Investigating English Pronunciation

Trends and Directions

Jose A. Mompean, Jonás Fouz-González, Jose A. Mompean, Jonás Fouz-González

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137509437
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Sprachen unterrichten

This book updates the latest research in the field of 'English pronunciation', providing readers with a number of original contributions that represent trends in the field. Topics include sociophonetic or sound-symbolic aspects of pronunciation English pronunciation teaching and learning.

1

Introduction

Jose A. Mompean

University of Murcia

1.1 Some historical notes

If I were asked how long the modern study of English pronunciation has been around, I would definitely refer back to Daniel Jones (1881–1967). The British phonetician is mostly remembered for his cardinal vowel diagram, a version of which is still used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA, 1999). However, Daniel Jones’s work on English pronunciation opened the door to many other researchers. One hundred years ago, Jones wrote his Outline of English Phonetics (OEP), often considered to be ‘the most influential book in the history of English phonetics’ (Windsor-Lewis, 1980, p. 343). Although the first edition was published in 1918, the work had been in press in July 1914, but could not be published until the end of the First World War (Collins and Mees, 2001). Jones managed, however, to publish his English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD), a work that complements OEP, a year before, in 1917.¹

Jones’s work on English pronunciation in OEP was groundbreaking for different reasons.² To start with, it represented a comprehensive description of the pronunciation of one form of English he was later to call Received Pronunciation (RP). English pronunciation had been the source of some interest from a diachronic (e.g. Ellis, 1869–89) or lexicographic (e.g. Walker, 1791) point of view.³ However, OEP was at the time the first truly comprehensive synchronic description of an English accent and, indeed, of the standard pronunciation of any language.

Jones’s work was also modern in that his approach was not prescriptive. According to Jones, the object of OEP was not to set up RP as a standard but to ‘record accurately one form of English pronunciation’ (Jones, 1918, p. vi). This descriptive approach was an important departure from previous works such as Henry Sweet’s (1890) A Primer of Spoken English, which claimed to have no intention of ‘setting up a standard of spoken English’ but simply to provide ‘a faithful picture … of educated spoken English’. However, Sweet also claimed, for example, that this form of English would be ‘distinguished from vulgar or provincial English’ (p. v).⁴

Apart from his comprehensive and descriptive account of the pronunciation of English, another feature of Jones’s work was its practical approach to phonology and phonetics. In this, Jones was influenced, like Henry Sweet, by the strong empiricist flavour of the British scientific tradition (Clark, Yallop and Fletcher, 2007), paying less attention to phonological theorizing and more to phonetic description, transcription or phonetic training. In the preface of OEP, Jones expressed an explicit concern with pronunciation teaching and learning. He claimed that the book had been prepared ‘with a view to giving the foreigner all the information’ that s/he would be likely to require for learning English pronunciation and that his suggestions on how to overcome pronunciation problems with methods were based on ‘personal knowledge of their utility in practical teaching’ (Jones, 1918, p. iii).

Modern in many ways, OEP and EPD were nonetheless published early in the twentieth century. These two works were so monumental that Jones published few other major works afterwards, as he was so busy revising them.⁵ Jones’s work continued to be influential during much of the century and is still valued as a reference point in the study of English pronunciation. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, new theoretical and methodological approaches came to enrich the study of English pronunciation. The next section presents some of these approaches.

1.2 Advances in theory and methodology

One aspect insufficiently dealt with by Jones was the study of other varieties of English. Jones is famous for having codified RP in his two major works (OEP and EPD) but he encouraged others to describe different varieties of English. In the preface of his OEP, Jones hoped ‘that those … able to give accurate descriptions of other forms will bring out books similar to this one’ (Jones, 1918, p. vii). As a case in point, and following Jones’s pioneering EPD, Kenyon and Knott published their Pronouncing Dictionary of American English in 1944, in which they recorded the ‘cultivated colloquial English in the United States’ (p. xv) of three broad regional varieties, East, South and North.⁶ For British English, updated versions of RP (e.g. Gimson, 1962; Roach, 2009) or a broader ‘General British’ (e.g. Cruttenden, 2014) continued to be the main focus of attention in descriptive works together with General American (GA), mainly from the 1990s on, in pronunciation dictionaries such as CEPD (Jones, Roach, Setter and Esling, 2011) or LPD, the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (Wells, 2008). However, the study of language varieties can best be exemplified by Wells’s Accents of English (Wells, 1982a, b, c), a comprehensive description of the major types of English pronunciation in the world. The emergence of a wide variety of World Englishes (see Kachru, Kachru and Nelson, 2006 for an overview) reveals the interest in varieties of English, foreseeing extensive future work on the description of varieties other than American or British English.

Another important aspect insufficiently dealt with in Jones’s work and time was variation. Pronunciation not only changes across different territories or communities but also within communities, as ‘no accent is a homogeneous invariant monolith’ (Wells, 1982b, p. 279). The rise and development of sociolinguistics in the 1960s (see Chambers and Schilling, 2013; Wodak, Johnstone and Kerwill, 2012 for recent accounts of the field) introduced the study of variation into mainstream empirical linguistic research. Since sociolinguistics focuses on variation in language and one of the aspects of this variation is phonological and phonetic variation, a subfield of sociolinguistics can be identified, which is often referred to as sociophonetics (see Thomas, 2013 for an overview). The study of variation and the way in which language varies and changes in communities, and the correlating of linguistic forms with geographic, social and interactional-communicative variables (accent, age, gender, ethnicity, status, level of education, etc.) represent a significant step forwards in the study of English pronunciation.

Another major development, also in the 1960s, was the rise of applied linguistics and its subdiscipline known as second language acquisition (SLA) (see Doughty and Long, 2005; Gass and Mackey, 2012 for recent overviews). Since SLA focuses on the process of second language acquisition/learning⁷ and one of the aspects to acquire in the L2 is phonology, a subfield of SLA is that of second language phonology or, simply, L2 phonology (Hansen-Edwards and Zampini, 2008; Leather, 1999). The theoretical advances of L2 phonology and SLA more generally are numerous. Modern research now commonly uses constructs dealing with learners’ individual differences, including motivation, attitude, cognitive styles, age, anxiety, personality, learning strategies, etc. In addition, constructs such as interlanguage, transfer, input/output or interactions, among others, only used by SLA researchers a few years ago, are now part of the jargon of a broader speech research community.

The SLA jargon and findings of SLA/L2 phonology more generally have been used with practical applications in mind, such as L2 teaching (Cook, 2008). Second language pedagogy (see Long and Doughty, 2009 for an overview) in general, and the field of pronunciation teaching in particular have grown significantly since Jones’s time. Examples of the attention received by pronunciation pedagogy are numerous (e.g. Morley, 1987, 1994) and this attention focuses, among other issues, on the choice of pronunciation models (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk and Przedlacka, 2008), including the ‘Lingua Franca Core’ proposal (Jenkins, 2000), the use of technology in pronunciation teaching (Fouz-González, this volume; Hincks, 2015), bottom-up (segments first) vs top-down (prosody first) priorities in the selection of items to be taught (Dalton and Seidlhofer, 1994; Pennington, 1989), or teaching methods and paradigms (Levis, 2005). In fact, Daniel Jones can be considered as one of the most representative members of the Reform Movement in language teaching. Reformers advocated, among other things, that the findings of phonetics should be applied to language teaching, that teachers should have solid training in phonetics and that learners should be given phonetic training (e.g. ear-training and production training). The Reform Movement is an arguably early example of the analytic–linguistic approach to pronunciation teaching identified by Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (2010), in which explicit information about the L2 pronunciation is provided with tools such as phonetic symbols, charts, articulatory descriptions, and other aids. The authors contrast it with the intuitive–imitative approach, which depends on the learner’s ability to listen to and imitate the rhythms and sounds of the target language without the intervention of any explicit information.

The development of the field of L2 phonology reminds us that mainstream phonology also developed considerably during and after Jones’s time. In fact, although phonetics existed as a science in the late nineteenth century and is today a modern science (see Hardcastle, Laver and Gibbon, 2010 for an overview), modern phonology had barely been born when Jones wrote his major works. Jones was not primarily a linguist, but a phonetician, and although OEP relies on the concept of the phoneme, for example, Jones’s theoretical outlook was soon widely felt to be dated.⁸ The development of modern phonology from the 1930s on and its different approaches have contributed to our knowledge of phonological representations and processes (see Anderson, 1985 and Clark et al., 2007 for accounts of the history of phonology). This has led to the incorporation of many concepts and terms now commonly used by researchers and teachers interested in speech. These include, among others, terms such as minimal pair, distinctive feature, phonological rules and constraints.

The theoretical developments since Jones’s time described above have been profound but the same applies to methodology and the ways in which researchers collect their data and conduct their analyses. As a phonetician, Jones did not use the introspection of much of the theory-driven approaches to phonology that were (and still are) common both in Europe and the United States. This is partly due to the divorce between phonetics (considered to be the study of speech production, transmission and perception) and phonology (the study of abstract sound systems, patterns and distributions) and dichotomies such as langue/parole and competence/performance. Jones’s data collection methods were essentially based on his close observation of people’s speech. Modern approaches to the study of speech, however, require methods and techniques for data gathering as well as hypothesis testing. In fact, the rise of sociolinguistics in the 1960s was partly a result of inadequate methods in earlier approaches to the study of dialect. Sociolinguistics argued for and used data collection techniques, fieldwork and quantitative analyses to describe a person’s speech, a group or community (see Milroy and Gordon, 2003, for a review of sociolinguistic fieldwork methodology). Similarly, SLA also made extensive use of data collection research techniques from the start, having borrowed or adapted many techniques from first language acquisition research (Cook, 2010). Even in mainstream phonology, the appearance of approaches in the late 1980s such as Experimental Phonology (Ohala and Jaeger, 1986), Laboratory Phonology (e.g. Cohn, Fougeron and Huffman, 2012a) or Corpus Phonology (Durand, Gut and Kristoffersen, 2014) introduced empirical and experimental methods in the study of phonology as well as the study of large native speaker and learner corpora. These advances have today a greater impact given the emergence of ever faster and more powerful computers and inexpensive or free speech analysis software. The consequence of these developments as well as others in the study of speech is that modern studies on the pronunciation of English are increasingly empirical and use analysis of speech data that go beyond mere observation of speakers’ productions.

1.3 The present volume

In much the same way as ‘second language acquisition’ can refer to the process of learning a second language and the discipline devoted to studying that process, English pronunciation could be considered as an object of study or as a field of research and practice itself.

As an object of study, English pronunciation and all the aspects that it includes (segmental phonology, prosody, accents and variation, acquisition, teaching, etc.) is still very much the focus of attention from scholars and practitioners, fuelled by the theoretical and methodological advances of the last decades discussed above. These include not only phoneticians and phonologists, but also sociolinguists, second language acquisition researchers, or language teachers with an interest in grounding classroom practices in evidence-based research, among others. Field-specific (and occasionally multidisciplinary) research appears regularly in journals that specialize in phonetics, sociolinguistics, first and second language acquisition, foreign language pedagogy, etc. In addition, various academic conferences, an essential channel for the dynamic exchange of information between researchers, now attract both researchers and teachers interested in the issues relevant to English pronunciation, both native as well as non-native.⁹ Another example of the continuing (and growing) interest in English pronunciation is also The Handbook of English Pronunciation (Reed and Levis, 2015), which deals with topics in language acquisition, varieties of English, accent’s changing role, and connections to discourse, technology, and pedagogy, etc.

As a field of research and practice, English pronunciation can be considered to be at the crossroads of different until now largely unrelated research communities. The field of English pronunciation tends to be interdisciplinary because its object and questions require the interaction of two or more different disciplines. This overlap manifests itself in the sharing or full integration of concepts, in methodology, procedures, theory and terminology, as well as in the organization of research and training. Sharing and combining improves our understanding of the object of study, a necessary goal which would be difficult to achieve through the means of a single discipline. For example, semantics and phonology can combine in phonosemantic or sound-symbolism studies; and phonosemantics and language teaching can combine in order to explore the usefulness of phonosemantic associations in pronunciation teaching (see Mompeán-Guillamón, this volume).

Whether English pronunciation is considered to be an obje...