PTLC2005 Pekka Lintunen Phonemic Transcription and its Effect on Learning:1
Phonemic Transcription and its Effect on Learning
Pekka Lintunen, University of Turku, Finland
1 Introduction
The paper focuses on a study in which 34 Finnish university students of English were
taught pronunciation skills and phonemic transcription simultaneously. The study
indicates that pronunciation and transcription skills correlate and that exercises in
phonemic transcription are effective when teaching English as a foreign language.
Transcription seems likely to be particularly beneficial for learners used to a close
grapheme-phoneme relationship in their native language.
2 Transcription as a teaching method
Phonemic transcription is a teaching method that has traditionally been used for foreignlanguage learners of English, especially at advanced levels. Gomes de Matos (2002:
314) listed transcription reading skills as one of the basic abilities that every foreign
language learner should master and certainly most books for EFL learners include
phonemic symbols in vocabulary sections, and there are also transcription workbooks
(e.g. García Lecumberri & Maidment 2000 and Morris-Wilson 1984). Phonemic symbols
are a necessity for writing about pronunciation, but they are often neglected in teaching
although there is considerable variation between levels and individual teachers. Often
the situation depends on how effective the teachers themselves find this method.
Phonemic transcription is likely to be very beneficial for learners who are accustomed to
a close phoneme-grapheme correspondence (or shallow orthography) in their native
language when they want to learn a language with more complicated grapheme-tophoneme rules (or deep orthography). Thus a good example can be provided by Finns
learning English. Finnish orthography follows quite closely the phonemic principle with
some minor exceptions (like there is no single grapheme for the velar nasal /ŋ /).
Therefore the relationship between the spelling and pronunciation of English is not
straightforward for Finnish learners of English. Phonemic transcription provides an
intermediate stage which should make learners more aware of the phonemic level of
language. Improved phonemic awareness, in turn, is assumed to aid learners'
pronunciation skills (e.g. Wells 1996).
There are, however, relatively few empirical studies (e.g. Koet 1990) concentrating on
the effect transcription has on learning, although some other studies on transcription
skills can be found (e.g. Š uš tarš ič 1997). One recent study has suggested that
teaching phonemic transcription should be beneficial for pupils at risk for learning
difficulties in a foreign language (Dufva & Vauras 2002). The raised phonological
knowledge resulted in improved reading and writing skills, which suggests that, in
addition to speaking, good transcription skills can aid other language skills as well. This
paper investigates whether pronunciation and transcription skills are co-dependent and
tries to shed light on the value of transcription skills for learners' pronunciation
development.
3 Data collection
The subjects of this study were 34 Finnish first-year university students taking a course
on English pronunciation. The data were collected from three separate tests for both
PTLC2005 Pekka Lintunen Phonemic Transcription and its Effect on Learning:2
pronunciation and transcription at various points during the course to observe the
subjects' development in these two tasks. In the tests, the subjects either read aloud a
short text or transcribed one phonemically. The transcription tests had 111-130 words
(432-484 phonemes) and there was an average interval of six weeks between the tests.
Afterwards their errors were analysed. The accepted transcriptions were the standard
pronunciations suggested by Wells (2001) and Roach & Hartman (1997). The only
differences between the model and these dictionaries were that the placement of stress
was not considered (although some weak forms did occur) and the neutralised /i/ symbol
was not used.
The three pronunciation tests were held in September, December and April. Thus there
was a longer interval between the pronunciation tests than in the transcription tests. The
subjects read aloud a short passage of English with 279-361 words plus an additional
word list of 8-9 isolated words. Three judges were used to evaluate the pronunciation
tests. With each subject, the judges considered each phoneme and decided whether it
was always correct (this was given an error value 0), caused occasional problems
(possibly slips of the tongue, error value 1), caused systematic problems (error value 3)
or was always mispronounced (error value 5). The first two judges were Finnish teachers
of English and the third judge was a native-speaker teacher of English. The first judge
evaluated the whole data and the other two judges evaluated parts to check whether the
analysis conducted by the first judge was accurate. On the whole, the correlations
between the judges were statistically significant (Pearson's r=0.684-0.868, p<0.01). The
clearest differences involved the vowels as judges 2 and 3 tolerated more flexibility in the
English vowel system than judge 1.
4 Results
The results from the pronunciation and transcription tests were compared both
qualitatively and quantitatively. In the transcription tests, the subjects made 968 errors in
the first test (range 6-59, median 29), 655 in the second (range 3-50, median 22) and
639 in the final one (range 7-45, median 16). In the pronunciation tests, the total number
of error points given to the subjects was 926 in the first pronunciation test (range 5-48,
median 27.5), 676 in the second (range 4-39, median 21.5) and 551 in the third test
(range 2-41, median 15). The development of the subjects in both test types was clear.
Qualitatively it was noticed that the consonant errors correlated in pronunciation and
transcription (Pearson's r=0.645, p<0.001). The vowel errors were more problematic to
compare as the judges had difficulties in deciding on the limits of acceptability due to the
flexibility of the English vowel system. As a result, there were clearly fewer vowel errors
found in the pronunciation tests than in the transcription tests. Therefore the correlation
of the vowels was not statistically significant, although errors related to the use of the
schwa and to the quality difference between the tense and lax vowels were found to be
very frequent in both test types. (The detailed results can be found in Lintunen 2004.)
The subjects' performances in both transcription and pronunciation were compared
quantitatively as well. Table 1 shows the correlations between the numbers of errors the
subjects made in the sub-tests of the study (Pearson's r). As the table demonstrates, the
transcription and pronunciation tests correlated quite well with the other tests of the
same type. In addition, the final transcription test correlated significantly with each
pronunciation test and the second transcription test correlated with the final
pronunciation test. One reason why the final transcription correlated best with the
pronunciation tests may be that by the final transcription test the subjects had learnt to
PTLC2005 Pekka Lintunen Phonemic Transcription and its Effect on Learning:3
master the technique quite well (e.g. the correct shape of the symbols and the
conventions used when imitating speech with phonemic symbols). It may also be the
case that, as the final pronunciation test reflected the subjects' production at its best,
their pronunciation was in the end almost as accurate as their transcription. Interestingly,
the second transcription test also reflected the subjects' final pronunciation test as far as
the numbers of errors are concerned. One has to bear in mind, however, that observed
correlation does not reveal how one variable affects another. Thus it is not valid to claim
that transcription skills caused the development in the subjects' pronunciation skills,
despite the strong logical arguments in favour of this interpretation. However, the
correlation of these skills is clear.
Tran 1
Tran 2
Tran 3
Pron 1
Pron 2
Pron 3
Tran 1
1.000
0.644**
0.564**
-0.037
0.027
0.181
Tran 2
0.644**
1.000
0.749**
0.270
0.290
0.446**
Tran 3
0.564**
0.749**
1.000
0.511**
0.555**
0.767**
Pron 1
-0.037
0.270
0.511**
1.000
0.901**
0.769**
Pron 2
0.027
0.290
0.555**
0.901**
1.000
0.831**
Pron 3
0.181
0.446**
0.767**
0.769**
0.831**
1.000
Table 1. The correlation matrix of the sub-tests of the study (**= significant at p<0.01
level).
Qualitatively it is also possible to examine the subjects and their performances in the two
test types more closely. Figure 1 shows a scattergram of the subjects when their errors
in the final transcription test were compared with the development of their pronunciation
during the testing period.
50
40
30
transcription3
20
10
0
-40
-20
0
20
40
60
80
100
improvement %
Figure 1. A scattergram of the results from the final transcription test and
the improvement percentage of pronunciation.
PTLC2005 Pekka Lintunen Phonemic Transcription and its Effect on Learning:4
The correlation between the errors made in the final transcription test and the
development of pronunciation during the testing period was statistically significant (r=0.686, p<0.01). This means that the subjects who mastered transcription best were also
the ones who were able to achieve the greatest improvement in their pronunciation.
Moreover, those subjects who were the poorest in transcription showed very little
improvement in their pronunciation. One subject even performed noticeably worse in the
pronunciation test after the course than at the beginning. Individual factors, such as
motivation or test anxiety, may naturally have affected the results.
5 Conclusions
The study suggests that phonemic transcription is an effective teaching method for
foreign language learners of English. The results show that the subjects' performances
in the pronunciation and transcription tests were both qualitatively and quantitatively
related. Moreover, it was shown that those subjects who were the best transcribers were
also the ones whose pronunciation developed the most during the testing period. The
effectiveness of transcription may have been enhanced by the fact that the subjects
were native speakers of Finnish. The subjects were used to a close phoneme-grapheme
relationship in their native language and the principles of transcribing English
phonemically are, in fact, quite close to those of Finnish orthography. Thus a closer
awareness of this important intermediate level between the written and the spoken form
of words must have benefited the subjects in learning the sound system of English more
accurately.
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