Teaching Phonetics in Indian Class Room: New Strategies
THIRUPATHI VENNUM
M.A., M.Ed.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
KAMALA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, SINGAPURAM
HUZURABAD, KARIM NAGAR-505468
PHONE: 9848518351
E MAIL:vennumthirupathi@gmail.com
ABSTRACT:
English is an international language. It is the language that many Asian, African,
Pacific, and other countries choose as their official or associate official language.
Colonization and Globalization in all the fields make English language a unique world
language rather than the language of only the English speaking countries such as the UK
and the USA because the number of the people who use English as a means of
communication exceeds much more than the number of the people who speak it as their
mother tongue. India, more than two centuries, has been had the influence of English
language on all the fields. Learning English, the universal language, as a Second
Language, becomes inseparable branch as also unavoidable in Indian education System.
For those who do not know Hindi or whose mother tongue is not Hindi, it is imperative
that they should at least have knowledge of the English language. English is the most
commonly spoken after Hindi in India.
Phonetics plays an important role in communication in countries where English is
a second language to attain proper pronunciation of each word and Phonetics became an
inseparable component of English teacher. What is Phonetics? Why should the Indian
students learn phonetics? What are the barriers in learning Phonetics? How should they
overcome and learn it? Do the English teachers have to face any hurdles while teaching
English phonetics? Teaching phonetics to the students in India is too difficult because
various dialect problems will arise. The teacher should try to avoid the serious problems
in pronunciation of the learners. The article exposes how one can easily learn phonetics.
It gives the readers not only the importance of phonetics in the modern days but also tells
them how to transcribe the English words in to phonemically.
Key Words: CALL, Communication, Phonetics, Pronunciation, Sound and
Transcription.
Phonetics is one of the important branches of linguistics. As the name indicates it
is a science of sounds that deals with the production of different sounds (vowel sounds,
consonant sounds and semi vowel sounds), transmission of sounds and reception of the
sounds of human speech. Now a day it is observed as a field of modern linguistics.
Phonetics was studied as one of the sciences as early as 2000 years ago in ancient India.
Since Indians have different demographics and a variety of local languages and dialects,
teaching phonetics to students becomes somewhat difficult task. Although phonetics is
the part of the syllabus of the students in many schools in India, it is not a separate
subject. It is an internal part of English language. Many Indian students think what the
constructive things are from learning pronunciation. We know that all languages are
learnt with the principle speaking first writing second. Because language learning is not
like teaching a subject it is a skill that requires ample practice through sufficient speaking
and listening activities. If we speak in English with our local people, however the
pronunciation is, it is not observable but whenever we want to communicate with others
means especially foreigners, the speakers must articulate in standard pronunciation.
Regarding this, P. Tench (1981:1) says that “Pronunciation is not an optional extra for the
language learner, any more than grammar, vocabulary or any other aspect of language is.
If a learner's general aim is to talk intelligibly to others in another language, a reasonable
pronunciation is important.” The students who do not have proper awareness in
pronunciation and articulation of different sounds may be weak in other skills also. If the
speaker is sure that his accent is understandable, there is no problem. In order to achieve
these goals, there’s no doubt, the people will need to think about pronunciation and
articulation and they have to spend some time on it. Teaching English pronunciation is
still abandoned in the syllabuses in tertiary education in India.
Although the course writers spoil the speaking and listening activities for the
learners in India especially in southern states where mother tongue dominates, they are
not concentrating the importance of phonetics in the curriculum to include it as one of the
main components. Till intermediate, the students in the most of the states in India do not
have the phonetics in their syllabus. It is necessary to incorporate the phonetics from
school studies so that the learners may habituate to articulate words in a correct way. As
phonetics is not in the syllabus of high school standard in Southern places, the learners do
not realize their mistakes in their pronunciation.
Barriers to learn Phonetics:
1) More Theoretical sessions than activities that practical: The activities that for
speaking and listening are not at all being practiced during the class and the teachers are
also reluctant to get the students practice activities in front of other students where there
is the scope for better perception and the time slot allotted for speaking and listening
activities is very less so that students are unable to get the knowledge of the place and
manner of the articulation of each sound and the knowledge of speech organs and how
they are producing the sounds and the syllabus is heavy filled with reading and writing
exercises. By the end of the year student is not getting sufficient listening and oral
activities.whilch makes student passive in his communication skills and is not competing
with the native speakers of English wherever he goes.
2) Faulty methods for teaching English language: Skill based teaching is very
much in vogue in professional courses. It is really an uphill task for the language teachers
to teach the phonetics for a professional student without proper orientation. They hasten
with the syllabus under the pretext of syllabus completion adopting all conservative
methods. Language teachers who are teaching phonetics should be well trained with
some orientation programs, work shops, symposiams by language exports and not be
overburdened by the syllabus. There is a need for syllabus makers to look in to the
syllabus before it is set to make sure that it serves all the needs of the student to
communicate even after his course.
3) Heterogeneneous class rooms: In many Indian classrooms teacher has to face
the problem of multi-lingualism. And he gets the students with different demographics,
with different educational backgrounds, different socio-linguistic backgrounds, different
boards of educational system and different socio- economic backgrounds so the teacher
finds it difficult to handle students of such varied backgrounds. Some students learn the
things very quickly and some are little bit slow so the teacher takes much time to get all
the students understand and he has to spend much time which requires more patience so
this heterogeneity hampers the attainment of learning the standard pronunciation. The
languages in India such as Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada and Malayalam dialects
interfere in their pronunciation so that the errors will generally occur in Indian
pronunciation.
Phonetic Transcription:
In order to know what the phonetic transcription is, we have to first know what a
phoneme is. A phoneme is a set of similar sounds illustrating meaning differences or
differentiating between words. A syllable consists of a vowel as an essential element and
one or more consonants at the onset which is pronounced with a single contraction of the
lungs. The English language has twenty vowel phonemes, i.e., twelve pure vowels and
eight diphthongs. We have twenty four consonant phonemes. While the vowels are
articulated without any obstacle in the vocal tract, the consonants are produced with some
friction of the air passage. The treatment of the segmental basically includes sound
contrast in words, pronunciation of vowel and consonant phonemes. The phonemes
which are not available in the learner's mother tongue and problematic to him or her and
they should receive special treatment in the teaching material and methodology and
sufficient room in the learner's practice.
Phonetic transcription means a written or printed representation of using a
phonetic alphabet. It is necessary, because the spelling of an English word does not tell us
how we should pronounce it. The interesting thing is that we can not say that each
alphabet gives the sound(s); sometimes two or more alphabets provide only one sound.
For example employee has four vowel letters but it has three syllables and the last two
letters “ee” give one sound only that is /i:/. A letter can represent many sounds such as
“c” as in car /ka /, cell /sel/ and church /t?t?/ and one of the alphabets stands for a
sequence of two Sounds. E.g. Quality, queen and exact. So we can say that there is no
relationship between sound and spelling. Some more complexities are: 1. some words can
have the same spelling but different pronunciation:
I saw him at chaurasta yesterday.
I saw a saw near the sea.
Some words have different spelling but the same pronunciation, for example:
He gave me a one rupee note.
She won the cup.
In the first example, both the verbs (a) and (b) “saw” give same meaning but in (b) “saw”
is used as a verb and a noun. Though the pronunciation is same, it gives the different
meaning whereas in the second example, “one” and “won” are pronounced same
although they have different meanings.
If one knows the phonetic transcriptions, one can be able to understand the correct
pronunciation by looking at the transcription in the dictionary. There are two well-known
dictionaries that are available in the market. One is Danial Jones English pronouncing
dictionary and the other one is Oxford. Though many people think that it is very hard to
learn English phonetic transcription, the learned masters utter that it is not that much
difficult that we expect. As most of us do not keep our concentration on phonetics, the
Indians are not good at articulation. D. Dalton (2002) rightly says: “We are comfortable
teaching reading, writing, listening and to a degree, general oral skills, but when it comes
to pronunciation we often lack the basic knowledge of articulator phonetics (not difficult
to acquire) to offer our students anything more than rudimentary (and often unhelpful)
advice.” The learners should notice improved pronunciation of individual words. Besides
the students, the English teachers should also practice phonetic transcription. They should
teach in RP English so that they make the learners to learn and articulate the correct
Pronunciation. If they teach their classes with Indian pronunciation which is happening in
India, the students may not know the RP so we would like to say that it is the onus of the
English teachers to make the learners to speak in RP. They should unfold the easy
methods in phonetic transcription and exemplify the differences between Indian English
and R.P.How should the English teachers create the atmosphere of good pronunciation?
What should the learners do to improve their pronunciation? What are the techniques that
make them to learn and articulate good English? Although there are many procedures to
learn phonetics, the final choice is to transcribe the words in to phonemically and give the
ears to the speeches. I would like to propose a few techniques and activities that appear to
be useful for learners and teachers alike:
1) Learners should be asked to read aloud the lessons in class room it self:
The learner should read the paragraphs or text aloud to improve good
pronunciation in the class room it self so that he will be able to overcome all his
inhibitions and the domination of his mother tongue also. Teacher should try to identify
the errors and mistakes in pronunciation made by the learner and immediately give
feedback in such a way that how the learner pronounced that particular word or sound
and what is the exact pronunciation by pronouncing himself or through some audio
records which will help the learner to improve his pronunciation and for the next time he
will not commit the same mistake. The classroom techniques and activities for teaching
EFL pronunciation make the learners to add their talent in improving good pronunciation.
J. Morley says that (1991: 507), “the teacher can perform the role of a 'speech coach' or
'pronunciation coach' who, rather than just correcting the learner's errors and mistakes, he
should supply information about all the sounds, give models, offer cues, suggestions and
constructive feedback about the performance, sets high standards, provides a wide variety
of practice opportunities, and overall supports and encourages the learner.”
2) Designing communicative Activities:
The teacher should design communicative tasks so that he directly or sometimes
indirectly improves the learners’ pronunciation as well as speaking skills. The dialogues,
mini-conversations and different role plays using the variety of different daily situations
for both young and adult EFL learners according to their linguistic level to practice
particular sounds, especially those which are not available in their mother tongue.
Pronunciation while participating in different role plays, mock debates, group
discussions, rehearsal strategies and cover strategies will help the learners to develop
their pronunciation and to know how the different sounds are pronounced by other
individuals to attain standard frequency and pitch in pronunciation and give the
impression that their pronunciation is better than it really is.
3) Making the use of Dictionary:
An authentic dictionary provides the meaning as well as phonetic transcription of
every word using the standard 44 sounds in phonetics so that learners by looking at
different words in the dictionary, will be in the position to distinguish difference among
the all sounds. Dictionary enables the learner phonetic transcription including syllable
division (dividing words in to different syllables i.e. syllabification) and stress mark
(Primary stress and secondary stress). As they see the phonetic transcription, they easily
find out the correct pronunciation and easily understand the one to one correspondence of
phonemes. When they learn one to one correspondence of phonemes they won’t confuse
while using the same sounds in their communication. In this way the dictionary not only
serves them to improve the phonetic transcription, command over different sounds but
also provides vocabulary and grammar. At present some famous dictionaries available in
the market they are “Danial Jones English pronouncing dictionary”, “Oxford English
Dictionary (4th Edition)”, “Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (18th Edition)”
etc...
4) Repeating the Sounds:
Pronunciation is very important in making English and non English native
speakers understand the message what we want to convey so learners have to pay close
attention to pronunciation and listening activities provided in the classroom as well as in
the daily life as early as possible. In order to attain standard pronunciation learners should
repeatedly practice the activities relating speaking and listening. By using and repeating
the sounds, one can easily remember the correct articulation. Whenever the learners
eloquent a word frequently, they can easily remember its pronunciation and phonetic
transcription.
5) Self-learning:
When the learners practice the phonetic transcriptions and pay the attention to the
pronunciation of each sound and the phonetics, the improvement will be come in their
articulation. Self-monitoring is also the important action of listening to one's own speech
in order to find out mistakes. It is followed by self-correction standing for the process of
fixing one's inaccuracy after they have occurred by repeating the word or phrase
correctly. If we teach the learners self monitor, we make them to learn sufficiently as they
and we expect. The class will be more effective if the learners are able to give feedback
regarding their participation and their pronunciation in different role plays, mock debates,
group discussions, rehearsal strategies and cover strategies. And giving some model
audio records to practice at their homes on their own and asking about their practice in
the class room will also make learners more enthusiastic and we can develop their
eagerness towards learning standard pronunciation. when the self learning is motivated
automatically their practical learning in the class room will also be strengthened.
6. Computer Assisted Language Learning:
Computer-assisted language learning plays a significant role in helping the
students in learning phonetics. It provides the students to find out their mistakes through
using Computer. Today different soft wares are available in the market to learn on
computers the standard pronunciation and the other comprehensive skills which are
required to compete with the English sounded competitors and to take part effectively in
the different phonetics related entrance examinations. If learners want make use of the
computer they get many benefits by it. They will be monitored, guided and given full of
freedom. It keeps the learners concentration on learning. In addition, the teacher can
exploit visual displays of speech patterns to teach intonation, stress and phonemes to
individuals and small groups of learners. This tool can be used for all the learners.
Conclusion:
I conclude that phonetics is one of the important components in English language.
With few techniques we can teach effectively in Indian classroom. Learning phonetics is
nothing but getting mastery over speaking skill of English and is eloquent in a language.
The syllabus designers are not incorporating sufficient listening and speaking activities
relating the phonetics in English curriculum so they have to be reminded that phonetics is
also compulsory constituent in speaking a second language. More pronunciation
materials should be added in the classroom activities so that the learners will come to
know the importance of phonetics and will be able to compete in different debates, Group
Discussions and Interviews effectively. The techniques and activities that are presented in
this article surely bring high-quality articulating abilities and wonderful listening
perception.
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Danial Jones, Cambridge: CUP, 2006.
D. Dalton, “Some Techniques for Teaching Pronunciation,” Retrieved May 1, 2002,
J. Morley, “The Pronunciation Component in Teaching English to Speakers of other
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P. Tench, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981.
Brownlee-Conyers, J. “Voices from Networked Classrooms.” Educational Leadership.
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