Here is an activity from Piers Messum and Roslyn Young. They are both members of a special interest group that discuss issues relating to pronunciation. I have added it to our blog as I think it is interesting and relevant for trainee teachers.
The issue that they have been discussing in general is whether it is a good idea to teach students pronunciation with a 'listen and repeat' model. This is the primary method used in EFL throughout the world. They question its utility. We will start with the idea of stress and timing.
The idea behind the first exercise was for people to become a bit more
aware of what they do with their respiratory systems during speech.
Technically, this is known as speech breathing (SB), although the name
is a bit imprecise: we're only really concerned with the control of
expiratory ventilation rather than breathing as a whole.
When we speak under normal conditions, we use voluntary muscular
activity to inhale. Pulling down the diaphragm and expanding the ribcage
opens up our lungs, and air flows in. The muscular activity stretches
the stiff, elastic tissue in our chest walls and as we decrease the
voluntary effort this tissue creates pressure inside us as it starts to
recoil. The situation is not dissimilar to a balloon, where the elastic
skin compresses the air inside.
The pressure this creates is more or less sufficient to drive the vocal
folds and create other sounds sources in the mouth (explosions for /p/
and /t/ etc). As we `deflate' we add a bit of pressure through
voluntary muscular activity, but for normal speech we really don't
need to do much that is active with our respiratory systems. There's
a constant pressure under our vocal folds, and all the interesting
things in speech happen from the vocal folds upwards.
This changes under extreme conditions, or when we don't speak
normally. If you tried to say a train of /s/ sounds at different rates,
you probably found that at 4 per second your SB was as it is during
normal speech. But at 1 per second, you were actively compressing
yourself for each sound, and relaxing between sounds. Let's call
that a pulsatile style of SB, since you were breathing out in pulses.
Clearly your SB can be either `smooth' or `pulsatile'
even if it is normally smooth.
This is leading up to a discussion of stress. How do speakers create
routine (rather than emphatic) prominence on some syllables in English?
Among phoneticians, there's disagreement about this and disagreement
in the data. Traditionally, phoneticians said that speakers put more
respiratory system effort into stressed syllables. Some data from the
1970's challenged this, and now there are people who believe that
stress is largely created by a vocal fold adjustment (more tension means
a louder signal) plus lengthening of the syllable, while others think
that it is caused by SB pulsatility which leads to greater loudness and
length automatically.
This affects us as teachers, because it has implications for how we
should teach stress. If stress is no more than greater loudness and
length, we might be best teaching it by getting students to copy
acoustic models.
But if it involves more effort being made by the respiratory system, we
should probably start with this, and get the extra loudness and length
as a by-product of the correct actions being made by the learner.
The extra information which, we think, resolves this dilemma is
something that phoneticians have paid no attention to: the SB of
English-speaking children during the period when they learn to stress
syllables. I looked at this as part of my PhD research, and it turns out
be very significant.
Children have compliant, floppy tissue in their chest walls, not stiff
tissue. So when they breathe in and stretch this tissue there is very
little pressure created by its weak tendency to recoil. If an
adult's lungs are like an inflated balloon at the end of
inspiration, a child's is like an inflated paper bag: full of air,
but not pressurised.
Also, children can't make syllables louder just by tweaking their
vocal folds ( in the way that adults can). They have to increase their
respiratory drive for greater loudness.
So for children learning English, stress has to be the result of
pulsatile SB activity.They are making more effort on every prominent
syllable than on other ones. Stress is something they do with their
respiratory systems and larynx in combination, not just an acoustic
effect they copy with a small adjustment of their vocal folds.
This post would get very long if I went into more detail about this now,
and I think it would be better to see if what I have written so far is
clear to everyone and what questions and thoughts, if any, it
precipitates before we go any further.
The proposal, though, is that stress can and should be taught
non-imitatively: by getting students to do something active with their
respiratory systems for a stressed syllable, and for the result to be
louder and longer as a result of this. Concurrent activities like using
some other part of the body in synchrony with the stressing may be
helpful, but in this case let's get to the core of the matter and
help students to make stress in as `natural' a way as possible:
with their respiratory systems, as phoneticians in the past always used
to recommend.
Piers Messum
