Teaching pronunciation

History

My interest in how we learn to pronounce arose from the experience of being a student in a Japanese class taught by Fusako Allard in Osaka in 1985. As a Silent Way teacher, she herself said nothing in the language until we already had a fair command of Japanese pronunciation. Instead, she encouraged us to experiment with making and combining sounds and saying words and phrases, giving us constant feedback on our progress. I would now regard this as a type of mirroring behaviour on her part, and the overall interaction as being similar in many ways to how children learn to pronounce their first language.

At school my spoken French had always been poor, but now I ended up with better Japanese pronunciation than friends who had learnt by conventional methods (variants of ‘listen and repeat’). I also had, I think, a better 'feel' for the language than them. This experience left such a strong impression on me that in 1993 I left my job in IT and started to train myself as a Silent Way teacher of English. I joined the Pronunciation Special Interest Group (PronSIG) of IATEFL and taught in the UK and France.

I have now written many articles for PronSIG’s journal (some in collaboration with Roslyn Young) that are available on the PronSci downloads page:

• The 2008 and 2016 ones are a synopsis of my thesis and of my Journal of Phonetics article adapted for language teachers, and contain suggestions for how we might alter the practice of teaching pronunciation. 

• The 2009 one expands on these proposals with respect to sentence stress. 

• The 2010 and 2017 ones shows how the English articulatory setting might be a result of the distinctive style of speech breathing in the language. 

• Others deal with practical classroom techniques such as pointing on a wall chart.

Current and future work

I also hope to extend various teaching experiments I have been working on. One builds on the ideas of part 1 of the thesis, using the Accent Method as a way of training speakers of other languages in the pulsatile style of speech breathing that appears to be developed by children speaking English. If this is successful, then we can hope for dramatic improvements in the English pronunciation of, for example, Spanish, French and Japanese speakers.

I mainly develop my ideas as classroom techniques, but also present at academic conferences on L2 speech acquisition from time to time as below:

More work in collaboration with Roslyn Young, has been to develop a new edition of Gattegno’s Silent Way charts for English. Their use is directly related to the model of L1 acquisition described in part 2 of the thesis. Please look at www.pronsci.com to see the charts for intermediate and advanced level students that we have designed for teaching the pronunciation of English, French and other languages, in conjunction with other approaches to grammar, vocabulary, etc. You can also see our revisions to the Silent Way charts for beginner learners.

Silent Way

Roslyn has written, I think, the best short introduction to the Silent Way (which deals with language learning as a whole, not just pronunciation):

• Young R. (2000) The Silent Way. In Byram M. (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning (London: Routledge) 546-548

More information on the Silent Way and Gattegno's pedagogy is available from Roslyn's website. His books and teaching materials are distributed by Educational Explorers/Cuisenaire based in the UK and Educational Solutions based in North America.