Teach English in Mapo Zhen - Jining Shi

Several years of teaching English in China, and many more years of living and studying there, often interacting with language learners and people eager to practise their English with a native speaker have led me to notice several pronunciation problems common to many Chinese learners of English. In deciding when and how to help people with these pronunciation problems, a certain amount of sensitivity is needed, particularly in a classroom setting where students are, to a certain extent, on display in front of their peers and may feel embarrassment. Even though the language classes I have taught have each been made up of students whose overall English level is roughly the same, this apparent parity often exists alongside significant variation in pronunciation accuracy. Much of this stems from differences in exposure to native English speakers: since China is a vast country, there are large differences between those who have grown up in major cities and those who have grown up in remote rural areas. Exposure to native English is often related to family wealth or class. Thus it is important not to over-emphasise individuals’ pronunciation problems where significant variation exists within the class. In some cases, students have not only been given bad examples of pronunciation by local English teachers, but have not been trained to listen carefully. Therefore it is not always profitable to make too much of pronunciation issues in a classroom setting when some students are struggling to hear the differences in the sounds (this is increasingly a problem for learners as they get older) let alone actually produce the correct sounds. The first set of common pronunciation problems encountered by Chinese learners of English are problems that stem from obvious features of the students’ own language. For most of the students L1 is Mandarin Chinese, and there is not space in this summative task to address the typical problems of minority students (speakers of Uighur, Tibetan, etc). For example, Mandarin does not use either the unvoiced or voiced th sounds (/θ/ and /ð/ in the phonetic alphabet) that are common in English. Frequently-used words like “this”, “that”, “there”, “thanks” or “with” are worth spending time correcting, because they are used so much and errors will simply be reinforced by careless repetition. Given that there is a very clear physical difference between the s sound that Mandarin speakers often use instead of th, namely the position of the tongue (visible outside the teeth in the case of any th sound) this one is quite easy to work on, and the teacher can exaggerate their own tongue movement to help put the class at ease. I have found that extensive drilling the first time I raise this point, and then returning to it occasionally in subsequent lessons, has been very successful. A second example, which I have not found so easy to solve, is the failure to pronounce final consonants (such as the -d in “happened”), or the omission of one consonant sound from a consonant cluster (so “cluster” might be pronounced “clusser”, and “hardly” might be pronounced “harley”). Mandarin does not have any hard final consonants, and only has two softer finals (-n and -ng), so students are not used to making final sounds that are not vowels. Since my name, James, has a final consonant cluster (and is often mispronounced as a three-syllable word, “Jay-moo-suh”, as Mandarin speakers add vowels that feel more comfortable to them) I have often used it as a test word for consonant cʊlusters. Unlike with θ and ð, it is not so easy to describe the position of tongue and lips as consonant clusters are produced, so diagrams of the mouth may be more helpful than attempting to get students to drill simply by hearing and attempting to copy a sound. The second set of problems do not obviously stem from Mandarin or another other L1. Students often mispronounce the word “wood”, simply omitting the w and making an awkward /ʊd/ sound. By pointing out that “wood” and “would” (which is normally not mispronounced, curiously) are homophones, students can generally be brought to pronounce “wood” correctly. This may be related to a w/v confusion (that does stem from Mandarin, which has no v and no plosive /w/ like English), in which, for example, “avoid” becomes /əwɔɪd/, and that also needs to be addressed by careful drilling, but it is a very special case of a particular mispronunciation. The word “usually” is another special case that is almost universal among learners in China, leading me to wonder whether, like certain grammar problems, it stems from an error in nationally-used school textbooks. In this case, the problem is the /ʒ/ sound in the middle of the word, which usually degenerates into an /r/ sound. Helping the students with similar words that cause them fewer problems, such as “treasure” and “measure”, gets them more comfortable with making a /ʒ/ sound in the middle of words. Teaching pronunciation is sometimes about focussing on specific sounds in relation to the position of the mouth, and sometimes about getting students to realise that they already can produce the sounds they need, but they need to get comfortable with those sounds in different positions in the words they are using. Of course, since students are all individuals, one-to-one pronunciation work is the most helpful, carried out in a friendly, encouraging manner that does not draw attention to any individual’s weak pronunciation in front of their peers.