are not the same. People can also fail to notice phonemic differences when listening -- phonology must be taught explicitly. The irony is that after everything I've said, in some languages (Spanish, but not Chinese, for example) orthography can actually be a useful tool in teaching phonology... but that path is rather convoluted so we'll avoid going down it today and leave it for another time.
An anecdote from personal experience
I've held the above beliefs for a good few years now, but it wasn't until I started trying out LiveMocha's Polish course that the reality hit home.
My Polish is pretty basic, but I do know how the orthography works. I understand the non-palatised/alveolar-palatal/retroflex distinction in the main consonants, I know how it's written and I know how to pronounce it. And yet...
LiveMocha's speaking practice exercises ask you to read out a script. And I kept making silly mistakes. For example, I kept pronouncing C as /k/, rather than the correct /ts/. I put the stress in the 3rd-to-last syllable sometimes, or the last syllable sometimes. Why? Well although I "know" the rules of Polish sound, I'm not really comfortable with them yet. Reading pushed me beyond my level of ability, and I fell back on the systems of other languages.
Conclusion and consequences
I suggested previously that an apparent better ability in the written mode than in the spoken mode was a sign that the learner was using inappropriate and untransferrable strategies in the written mode, which means that the common learner situation of having a higher ability in the written mode than the spoken mode is actually a disordered state and consequently leads to long-term difficulties.
Today, I've tried to give another reason why this is such a disordered state, by showing that the written mode isn't pure language, but rather a layer of abstraction added on top of the language, and you can't build on a foundation that hasn't been laid yet.
Now let me be clear: I am not saying that everyone should be better at listening than at reading (this is something I plan to discuss in my next article, on phonology), but simply that a beginner has an urgent need to develop performance in the spoken mode. I'm not even saying that all new vocabulary should be presented in the spoken mode. No, if the vocabulary is built on phonemes that the student knows and has rehearsed sufficiently, and the orthography is regular enough, it's not a problem. But introducing new phonemes in the written mode is just mental. The student will learn to read them, but he will have to construct his own phonology underneath that orthography, and that will almost certainly be wrong.
11 April 2011
The importance and unimportance of accent
Accent is essentially unimportant. It's the final coat of paint that makes our language pretty or ugly, shiny or dull. It is something that the beginning learner really doesn't need to think about.
Unfortunately, this is something that is frequently overinterpreted, because many people don't appreciate the fact that accent is only one part of pronunciation.
Every language has it's own phonology -- it has a set of possible sounds and possible combinations of sounds, and it has a set of distinctions between sounds. Though we do not need to learn a good accent from day one, we certainly need to learn the sound system of a language.
The most common consequence of conflating the sound system with accent is the idea that the "closest sound" from your native language is "good enough". Open up almost any beginner's book and it'll start with a list of sounds described along the lines of "like the a in cat", "like t in English". But this is rarely true.
Still, some languages will let you get away with this to some extent, but when you hit a more complicated language, it all crumbles.
Any book on Hindi will tell you that "closest sounds" just won't cut it, and that with that approach you will never be understood. This is because Hindi has more sounds than most other languages. In fact, there are 8 sounds that are approximately similar to T and D, so using an English T and D, or a French one, or a German one, would leave you completely unable to distinguish certain words, and unable to make yourself understood.
Worse, because you treat 4 different sounds as one, you will never learn to hear the difference either -- your brain only distinguishes sounds that mean something. The later you attempt to fix it, the harder it will be, because you will have to relearn all the vocabulary in order to learn the difference.
I've experienced this personally with Spanish. In Spanish C is pronounced like Z, when the C is followed by I or E. In some areas, these in turn sound like S, but in other areas, they don't. I started learning Spanish from a course that didn't make a distinction between S and Z, but as I progressed I spent more of my time with people who make the distinction than those who don't.
As a result, I started trying to speak like them. However, my brain was trained to see the two things as one, so I was prone to making mistakes such as pronouncing the word "especial" as "ezpesial". My errors were arbitrary, but not random -- they were consistent and there was a clear pattern. My brain was still seeing the two as equivalent, but was trying to explain it in terms of the other sounds in the word. Thankfully this was still pretty early, so I caught it and fixed it.
Other people are not so lucky. A local French teacher (from France) can pronounce all the sounds of English. But he couldn't before he came here. The result is that he has already learned all the words with the wrong sounds. The classic example is TH -- it's always T or D when he speaks. He's learnt the words now, so there's no going back.
Now, that's something that we call "falling together" (ah, a nice, self-descriptive term for once), but phonemes can also split apart.
Consider that Japanese doesn't make a distinction between liquids L and R. As an English speaker learning Japanese, I would likely hear these as different phonemes (meaningful units of sounds) instead of simply different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme ("allophones").
This splitting apart on its own isn't a big problem -- it doesn't lose information the same way falling together does. However, the two can very easily co-occur, and at that point they make a bad situation worse.
Take for example "CH" in German. It has two allophones -- a hard one (ach) similar to the sound in Scottish "loch", and a softer palatised one (ich) that takes on a quality similar to the English SH. But there's another phoneme that sounds even more like the English SH, one that's usually written SCH. And it gets worse, because in certain combinations of consonants, S starts to sound the same.
If we're not careful, the learner may end up splitting their Ss and their CHs, and putting half of each in the same box as SCH. The result is a map of the sound system which looks nothing like the native speakers view of things.
Accent is what we put on top of the sound system to give it colour and personality. You cannot develop a good accent based on an incorrect map of the sound system. Pronunciation has to be taught from the start in such a way as to encourage a consistent and correct sound system.
Accent can wait until later, but pronunciation must taught in some form right from the start.
Accent is essentially unimportant. It's the final coat of paint that makes our language pretty or ugly, shiny or dull. It is something that the beginning learner really doesn't need to think about.
Unfortunately, this is something that is frequently overinterpreted, because many people don't appreciate the fact that accent is only one part of pronunciation.
Every language has it's own phonology -- it has a set of possible sounds and possible combinations of sounds, and it has a set of distinctions between sounds. Though we do not need to learn a good accent from day one, we certainly need to learn the sound system of a language.
The most common consequence of conflating the sound system with accent is the idea that the "closest sound" from your native language is "good enough". Open up almost any beginner's book and it'll start with a list of sounds described along the lines of "like the a in cat", "like t in English". But this is rarely true.
Still, some languages will let you get away with this to some extent, but when you hit a more complicated language, it all crumbles.
Any book on Hindi will tell you that "closest sounds" just won't cut it, and that with that approach you will never be understood. This is because Hindi has more sounds than most other languages. In fact, there are 8 sounds that are approximately similar to T and D, so using an English T and D, or a French one, or a German one, would leave you completely unable to distinguish certain words, and unable to make yourself understood.
Worse, because you treat 4 different sounds as one, you will never learn to hear the difference either -- your brain only distinguishes sounds that mean something. The later you attempt to fix it, the harder it will be, because you will have to relearn all the vocabulary in order to learn the difference.
I've experienced this personally with Spanish. In Spanish C is pronounced like Z, when the C is followed by I or E. In some areas, these in turn sound like S, but in other areas, they don't. I started learning Spanish from a course that didn't make a distinction between S and Z, but as I progressed I spent more of my time with people who make the distinction than those who don't.
As a result, I started trying to speak like them. However, my brain was trained to see the two things as one, so I was prone to making mistakes such as pronouncing the word "especial" as "ezpesial". My errors were arbitrary, but not random -- they were consistent and there was a clear pattern. My brain was still seeing the two as equivalent, but was trying to explain it in terms of the other sounds in the word. Thankfully this was still pretty early, so I caught it and fixed it.
Other people are not so lucky. A local French teacher (from France) can pronounce all the sounds of English. But he couldn't before he came here. The result is that he has already learned all the words with the wrong sounds. The classic example is TH -- it's always T or D when he speaks. He's learnt the words now, so there's no going back.
Now, that's something that we call "falling together" (ah, a nice, self-descriptive term for once), but phonemes can also split apart.
Consider that Japanese doesn't make a distinction between liquids L and R. As an English speaker learning Japanese, I would likely hear these as different phonemes (meaningful units of sounds) instead of simply different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme ("allophones").
This splitting apart on its own isn't a big problem -- it doesn't lose information the same way falling together does. However, the two can very easily co-occur, and at that point they make a bad situation worse.
Take for example "CH" in German. It has two allophones -- a hard one (ach) similar to the sound in Scottish "loch", and a softer palatised one (ich) that takes on a quality similar to the English SH. But there's another phoneme that sounds even more like the English SH, one that's usually written SCH. And it gets worse, because in certain combinations of consonants, S starts to sound the same.
If we're not careful, the learner may end up splitting their Ss and their CHs, and putting half of each in the same box as SCH. The result is a map of the sound system which looks nothing like the native speakers view of things.
Accent is what we put on top of the sound system to give it colour and personality. You cannot develop a good accent based on an incorrect map of the sound system. Pronunciation has to be taught from the start in such a way as to encourage a consistent and correct sound system.
Accent can wait until later, but pronunciation must taught in some form right from the start.
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