Teach English in Zaogoutou Zhen - Linyi Shi

This is going to be a short essay on the role of phonology in teaching English as a foreign language. What is phonology? The definition of phonology as a field of study is “The branch of linguistics that deals with systems of sounds (including or excluding phonetics), within a language or between different languages.” We, as ELF teachers, however, are more interested in phonology as “The system of contrastive relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of a language.” The reason this system is of great importance to language teachers is that it allows them to take a more systematic approach to teaching essential points in pronunciation and reading. Phonology’s role in teaching young learners The EFL industry has seen a remarkable increase in demand for teachers who are able to teach young children. Perhaps more than anywhere else, this has been the case in China. I taught English as a foreign language there for two years. In this essay, I will also be sharing some of the observations I made during that period. By far the most popular and, in my experience, the most effective method for developing young learners’ phonemic awareness is phonics. The key purpose of phonics is helping students see the correspondence between the sounds and the spelling patterns of the language, e.g. cat – hat – mat – bat as opposed to met – let – pet – bet. This method has proven extremely useful in helping young students get off the ground in the initial stage of learning to read and speak. Unfortunately for the students, English orthography is far from being phonemic. This becomes a source of frustration when they face the words such as albeit, almond, anemone, genre, bouquet, quinoa, brewery, buoy, bury, clothes, cocoa and yolk or the word pairs and groups such as sloth – moth, wood – would, break – brake, blood – wood – food and bough – cough – dough. The list goes on and phonics can do little to help the students in this matter. The pronunciation of many words in English must simply be memorised! Phonics turn out to be most useful when teaching young beginner students whose goal is to grasp the basic rules of English pronunciation. This is not to say this methodology cannot be employed with adults. On the contrary. In my experience, even beginner adults can benefit from the activities in which certain sound groups are compared. For instance, a gap-fill activity where a student is required to write the missing words in a sentence: The _________ ate the mouse as a _________. (snack, snake) Superman wears a red _________; My brother likes to wear his red ________. (cape, cap) He drank a ________ of Coke and burped; My grandpa used to walk with a _________. (cane, can) This can be done using pictures as well instead of the words in brackets. When it comes to teaching phonics to very young students, there are some age constraints that teachers should bear in mind. If my past work is any guide, teaching students younger than 4 to read seldom yields any significant improvement, even when using phonics as the main approach. They can learn the alphabet and the beginning sounds, but that is, in most cases, as far as they can go. Having children less than 5 years of age fully comprehend the relation between the graphemes and sounds of the English language is nearly an impossible task. Some difficulties students meet in terms of pronunciation People around the world can struggle with different sounds in English. Whether EFL students are going to have a hard time pronouncing one sound or another, largely depends on the way their native tongue’s sounds system is different to the English. Chinese students, for instance, find pronouncing diphthongs quite difficult. In the south of China, people often can’t tell the difference between the sounds /l/ and /n/. Some of them pronounce /r/ as /l/, /l/ as /w/ or something close to /wr/ in some positions. That way, Bill becomes /biwr/, well /wewr/, ready /’lɛdi/ etc. Whatever the sound that students are mispronouncing, I often found the best way for them to stop making these mistakes is to drill the pronunciation of the words. If this is not sufficient, splitting a word into syllables or even individual sounds and drilling these instead is what normally leads to success. Once it is certain they can produce these sounds separately, the next step would be putting them back together, very slowly at the beginning, and then speeding up until a word or a phrase sounds natural. The true purpose of phonology in EFL When talking to students or their parents, if the students are too young for such a discussion, it is important to stress the true purpose of developing good pronunciation. While working as an EFL teacher, I noticed that parents all too often put an enormous amount of pressure on their children to develop a perfect pronunciation. Likewise, many of the adult students I taught were too hard on themselves about the way they pronounce certain words, arguing that people might not be able to understand them when they try to communicate something. While this concern is reasonable, not all mistakes lead to miscommunication. Whether a learner of the English language pronounces the word ‘think’ as /θɪŋk/ or /tink/ (especially in a context) doesn’t make much difference in terms of conveying meaning successfully. However, if /smæl/ is what a student says is while meaning to say ‘smile’, if they say /lʌɪn/ when they mean ‘nine’, that’s where we must interfere. This is especially so for beginners who are in the initial phase of learning pronunciation. There is seldom enough time for pronunciation in an EFL class. Nonetheless, if the students are making critical mistakes that make the difference in meaning, this is where phonology is useful as a “system of contrasting relationships among the sounds”. Perfection will only come with time and lots of practice.