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- We have yet to talk about pronunciation. How do we train it?
"Saying something wrong may cause physical damage."
(Kozhevnikov - "The shield and the sword")
That's what they took as a staple in soviet spy training centers when dealing with problems in pronunciation. During my lessons I make all of the kids spies without telling them. I'm acting as if the kid is in the middle of London. They come up to passersby and ask them questions, but they're trying to do it so nobody has an idea of them being a foreigner. Such a goal should be set from the very first lesson for a beginner-teacher.
- But we're not training spies! Do you need to act as if you're local if you're a politician, a businessman or a tourist?
No, of course not, under no circumstances. Actually, I think we should take pride in it. As one American told us, “Are we rich?! No, it's you, the Russians, the rich ones! You have such literature geniuses as Pushkin, Chekhov and Dostoevsky!"
Absolutely perfect and flawless pronunciation serves a completely different purpose. First of all, it helps you understand native speech easily. If you are used to pronouncing the words in a wrong way, your mind expects to hear the same from an English person. And when you hear something different, you get confused. It takes huge effort for you to figure things out. Also, you always think that English people speak way too fast. There's another point to understand about correct pronunciation. It helps you to keep different languages apart in your head. It's almost like different frequencies on the radio. You're just tuning in to the needed frequency and enjoying it, and other frequencies never mislead you. If you listen to some extracts from speech in different languages, you'll hear the difference in sound.
Now let's take a word from each language. Let it be the same word "table" as it'll stand as an example of simplicity in this case. Let's make a phrase using this word: "Help me set the table, please."
Hilf mir bitte, den Tisch zu decken.
Aidez moi, s’il vous plait, a servir la table.
Помоги мне, пожалуйста, накрыть на стол.
And let's try to mix up the words without thinking. Let's replace English "the table" with German "den tisch".
Of course, this won't work even with the correct pronunciation and at a natural pace. You'll get your tongue tied(literally). We can't change frequencies if we're targeting a particular one. I believe that a polyglot's secret is the correct pronunciation and managing to keep the languages in mind apart.
And finally the third thing correct pronunciation does is that it helps to keep the speech effortless. It's not that some sounds are initially more convenient than others. If you achieve this correct pronunciation in different languages like Spanish, English, German it'll be easier to speak to them. Even though the sounds of these languages are completely different, they all obey a single law within linguistics, according to which all the movements of the speech apparatus become natural and easy. This feeling can be compared to sliding on a good ski run. If there's no ski run, your skis either will fall into a snowdrift, or will slide in different directions on the rolled snow. And still while losing confidence, you're losing fluency.
(Translation: Only a person with utterly correct pronunciation is able to speak fluently and quickly.)
We've already talked about slow speech and how it's forbidden while learning/teaching a language. At first your child peeps, then chatters, but if we speak about such phrase as Shakespearian "to be or not to be", which had better be said slowly, that's for the greatest actors as Smotkunovsky. Leave it be, don't expect it from the start. Someday our children will learn actor's speech and they will hold pauses, leaving the audience at a cliffhanger.
So, we cannot decide intonation, tempo and pronunciation. Those are distinctive characteristics of one sound wave.
- But still how do you teach a child to pronounce difficult sounds of a foreign language correctly?
I must correct you right away, we'd better not call them difficult. They are not more complicated than the sounds of the Russian language.
- And yet how to teach a child to control the tongue?
“When the centipede was asked what her 17th leg was doing at the moment when the first one takes a step forward, she started thinking... and went crazy!”
During classes with my adult student (she's 30 y.o.) I always try to make her speech "come alive", I come out of character and ask her: "Jane, what's wrong with your tongue? It seems as if it got stung by bees!" She used to answer: “But I still don't have time to figure out where to lick the palate, and where to push the teeth!”. That’s the result of the classes of English in childhood when the aim of the lesson was to explain the pronunciation. The result is - a heavy language barrier that's hard to take down. It was always funny to me to see advertising slogans like “We'll break the language barrier down!”. Isn't it easier just not to build it? After all, a person is born without any barriers! A child will easily put his hand in the mouth of a shepherd if they have not received the experience of fear.
(Translation: Why don’t you stop building language barriers instead of always taking them down after building them?)
The correct sound of a foreign language (as part of a whole in poems, games) are born in a child as a direct reflection of what they have heard. The scheme is: ear-tongue. There has to be nothing in between, in order not to keep the information in the head. So in order to achieve the correct pronunciation, it is not necessary to “explain” it (this word already contains some unnecessary actions), you need to let it go, do not touch it, do not interfere. Under no circumstances do not get into the child's mouth speaking about the palate, the tongue and lips!
If we let go of an object raised above the ground, it will drop vertically down, and any deviation from this trajectory will be due to the horizontal component of any forces other than the force of gravity. It could be the wind or someone's push. When a student suddenly says the wrong sounds, you need to look for “what kind of wind blew”. It could be any of the popular peers who said "wan, too, sree", or the mother decided to help and remember the way she was taught.
Let's imagine how dew forms. The fog descends and condenses into small droplets on the grass and leaves. And now imagine this situation: the director urgently needs to take a close-up of leaves in dew drops, but unfortunately there is no fog. He takes a syringe with a thin needle and puts it drop by drop on the leaf. Maybe it will do for a short episode, but we will never be able to get such wonderful silver beads as nature makes them. Similarly, meaningful and brightly colored speech, descends from above and “condenses” at a natural pace, just like fog, with beads of beautiful, absolutely correct English sounds. In any case, the fog is primary.
(Translation: The sounds are born by listening and repeating. Unfortunately, speech cannot be formed from sounds.)
Let's try to describe how speech is born. Let's imagine our phrase in the form of a ridge of relief rocks. Our real-sounding phrase (like a watercolor landscape) will not exactly fit the contour. It will look like a slightly smooth curved line.
Imagine that the thinnest, almost weightless, sufficiently elastic veil falls on this rocky relief from above. At first, it touches only the tops and hangs in the air, then slowly settles under its own weight (as it was considered earlier in the case of the evolution of the phrase “I want an apple”) and in the end it almost fits the relief, but not completely. Some small bends and crevices will remain untouched by the fabric. Due to its lightness, the veil descends slowly and we must resist the temptation to speed up this process with our hands. It would seem that it's is easier, “gone and done” – and patted the veil with your palms, carefully tucking all the slits! But that's the trick, that this veil is inviolable, it instantly breaks as soon as you touch it, not to mention that it chooses the slits itself.
... When a "veil of speech" slowly settles to being fluent, parents feel pressed for time and they start to "help" by patting it down, even though they're just destroying what the teachers have done. For example, in many phrases like “What time does it open? What’s the weather like?” the middle is not audible, and it is pronounced very blurred and most parents consider it their duty to help, pronouncing clearly “da:z” or ”frrom" with their language. (“But he didn't hear it!")
If we put those stones of "da:z " and "eez" (does and is) on a ski run, there'll be no one to move them away and your child will stumble pronouncing those words until they break their skis. Mind that in real life nothing sounds like "da:z" or "eez".
Summing up the results of the chapter “pronunciation”, I want to conclude that there is no pronunciation problem at all, and it would not be worth writing about if so many people wouldn't talk about it all the time. This problem occurs only for those who think of it, who pull out their lips like a tube, who lick the palate, stick out their tongue between their teeth. In such a case the problem really is there: correcting corrupted pronunciation. Let's get back to the quote of Kozhevnikov and point out that back in wartime five year olds or adults knowing no language were not trained to be spies, that's why this technique of correcting the pronunciation was invented.
(Translation: The problem with pronunciation occurs only if you raise it)
- Well, then what should the child copy? The teacher's speech?
Yes, of course, first of all, it's because the teacher is a kind of analogue of the mother for the baby, but that's not enough. Even if the teacher has the best pronunciation in the world, it shouldn't be the only correct speech a child hears. Let's listen to each other’s speech: how different we are! There's a low voice coming out of the chest, high sonorous voice, thick bass, playful tenor. The child should not get used to one particular timbre or to one manner. Well who is my child going to be listening to? For example, take a look at what is written in small print on the tape: “Voiced by the announcers of London radio." If it is really voiced by them, that's splendid! Those are not just native speakers, they are people who have specially learned to speak correctly and fluently. Dear reader, tell me, please, if you had a chance to come to the studio and record a children's fairy tale in your own language tomorrow would you consider yourself ready for such a task if this record is to be widely distributed? Look, in sound tracks to textbooks (Longman, etc.), discussions are voiced by a whole group of actors, and look at how well their voices are chosen: there are boys, girls, aunts, uncles. Those are totally different voices that sound at the same time the background noises are played. That makes the speech especially real.
Of course, if we speak about listening to the tapes, we must mind that the tapes where two languages are involved are out of the question:
- it sounds strictly edifying: “Lesson one. Repeat after the speaker: Ah, ah, ma, ma...”
- or playfully: “Well, baby, are you ready to learn English? Listen to the parrot! I think it wants to say hi: “Hello!”
- or “Walking, walking bear and saw a дом ”
This kind of listening is only harmful. In the first case, it is a direct murder of the language, and in the second - the same game of language, the way to nowhere. No comments about the third case, since the logical continuation would be the phrases “What is your имя” or “How old are ты?”. There's this bilingualism in all three cases. It always throws you off the correct frequency and tries to make you not think about the language.
The instructions for the washing machine forbid us to switch modes when the machine is working, because this leads to the burning of the motor. Something similar happens in our heads.
- What about simultaneous interpreters?
Well, first of all, our children are far from them! Let's set "translating stuff" for later, because it's a creative process of looking for analogies. Ask translators and interpreters yourself if it's easy to work with two languages at a time switching in between. It's a hell of a job! It's much easier to speak the language you use to think!
Clear or beautiful pronunciation is not to be taught.(Mind that the main part of class exercises and homework is listening.) In case your child has physical problems in pronunciation of some sounds, you can work a little like a speech therapist, picking up special rhymes with these sounds and vividly playing them. But DO be careful!!! Do not concentrate the child's attention on sounds. If you do it'll build obstacles in the child's way. You'll scare them! When the thought process goes from the cat and the mouse to the tongue, the palate, the teeth, the child will meet the dead end and it'll be so hard to get out of there. That means that you'll be the one who lays the foundation of the language barrier.
(Translation: Be careful!!!! Do not center your child’s attention around sounds! It’s a dead end!)
Addition to the chapter.
The book was written in 2006 when the internet was super slooow and it worked via the telephone cord. At that moment ASTechnique did not exist. There just technically couldn't be.
But since the main part of homework is listening, we've started to notice an interesting thing.
An example. The first language a teacher has learned is German, so there's a heavy German accent in her English speech. So the students take the manner of speech from their teacher and the pronunciation from the speakers(who speak fluently and with great intonation) in listening.
There are more and more such cases in our piggy bank. The thing is that the children who record themselves with the speaker at home and the pronunciation standard is not a teacher, but a native speaker (even though the amount of sound of the teacher's speech is on average 5-6 times more than the native speaker's speech during home audio recording).
We were amazed by such statistics.
This confirms our hypothesis that the ear first of all adopts the intonational curve of the sound wave (which is given by the teacher/English-mom during the initial presentation of something new), and only then it adopts the overtones (which are heard during repeated fixing listening from the native).
So authentic listening is responsible for phonetics, but not the teacher. And there are a lot of such materials.
The role of the teacher is to properly present and rotate the material during the lesson. Recording their own speech along with a native speaker at home will definitely help with phonetics.
