by Ana Paula Biazon Rocha
We are kicking off the 2024 blog posts by looking back at our Pronunciation Café. This online event was open to the public and took place on 17 Feb (Sat). Participants had the chance to meet, network, and chat about all things pron!
In education, teachers’ feeling of belonging to a group or community that shares similar interests and provides professional support and development is paramount. It is the exact function of ‘communities of practice’ (CoPs) (England, 2018). PronSIG, for instance, is a CoP that allows teachers to be themselves, discussing and reflecting on their fears, insecurities, successes, ideas, and beliefs when it comes to pronunciation teaching. The Pronunciation Café was a concrete example of this. So, here are some highlights:
1. Diversity of participants
Teachers from all over the world joined us, from Kazakhstan to Nigeria. They were private tutors, primary or secondary teachers, researchers, academic teachers, among others, and most of them had been teaching English for more than ten years.
2. Pronunciation-related teaching challenges
Participants’ replies to their greatest pronunciation-related challenges can be seen in the categories below (thanks to AI tools!):
- Pronunciation practice
- Teaching resources
- Time management
- Student engagement
- Varieties of English
- Intelligibility goals
- Pronunciation assessment
- Phonetic symbols
- Confidence issues
Interestingly, most of these categories coincide with what has been recurrently pointed out in the literature as teachers’ main issues regarding pronunciation instruction:
- lack of confidence, knowledge and skills to teach pronunciation (Brinton, 2022; Walker, Low & Setter, 2021);
- intelligibility over nativeness as the main goal of pronunciation teaching (Levis, 2018); and
- lack of adequate support to teach pronunciation (Murphy, 2017).
This means that there is still lots to be done to aid teachers, which takes time and effort. But we will not give up! Let’s take one step at a time, shall we?
3. Some previously mentioned topics
Among the categories above, some participants’ comments were about topics that had already been discussed in this blog, such as:
a. ‘What to correct and what to leave out’: this previous blog post can help.
b. ‘Teaching word stress’: this previous blog post can help.
c. ‘Getting learners to feel pronunciation’: our very first blog post can help.
d. ‘Dealing with attitudes towards intelligibility vs. ‘native speaker goals’: this previous blog post and this one can help.
Image 1: PronSIG Cafe on 17 Feb 2024
4. Two comments that resonate with most of us
To conclude, I would like to draw your attention to two important comments about participants’ pronunciation challenges that I guess most of us can relate to:
- ‘My own low confidence in the way I speak.’
- ‘Getting the right pronunciation myself.’
Teaching involves a lot of exposure of the teachers’ voice: we are being seen and judged (even if unconsciously!), as professionals, practitioners, knowledge disseminators, learning facilitators, and ultimately, human beings (even if some students, fellow staff members, parents, the educational system, etc., usually forget we are such!), we all have strengths and weaknesses, we all know the things we are good at and the things we need to study or improve upon. We do not need anyone constantly pointing these out as we often put too much pressure on ourselves. On top of that, pronunciation adds even more exposure: it is the way that you sound, it is the way that you speak, there is no escaping it! Thus, not feeling confident in our own pronunciation is not something made up, it is real, especially if you have not been adequately prepared or trained to teach it; if your students or their parents pressure you to have or teach a ‘native-like’ accent (whatever that means!); if you are a so-called ‘non-native English speaker’ in a group of native speaker teachers; if you are a native speaker whose English variety is not Standard British or American English; if you work two or three jobs, or teach more than ten private students to make ends meet, you name it! It is indeed hard to teach something that you do not feel certain about…
I guess there is no right or wrong answer or magic advice to give to the teachers who made those two comments. I have also been there countless times in my own teaching career. However, perhaps we should remember that a) we are not walking dictionaries, b) there is no such thing as ‘perfect’ pronunciation, c) as teachers we are also learners, and d) there should be no shame in admitting you are not sure about how to pronounce a certain sound or word when asked by a student. I know it’s easier said than done, but we should believe in ourselves somehow, should we not?
As a community of practice, PronSIG is here: possibly not to give you all the definitive answers (do they exist?), but to listen to you, to share with you, to hold your hand and say, ‘Me too. Sometimes I am not confident in my own pronunciation either’, and by supporting and learning from one another, we can hopefully overcome our pronunciation challenges.
So, put your kettle on because more Pronunciation Cafés are coming soon!
And if you are thinking: too much talking, I only need ideas to teach pronunciation in my lesson tomorrow morning, this blog post or this one can help. But what is teaching without reflecting and what is reflecting without teaching?
Don’t forget to leave your comments below, I would love to hear them, and follow PronSIG on social media.
References
Brinton, D. M. (2022). Effective pronunciation teaching. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of Practical Second Language Teaching and Learning (281–295). Routledge.
England, E. (2018). Communities of Practice. In J.I. Liontas, & M. DelliCarpini (eds), The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (pp.1–7). Wiley.
Levis, J. (2018). Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murphy, J. (2017). Teaching the Pronunciation of English: Focus on Whole Courses. USA: The University of Michigan Press.
Walker, R., Low, E., & Setter, J. (2021). English pronunciation for a global world [PDF]. Oxford University Press. www.oup.com/elt/expert
