Teach English in Cuifeng Zhen - Jinzhong Shi

This essay aims to deal with problems of pronunciation that are peculiar to Czech students of English. As a starting point I will look for the causes of the difficulties in the norms of the L1. I will also assume that difficulties not rooted in the norms of Czech speech are not L1 based problems - which is to say that they may occur to any student or native speaker of English, as for example a stutter or lisp, and I will not deal with such issues. Further, I will use a bottom up approach, dealing with the smallest units of speech first - i.e. the making of particular sounds such as 'th' in thing, and working upwards towards the panoramic topic of prosody in general. Types of difficulty will be grouped by supposed cause, and in each case possible solutions will be given after the description of the difficulty. The first group to be considered is comprised of speech sounds that do not exist in Czech. Most noticeably these are: w - as in window o - as in bone th - as in thug th - as in then. These tend to be mis-pronounced as: w becomes v o becomes o as in dog th, as in thug, becomes s th as in then, becomes z. I suggest these methods to help students to find these sounds: w - It may be helpful to explain that this letter can be understood as a vowel. Students would practice initially the sound on its own, as a vowel sound, and then in words where it is the first letter, as this may be a relatively easy progression. o - I would try beginning with exclamatory words and phrases, such as "Oh!", "Oh no!","Go!" and also "So?". Then I would have the students try to combine the sound within longer non-exclamatory words. I suggest this because it seems to me that this sound lends itself to such exclamations, and so they may be a good place to get a feel for it. "Th" as in thug, and "th" as in then; the two forms of English "th" are a voiced/unvoiced pair. Similarly the common Czech substitutions "s" and "z" are a voiced/unvoiced pair. It is the same error that causes both mistakes; and this lies in the misplacement of the tongue. Czech speakers will tend to place the tip of the tongue towards the alveolar ridge, whereas it should be held towards the upper front teeth. I suggest beginning with diagrams representing tongue placement. Because developing the ability to produce new sounds requires a lot of practice, I would search for free speech recognition software that would indicate to the student when they have made a recognisably correct sound. With this they would be able to practice at home. Of course it may be that such software would not work reliably enough, and care should be taken with this. In these cases, it may also be that the students are unable to hear the sound distinctly. Listening exercises to distinguish sounds might help here. Finally I would be careful to inculcate in the students the sense that success in pronunciation may come as a result of a long period of acclimatization and trial and error, and that the important point is rather to open up to new sound possibilities than to master the new sounds immediately. The second type of mistake that I deal with concerns words that have been learned from text, rather than from the spoken word. As English is not a phonetic language, this can of course lead to errors, even for native speakers. But an example relevant to Czech native speakers would be the almost silent b at the end of the word bomb. A Czech would likely want to pronounce this word as bomba, so as to sound fully all the letters. I would suggest here that learning the sound of a word is made an equal part of vocabulary learning along with spelling. In this, an application such as Google Translate with its read out loud function can provide at least a check against basic errors for the student studying at home. The third type or error peculiar to Czechs when learning English concerns misapplication of sound combination rules from the Czech language to the English language. Perhaps the main culprit here is the rule of end softening of consonants in Czech words; final consonants are de-voiced. And so, for example, "big bang" would become "bik bank", and "parade" would become "parate". Awareness of the error along with drilling may be all that is required to cure this problem. But I should say that I have not yet tried this, and so I do not yet know if awareness and drilling would be enough. Word stress, and the difference between the Czech and English systems, causes a lot bad pronunciation among Czech learners of English. While English words have a wide variety of stress patterns, Czech words are almost always stressed on the first syllable. Mapping of the Czech system onto English makes fluency impossible - and this is quite a common problem. A part of the solution to this must be the learning of words by sound; their sound being given at least equal weight to their spelling. Speaking personally, I find that when trying to recall a word in English, I often recall several words without any connections of meaning - but with the same stress pattern as the sought after word - before successfully recalling the sought after word. And so I guess that native English speakers may associate groups of similarly stressed words in memory. Exercises or games might be created to encourage students to develop this memory style for themselves. But this only an idea and I do not know if it has been tried in practice. Speaking with good prosody, that is, with good overall sense and music to the speech, is really the end goal of learning good pronunciation. Indeed, while a simple single sound differently produced, as with a lisp, for example, is quickly and easily accommodated by a native listener, problems with intonation, rhythm or word stress will remain uncomfortable to listen to and may not be easily understood. At this time I do not have sufficient knowledge of the Czech language, nor of the requirements of good prosody, to diagnose problems in this area that are particular to Czech learners. Perhaps over time I will come to know more.