The Importance of Pronunciation - The Mexican Persective

Graciela Hernández, Mexico

Graciela Hernández is a teacher at Nuevo Continente School in Mexico City. She is interested in improving the level of English at this school. Her current interests are helping teachers as well as students to feel more confident in using the foreign language. She enjoys working with secondary school students. E-mail: gho@terra.com.

We need to pay special attention to pronunciation if we want communication to be effective. In previous years, when the communicative approach started being in vogue, teachers started concentrating more on fluency setting aside the importance of good pronunciation. As a result you could hear students saying "den" instead of "then", "day" and not "they", "dare" when they meant "there "or "seat" when they meant "sit". I even had the experience of meeting young kindergarten teachers who said "pier" instead of "pear" or "tigger" when they meant "tiger". And there argument was: "that's the way I learned it in Pre-school from my English teacher", so… that shows there has been a lack of interest in one of the basic systems of any language which is phonology (being the other three: vocabulary, structure and function).

We, language teachers, need to underline the paramount importance of pronunciation. We need to stress the value of both segmental (vowels, consonants and consonant clusters) and supra-segmental features of the language (stress, intonation, linking, elision, assimilation). We need to be aware of the whole and its parts, so we can equip students with the necessary abilities that will enable them to feel confident when using the language from the very beginning.

My experience as English teacher has been with Spanish speakers. Spanish is a syllable timed language while English is a stress timed language. When my Spanish speaking students speak English they sound unnatural and monotonous or as if they were talking in Morse. There is no intonation, no inflection, no rising or falling of the voice so many times they cannot be understood. They are not able to put their message across and of course that makes them they feel frustrated and insecure. I started a training program to review some grammar structures and to give some practice on listening to a group of English teachers in Elementary and some other interested people of the school I work for. They wanted a kind of refreshing course because they felt they needed to improve and practice the language they themselves had learned some time ago. I included pronunciation alongside.

I introduced them to the international phonemic symbols from the very beginning and none of them had ever even seen them before in any of the courses they had previously taken. Therefore they did not know how to pronounce words they had never seen before. And they were concerned about this. I began with the vowel sounds. I showed them one symbol at a time, and then I "read" it aloud and asked them to reproduce its sound. Then I asked them to think about a word that would have that sound and to write it next to its symbol. I did the same with the consonants. Once we finished going over the alphabet, I told them to write their complete names in their notebook and after to transcribe them into phonemic symbols. This activity helped the teachers to identify and to have some practice with certain symbols that did not mean anything and which they were not able to "read" before, but since they were included in their names, those was easier to remember.

Now, after six months of training they can read and interpret any word they look up in the dictionary and they can do it accurately. They are starting to be aware of their own pronunciation regarding individual words and sentences. All this will hopefully enable them to be better teachers and to influence their students in a very practical way because they will in turn teach their own students to use these basic but not-very-much-taken-into-account tools. If we start focusing again on this basic component of the language, we will be able to help students have a good start in English and consequently they will feel much better and confident when using the language.

Please check the Pronunciation course at Pilgrims website.