Metaphors and Constructing a Speaker
Ahhhh - what a messy room!!!!!
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Construction is a process that involves the building or assembling of infrastructure. A solid building is impossible without a solid foundation. A strong foundation is a nice metaphor often used to talk about developing knowledge, but we have to use such a metaphor with care. When talking about second language learning, we can begin from the basic building blocks of speech. However, such an approach becomes problematic in teaching pronunciation and building language skills in a second language learner.
Let’s consider: Following a construction model, we start with the basic building blocks of speech. A phone is a sound. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound which can distinguish two words. ‘Ran’ and ‘tan’ differ only in their initial sound. Except for a few linguistic dissenters, most state that there are 44 phonemes in English, 24 of which are consonants. Languages vary in the number of phonemes. A phone can be broken down further, as it has different forms called allophones. The sound /p/ is made differently in the word ‘pair’ from how it is in ‘spare.’ The former sound /p/ is called aspirated because a puff of air is made while pronouncing it; there is no puff of air made with ‘spare.’
Any linguistic unit which can be separated from the others is called a ‘segment.’ If a Chinese student mispronounces an English vowel, it is called a segmental error. American linguists use the term suprasegmental to refer to accent, tone, stress or intonation. In other words the term applies to more than a single sound.
So these are the basic building blocks of speech, the bricks and mortar of construction. Unlike beginning with a building’s foundation to ensure a solid project, beginning with a complete emphasis on speech basics has seldom contributed to the solid construction of a speaker. One problem is that, to push the metaphor further, an adult speaker already has a complete building—another language. The central knowledge we learn from teaching pronunciation in a second language is that speaking a language is not the equivalent of correct pronunciation of phonemes. This realization suggests that our metaphor misleads us.
For example, for years in our language laboratories, students have practiced pairs of sounds such as ram/lamb, ray/lay, row/low. After many hours of practice a student may sometimes begin to hear the difference and, oftentimes, this ability to hear only worked while their headphones were on. But notice, my wife comes home from work, and asks how my daughter slept. “She slept like a lamb. Look at the little angel.” The following evening my daughter’s bedroom looks like it was hit by a hurricane and my wife says angrily, “Are you really going to tell me she slept like a lamb!” Unlike constructing a solid foundation in a new building, teaching phonemic differences alone hardly constructs a speaker in a second language. These two sentences about my daughter ‘sound’ rather different and the difference is important from the standpoint of communication.
Let me cite another issue that dents our metaphor. Let us say a Brazilian Portuguese speaker wants to learn American English. Brazilian Portuguese is a syllable-timed language. The rhythm of this language means it takes the same amount of time to pronounce each syllable. Consider the English sentence “Allison didn’t/finish her/essay. I made three divisions and each division takes the same amount of time to pronounce and yet each has a different number of syllables. American English is often called a stress timed language; its rhythm is very different than Brazilian Portuguese. This consideration suggests a rather different model in creating a speaker of a second language, closer to a musical model. Can you imagine a composition by Thelonius Monk being played by Chopin? It would not sound quite right! When a Brazilian Portuguese speaker speaks English it may not sound right as well. The next time I write about pronunciation I will explore the analogy with music as we have seen the construction analogy will only take us so far.
– Dr. Paul Schneider, Director of Teacher Education Programs, WAL