PTLC2005 Raimunda Cesoniene English Phonetics and Phonology: Course for Future Interpreters: 1
English Phonetics and Phonology: Course for Future
Interpreters
Raimunda Česonienė, Kaunas University of Technology
1. Introduction.
Being an interpreter requires high intelligibility of a foreign language in order to fulfill the
task of communicating a message properly. The usual working environment would
include the situations when you cannot ask for repetition or clarification of the information
you hear. Consequently, students aiming at this specialty should also aim at developing
both their productive and, even more important, receptive skills in language learning.
Most writers in the field emphasize that knowledge of phonemic system of a foreign
language as well as awareness of the processes in connected speech help learners to
improve ability to listen actively and produce accurate and correct speech, i.e. enhance
intelligibility of the language they are learning (Cruttenden, 2001; Kenworthy, 1990;
Roach, 2000; Underwood, 1990, etc).
Having noticed a relatively poor pronunciation of future interpreters and translators of
technical language, a new course in Phonetics at the Faculty of Humanities of Kaunas
University of Technology (Lithuania) was introduced. Since it was a new course, there
was a need for a pilot survey to evaluate its implementation and impact on the students’
abilities to produce correct English. At the end of the course students were asked to fill in
a questionnaire, the questions of which addressed gained knowledge in the field, attitude
towards the topics covered, the means of presenting information, the quality of teaching,
and suggestions for course improvement.
The aim of the article is to present an overall view of the course using students’
evaluations and tutor’s observations as a point of reference; and indicate the most
problematic areas faced by Lithuanian students when learning English Phonetics and
Phonology. The methods used involve survey (qualitative) analysis and empirical
observations.
2. Description of the Course.
The course was introduced having the following objectives:
- to provide students with theoretical background concerning the sound system of
the English language;
- to help students identify their own pronunciation errors and give them advice in
terms of how to improve in this area;
- to introduce suprasegmental features of the English language to students and
enable them to improve their production of connected speech.
The course lasts for one semester (16 weeks) and there are 5 academic hours per week.
One hour is devoted to theory and the remaining four are intended for practice. The
course consists of two main parts: the first deals with phonetics of the foreign language
and the second – with phonology. This division was based on various linguists’ choice to
differentiate between phonetics as a science of physiological features of sounds and
PTLC2005 Raimunda Cesoniene English Phonetics and Phonology: Course for Future Interpreters: 2
phonology as a science of sound organization in a particular language (Roach, 2000;
Davenport & Hannahs, 1998). The main textbooks chosen for the course were English
Phonetics and Phonology: a Practical Course by Peter Roach (2000) and Practical
Phonetics and Phonology by Beverley Collins and Inger M.Mees (2003). Separate
sounds and sound pairs were practiced mainly using dialogues from How Now, Brown
Cow? by Ponsonby (1987). Other teaching means included listening and repetition of
sounds,
words
and
phrases,
transcription,
online
tutorials
(http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/tutorials.html), recording students’ speech and
correcting it (analysis was carried out either by the tutor or by students themselves).
Students were assessed by oral performance, tests, homework, and written assignment
– analysis of another student’s speech.
3. Participants.
21 first-year students attended the course. Needs analysis at the beginning of the
semester revealed that on average, they have been learning English for 10 years in
secondary school and only two girls have been to English speaking country. However,
even 9 students were sure that their English pronunciation was very good. They had no
prior knowledge of phonetic or phonological differences between English and Lithuanian,
yet their motivation to improve their pronunciation and make it as close to a native one
as possible was very high. The major concern for students was fluency, sounds, and
intonation (in order of priority). As it was noticed later, they indicated the problematic
areas very precisely, since weak forms, linking of words into sense (intonation) groups,
and different phonetic features of sounds in two languages caused most of the
difficulties during the learning process.
4. Results.
4.1. Segmental level.
The first part of the course focused on production and articulation of English sounds as
well as their specific features. The comparison of phonemic systems of the two
languages is beyond the scope of this article; therefore only the main difficulties
experienced by the students would be indicated.
Students were asked to specify the consonants and vowels that were the most difficult to
articulate. The majority of students listed the phonemes which do not appear in the
Lithuanian language as causing problems: /S/, /C/, /¢/, /M/ (an allophone of /n/ in
Lithuanian), /?T/, /29/.
Having observed students performance during lectures, it should be noted that although
the above mentioned consonants seem strange, students learned to articulate them
easier than those, which are close to Lithuanian phonemes yet differ in one phonetic
feature. For example, English alveolar plosives /t/ and /d/ were incorrectly pronounced
as dental plosives (which is true in Lithuanian); one more common mistake was wrong
articulation of voiced palato-alveolar (post-alveolar) approximant .¢. which appears as
voiced alveolar trill /r/ in students’ native language; finally, voiceless glottal fricative /h/
would be almost always pronounced like voiced velar fricative /F/ (in Lithuanian it only
appears in international words, besides it is also assimilated to /x/ before a voiceless
consonant (Pakerys, 1995)).
PTLC2005 Raimunda Cesoniene English Phonetics and Phonology: Course for Future Interpreters: 3
Considering vowels, nobody indicated them as problematic items, possibly due to a
variety of the phonemes in Lithuanian (12 pure vowels and 9 diphthongs). The major
problem was a closing diphthong /?T/ which tended to be wrongly articulated as /ou/.
Other mistakes were caused by the influence of other Lithuanian dialects or foreign
languages (American English, Russian) on the students.
To sum up, only two students felt that there was too little work done on the articulation of
separate sounds. The rest were satisfied and indicated that they had just the right
amount of practice. The most complicated yet the most useful topics for the students
seemed those on phonemes and allophones and consonant classification; whereas
rather difficult and the most boring was the lecture on the vocal tract.
4.2. Suprasegmental level.
The second part of the course focused on various phenomena of connected speech
which create the ‘melody’ of a language: word and sentence stress, weak forms and
rhythm, assimilation, elision, linking and intonation.
As phoneticians maintain that some phonological processes (such as weak forms,
accentuation, linking, etc) are more vital for foreign learners to be mastered than others
(such as assimilation, juncture, etc.) (Cruttenden, 2001; Roach, 2000), the major focus in
the syllabus was on the difference between function and lexical words, weak and strong
forms of function words and linking of words smoothly into sense groups. Preconceived
lecture plan coincided with principal drawbacks noticed during lectures in learners’
speech. First, students did not divide their talk into intonation groups. Their attention was
mainly on speech which, in their opinion, would help them sound more fluent. Due to
that, mispronunciation of words and wrong articulation of sounds occurred. The second
problem was students’ unawareness of weak forms caused by discrepancy in the
‘melodies’ of English and Lithuanian: English is stress timed whereas Lithuanian is
syllable timed. As a result, students would place sentence stress applying the rules of
their native language.
Assimilation of sounds, although considered of secondary importance, had to be
practiced more than intended since types of assimilation in English and Lithuanian differ.
Students would use regressive voice assimilation whenever the consonants of different
voicing meet in their speech under the influence of their language. Therefore, it was
necessary to introduce sound assimilation rules of the English language and enhance
students’ perception of possible mistakes.
As concerns intonation, mainly tonality and tonicity were addressed during the practice
sessions as the issues related to accentuation. Nuclear tone changing was only
introduced in theoretical lecture as this topic was impossible to explore and practice in
detail because of time limit.
The students were really surprised to learn about suprasegmental features that help
them sound more fluent and more English-like and their motivation to learn the new
things was extremely high. No topics were indicated as boring or unimportant ones.
4.3. Methods of teaching/learning
The material was practiced through repetition of sounds and phrases, dialogue reading,
transcription (which also included transcription of BBC news report), exercises on the
PTLC2005 Raimunda Cesoniene English Phonetics and Phonology: Course for Future Interpreters: 4
Internet, homework tasks related to the theory covered (3 homework assignments),
recording and analysis of students’ own speech.
Students were asked to indicate whether a method was useful or gave no results and to
comment on their answers. There was a unanimous opinion that some means of
learning/teaching gave no results only due to the lack of practice on them. They suggest
that the repetition of sounds and phrases would be more useful if there was a possibility
to exercise it in small groups. This observation corresponds to the tutor’s opinion that the
major downside of the course was a large group of students and no possibility to practice
various phonetic and phonological phenomena in groups of 4-5 students. Learners felt
there was too little of teacher’s correction on their production of speech whereas small
groups would be a great opportunity both for a teacher and for students to interact more.
Transcription was chosen as a means to realize the difference between pronunciation of
a word found in a dictionary entry and that in a real context. Moreover, future interpreters
aiming at high acceptability in RP should become aware of how native speakers usually
perform their talk (Cruttenden, 2001; Lecumberri, 2000). Only two students indicated this
activity as pointless because of the time limit. It should be noticed that a tutor’s mistake
was to introduce transcription only in the middle of the semester, after all the phonemes
had been presented. The students could have practiced more if they had started
transcribing at the very beginning of the course.
Web tutorials were considered a funny way of learning, where one gets the answer fast,
deepens knowledge in the new material and which is not monotonous. Yet sometimes a
poor quality of the Internet connection encumbered the learning process and it was
noticed by the students as a negative aspect.
5. Conclusion
Overall impression was that students were satisfied with the course despite its
complicated theoretical material and considerable amount of time spent for individual
work. They acquired knowledge and understanding of the different phonemic systems of
languages, of the processes in continuous speech and their effect on fluency and
became capable of identifying their own mistakes in pronunciation. Further analysis and
observation is necessary to be undertaken to improve the course, eliminate the material
of secondary importance and avoid tasks that confuse learners and carry no practical
usage.
Reference list
Cruttenden, Alan (2001) Gimson's Pronunciation of English. Sixth edition. London:
Edward Arnold.
Davenport, Michael & Hannahs, Stephen J (1998) Introducing Phonetics and Phonology.
Arnold Publishers.
Kenworthy, Joanne (1990) Teaching English Pronunciation. Longman.
Lecumberri, Luisa Garcia M & Maidment John A (2000) English Transcription Course.
Arnold Publishers
Pakerys, Antanas (1995) Lietuviu bendrines kalbos fonetika. Vilnius: Zara.
Roach, Peter (2000) English phonetics and phonology. Third edition. Cambridge
University Press.
Underwood, Mary (1990) Teaching Listening. Longman.