The Pronunciation Survey

I've set up a learners survey on pronunciation attitudes based on one that I read preparing for my thesis.  It's 10 multiple choice questions via SurveyMonkey.  It's really just for Intermediates and above.

Click here to take survey

I wanna walk like you, talk like you, you hoo hoo.

I will publish the results when I get 50 surveys in.  I'll even try a little analysis just to make it interesting.

I'd like to learn about as many learners as possible, so I'll share this with teachers here in Dublin and online.

(IF you are interested, I only wrote one of the questions. Nine of the questions are adapted from A. Raymond Elliott's Pronunciation Attitude Inventory appended in his Foreign Language Phonology: Field Independence, Attitude, and the Success of Formal Instruction in Spanish Pronunciation.  This was published in The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 530-542.  Even the photo above is adapted and shared from a photo I saw as a kid.  My research will be original though.  Promise.  By the way here's the full text via GoogleScholar.)


The link to my adapted survey is below if you would like to share it.  Thanks.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HB22RCN

So- yes that's right! Hard evidence about how our students think about studying pronunciation will be here in just a bit.  Technically nothing's hard evidence until we get to 300 learners though.

I'll keep adding and publishing the data, if you keep asking the students.  Thanks again.

*****
The results are coming in... thank you for telling your friends.  Just a few more to go.

Good Wikipedia: Japanese learners finally differentiating R and L

I am a big fan of John Wells' blog.  He does know I exist unfortunately.  My old email started spamming the world after I joined LinkedIn.  Yes, I'm making excuses.

So anyway he frequently mentions Wikipedia as a source. This may be because he is more a descriptive phonologist than a prescriptive one.  A smart choice and one which takes quite a bit more brains to pull off and is generally better for the world.  The last thing we need is another British accent dictator.

Anyway while looking to see what they mention there as "general knowledge" on one topic the article on Japanese Learners of English popped up.  It's great: well-researched and better referenced than the stuff I've written on the topic.  Give it a read if you have a Japanese student.  Send a note if you want a good resource for teaching it.

Here's the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_speakers_learning_r_and_l

If the Daily Mail has figured it out I think we all have.

This article is based on an interview with Mario Saraceni. Here are the first couple of lines:

People learning the English language around the world should not adopt the 'Queen's English', a linguist said today.

Dr Mario Saraceni, of the University of Portsmouth, called on native English speakers to 'give up their claim to be the guardians of the purest form of the language'.

He argued that the ways it has been used and changed by millions of people around the world are equally valid.

Well, yeah.  

It's just good to see the debate finally splashing outside of the little pool of enthusiastic English teachers.  As the mighty John Levis in Iowa, who started a pronunciation teaching conference last year read about it here, has pointed out, the goal of classroom instruction in pronunciation should be centered on achieving intelligibility and comprehensibility not native accents for the learners.  I would still prefer to make control the practical objective but we'll leave that for another day.

Teaching by video.

I was really impressed by this video.



She demonstrates great understanding and control and that grounds her lesson.  It's specific and very fast but because it's directed at a targeted group of students, Koreans who have trouble with /f/, it works.  Also the learner leads because they pause and repeat bits at will, instead of pretending that the teacher is omniscient.

This is another great reason for teachers to run class blogs.  Good learners really do find the good resources and if you can start them started you start a virtuous circle for your school and its future learners.

I've been thinking this a lot recently: books are not the best  pronunciation resources.  Multimedia is the only way to teach this stuff.  Build a set of resources you can share with your learners.

Good luck.

To teach the IPA Phonology or NOT

It's the old debate: Is teaching the IPA chart worthwhile in English Language teaching? I think everyone teaching nowadays should have a good handle on what is in the use of the IPA for a student who wants to really participate in spoken English. So many teachers don't want their students to be their peers. They simply don't believe in their students or their own abilities. In the end a teacher can keep their students "in their place" with incomplete pronunciation work. It's just not fair to tell show them everything but how to use their mouths to communicate. It's not communicative. That's my opinion, of course. Where do you stand?

SNACK Sound Toolkit

http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/

This is another whopper like PRAAT.  This one was developed at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.

So SIT then.

It's cool and cheap and does the job.  This is like the IKEA of speech tools.  Maybe too high-level though. Let's see:

The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting language such as Tcl/Tk or Python. Using Snack you can create powerful multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack has commands for basic sound handling, such as playback, recording, file and socket I/O. Snack also provides primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech, but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also successfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals.
The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.

Yep.  Bit beyond me.  But this is the new goal: technology-literate teachers who also work outside of universities.

ELSTA as a start to a PLN

If you teach a language in Dublin and work with a school you should know about these guys or should I say girls.

They are the English Language Support Teachers Association here in Ireland.  Their membership appears to include teachers of Spanish and German here in Ireland as well as English Language Support and the occasional EFL teacher (me) and UCC's Séamas Kirkpatrick.  There seem to be a lot of links to TCD amongst the Exec group.  

I suppose the main reasons to join groups like this are to find out where you live and to find good resources.  But the best resources are always going to be people.  Despite my love for multimedia, hanging out with sharp people is one of life's great pleasures. 

They'll be having another conference in Dublin on the 15th of October.  If you come along and read their site first you'll be finding a whole lot of other people who are into what you do. And iron sharpens iron.  This is what my grandmother said years ago.  Personal Learning Networks is the more recent buzz word for it.  

These don't just have to be physical.  Twitter really can work for a for you in finding resources and materials and advice from working teachers like ourselves and the people who write our materials.  Loads of authors use it to stay in contact and keep sharp.  If you aren't using it try it for a month following the people on the list in this site on PLNs.    

I think you'll be glad you did.