Putting Phonology into Our ESL Classrooms
Phonetics -
What we need in the classroom is articulatory phonetics. We can show our students how English forms consonants, and how we as Anglophones pronounce vowels. We can engage the students by actually explaining to them how to articulate a sound, then we can ask each of them to pronounce the sound. We can write the instructions for hard sounds on the board, so they don't just hear the teacher's voice, but they also see the instructions. We can point to our teeth for a dental. Remember that beginners might not know every word you are saying; they may not know the word for "tooth" yet, so pointing to the teeth is important, and write out the instructions so that beginners can see the word "tooth" next to the appropriate sounds. Let them use their dictionaries they have in store to look up target words that are being pronounced. "Tooth" is a good example, because it contains an interdental at the end and an alveolar-dental at the beginning, and it is the operative word in describing the places of articulation as well. For other sample words it will not line up so exactly. The point is to engage the students in every way you can. Remember the four pillars of ESL instruction: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. The more ways they can communicate the items we teach them, in terms of phonological sound as the building blocks of words, the better they will be able to communicate. The Buddha said more than once that what we do follows what we think as a plough's wheel follows the horse that pulls it. In other words, practice makes perfect.
IPA Happens -
Everyone needs to know IPA in English. It is relevant for an ESOL teacher to know the IPA, as regards English. The IPA contains pertinent information arrayed in a logical format for teachers to refer to. It is not necessary for students unless they are adults, but it is part of that rubric of understanding a teacher must keep in her/his brain as s/he instructs English sounds to speakers of other languages. English consonant IPA -and all consonant IPA is arranged like a graph, and English vowel IPA (as other languages' vowel IPA) is superimposed on a grid that approximates the human mouth that produces said vowels. There is not an exact match, between all sounds produced and those represented on the grid. This is in part due to dialects. It is also accounted for by phonology versus phonetics. That translates into the fact that the intended sound (phonological representation) does not always surface because of influence from neighboring sounds (epenthesis, assimilation, dissimilation, deletion) or other more widespread causes, as we see in metathesis. We shall revisit IPA on page 6, The Hotdog Stand. There we will look at the sounds themselves, in a brushstroke fashion.
Phonology and Phonetics -
Don't get mired in detail. Acoustic and auditory phonetics are hardly necessary. They are there, but they are only curiosity pieces for the ELL's and the teachers of these students. The real interplay is between phonology and phonetics. Phonetics is how a sound appears in a given language, as the result of a rule-driven process, while phonology is the sound the mind hears and thinks it is producing for the speakers of native English, who are not self-conscious about the way they speak. Phonology is not a mirage. The teacher will need to explain some rules that explain why a [p] surfaces in the word "something" between the /m/ and the /"th"/ phonemes. This is epenthesis, or insertion, and it often occurs between two phonemes (i.e. sounds) that do not sound right when consecutive. The phonetic form has what I call a [p] shadow, because the phonetic [p] stands in the shadow of the other two consonants. Many speakers are not aware they are making this sound, and in different languages, other sounds are "shadow sounds." We know that every language is different, but how? The phonemes of every language are different (obviously), and furthermore, the phonetics are different as well. The phonetics are the surface forms, and sometimes show in the alphabetical representation in English, as well. Take "insufficient" versus "impractical" as a small set of examples. It's simpler, in a sense, that the phonetic nasal is represented differently in each case by the letters "n" and "m," because the neighboring sounds mirror one another near the inception of the word, as the prefix moves along to the word-boundary, but this needs to be explained to students, so that they know that "in-" and "im-" are the same thing. Sometimes a strain of phonetics is not represented in the same paradigm! Take "ingrown toenail" for instance. The phoneme /n/ at the end of the "prefix" (and I'll admit, it's an odd word I have dug up) comes up as velarized in the phonetic way of saying it. That is, it is pronounced like the "ng" at the end of "swimming," a great word for nasals and bilabials too. Show this to the students whom you instruct. We can ham it up and say the sounds several times, just as if we are teaching reading to a 1st-grader in a native English classroom.
One Activity
An activity we can do as teachers to help students along, is to let certain students become experts in certain sounds. Phonology is the realm of beginners in language-learning, and English can be complicated, in phonetics, in spelling, and in the exceptions. After learning the alphabet, it is probable students will want to embrace the phonetics. They can teach each other sounds as soon as we let them become experts, each in a different sound. They can make a presentation to the class, and connect the sound to a letter, then a set of letters, and examples can be brought up of regular cases and exceptional situations and words. The students can own the alphabet and connect it with sounds in their ESL work, and thus can begin to manage their own learning. This is a teacher's obligation, to help the students find their voice in English and be invested in absorbing the language and in mastering its pieces and parts. No human language is easy. This activity also fosters a good and n active classroom community. As a teacher (there I am on the left), I want to promote the well-being of my students. They learn to trust me, and I am their resource, and the one who must coordinate and maintain order.
"...Education is not filling a bucket. It is lighting a fire!" -William Butler Yeats, writer of English